(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, YouTube)
TWO PROMINENT RIGHT-WING MEDIA FIGURES will face off Friday in a debate over Charlie Kirk’s assassination. And while normies may find the specter of this a bit grotesque, MAGA media has thrilled to the ghoulish drama, eager to see a spectacle that’s been described as the “Super Bowl of Charlie murder content.”
There are a few hurdles that remain before the show can go off, including tense negotiations about cigarette smoking. But if those get resolved, then Candace Owens, who is one-half of the debate duo, will walk away with $300,000.
Kirk’s assassination eleven months ago has already inspired a MAGA civil war, as well as growing unrest within Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and the indelible image of widow Erika Kirk walking out at her husband’s memorial to pyrotechnics.
But with hundreds of thousands of dollars on the table and a buildup worthy of a pay-per-view prize fight, Friday’s showdown between Owens, the person who has profited more than anyone from her friend’s murder, and manosphere debater Andrew Wilson promises to be the most stomach-churning product of the Kirk conspiracy–theory industry yet—one that offers a vivid illustration of the twisted incentives of the right-wing content machine.
In one indication of the opportunism gravity with which they’re handling Kirk’s death, the event has been advertised with
Sam Stein and Will Sommer look back at the wildest moments from Mike Lindell’s career after the Trump-backed election denier lost the Republican primary for Minnesota governor. From refusing to accept election results and offering a $5 million challenge, to arguing with a kid at the Democratic National Convention, getting served legal papers onstage, and blaming the CIA, Lindell has produced no shortage of memorable moments.
(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: AP, Broward County Public Schools, Shutterstock)
Fishback Flopping
Florida’s seemingly never-ending Republican primary race for governor will finally be settled next Tuesday. With Trump pick Rep. Byron Donalds far ahead in the polls, it looks like groyper favorite James Fishback’s political ambitions are doomed—for now.
In a desperate attempt to inject some life into his campaign last week, Fishback gave a much-teased press conference accusing Donalds of being under Justice Department investigation. Feigning sorrow, Fishback, who looked like a kid playing dress-up, claimed that a whistleblower had told his campaign about the case, which supposedly centered on Donalds’s friendship with notorious Rep. Cory Mills, as well as allegations of human trafficking.
Yet even Fishback supporters didn’t buy his claims.
“They didn’t really produce any receipts,” white nationalist podcaster and onetime Fishback supporter Nick Fuentes said.
Making matters far worse, the Justice Department took the unusual step of clearing Donalds, saying in a tweet that Donalds was “not under investigation,” adding ominously for Fishback that “Falsely accusing someone of being under investigation is a dangerous form of weaponization.”
Donalds might not be in legal jeopardy, but Fishback is. In a lawsuit filed July 27 and discovered last weekend by Fishback’s many online detractors, former high-school debater Briana Whatley is suing Fishback for supposedly stiffing her on thousands of dollars in scholarship money.
Whatley claims she won a total of $11,000 from her participation in Fishback’s anti-woke debate program, “Incubate Debate.”
Whatley claims that when she was competing as a debater, Fishback often contacted her personally to encourage her to participate in his events, explicitly promising the chance to win scholarship money. Yet when Whatley won a total of $11,000 at the tournaments, Fishback was slow to cough up the cash.
While the money was supposed to be paid upon Whatley’s high school graduation in May 2025, she claims Fishback dodged her requests to pay the money for months. After the money was three months late, Whatley hired a lawyer, prompting Fishback to text her that he was “disappointed” that a lawyer had become involved.
A Fishback crony sent her $3,000 on the payment app Zelle last December, seven months after the money was initially due, reducing the debt to $8,000. Yet the rest of the money she says she was promised never arrived. In February, Whatley texted Fishback to ask him why he hadn’t paid money she had been promised on February 1—by then nine months late.
“Feb 1 was a Sunday,” Fishback responded, according to text messages attached to the lawsuit. “We don’t work on Sundays.”
Asked about the debt, Fishback claims he has paid Whatley since her lawsuit was filed.
“I dropped the ball,” Fishback told me in a statement. “Her missed payment was an oversight on my part. This has been resolved.”
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Fishback could face other problems, too. Gianna Tagliarini, a former Fishback campaign staffer who has since turned against the candidate, posted on X on Friday that she had reported Fishback to Florida’s state law enforcement agency after investigating his conduct at the anti-woke debate operation. It’s not clear whether that has resulted in a genuine investigation by FDLE, which didn’t respond to a request for comment.
For longtime Fishback watchers, the idea of Fishback owing someone money doesn’t seem outlandish. Last week, a federal judge handling a dispute between Fishback and his former employer ruled that Fishback owes $1.3 million in legal fees and other penalties to his old company, Greenlight Capital, bringing his total debt to them to about $1.5 million. The hedge fund has seized Fishback’s cars and even hunted down a luxury watch he allegedly purchased to try to recoup some of the money he owes them.
The news that he had $3,000 in cash to give to Whatley—and that he might have to come up with $8,000 more—will likely be of interest to the candidate’s former employer. Hard to believe Florida’s voters wouldn’t pick this guy!
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Far-right commentator Elijah Schaffer has been in a six-month tailspin. Back in February, his family-man image, his marriage, and his website all imploded after Schaffer was revealed to have had an affair with fellow trad commentator Sarah Stock.
While Stock has disappeared from the internet, Schaffer is living out a right-wing influencer version of the Reddit advice for dumped dudes: “Delete Facebook, lawyer up, hit the gym.” Schaffer has assembled a new online show, surrounded himself with a new cast of younger men, and gotten lean.
On Saturday, Schaffer celebrated his physical success by posting two pictures comparing married Elijah (wealthy, yet goateed and flabby) with the current divorcing Elijah (leaner, blonder, and kind of mustachioed).
(Photos: Elijah Schaffer, X.com)
“Still average looking. But still chose to ascend,” Schaffer wrote in “looksmaxxing” argot, thanking guru Clavicular for advice on improving his appearance.
But not every conservative woman1 was convinced that post-divorce Schaffer was so hot or his posts so accurate. X user “Lady Nickeh,” a little-known account (with only 627 followers) that Schaffer easily could have ignored, pointed out that Schaffer looks substantially larger in a recent appearance on his own online show. In the video, Schaffer looked older and larger compared to the static picture of himself he posted to celebrate his weight loss—a photo that would have presumably been easier to manipulate than a video.
“This is a photo of your last stream and you look worse off than when you started come on now,” the account sniped.
(Photo: ‘Lady Nickeh,’ X.com)
The taunting enraged Schaffer, who published twonew videos, one of them shirtless, in which he played with camera angles, stroked his jawline, and flexed his biceps to argue that he was indeed lean and mean. The studio camera, Schaffer complained, had just added an unfair ten pounds to his appearance.
“Hey stupid bitch, here’s a free lesson on how cameras work,” Schaffer says in one video, which he shared as a repost of the post by Lady Nickeh that set him off, before launching into a nearly two-minute-long rant about the challenges of filming yourself.
Yet Schaffer’s critic persisted, arguing that his marital collapse had lost him a certain joie de vivre that GLP-1s could never replace.
“Maybe if you would have kept choosing your wife and family over degeneracy you wouldn’t have been low energy, depressed and you would have had the same life in your face than in this picture,” Lady Nickeh wrote.
A tough review for one of conservative media’s most polarizing figures!
TUCKER CARLSON SPENT THE SUMMER in a fugue, talking with an alleged Russian spy and accusing Donald Trump of being the Antichrist, then claiming he never said that. Carlson’s visits to the White House earlier in the year had failed to avert the Iran war, and after the bombs started falling, Vice President JD Vance—once the voice of Carlson’s preferred brand of populist isolationism—came to look like another tool of the same hawkish Republican establishment that had scorned Carlson.
But in a much-hypedmonologue on Wednesday night, Carlson suggested his plan to bounce back from the Vance disappointment: running for president himself in 2028. While he didn’t explicitly say he would run, Carlson spent ninety minutes laying out ten planks of what looks a lot like a populist campaign platform. Like Donald Trump after descending the golden escalator in 2015, Carlson depicts America as crisis-ridden and badly broken—but fixable, if voters choose the right candidate.
“You’re going to need to do something about the pressing question of American identity,” Carlson said, as he finished his speech. “What does it mean to be an American? But it’s fixable. You just have to try. And we will be trying.”
Carlson’s speech hasn’t attracted much interest outside of the right because he didn’t explicitly say he’s a candidate. But it still bears looking at because it reveals how Carlson, a guy nowadays best known for talking about demons and ball-tanning and for cozying up to Vladimir Putin, might go about setting up a run for the White House—and get his revenge on Trump.
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CARLSON’S SPEECH WAS PRECEDED by a meeting last weekend with other Trump friends-turned-enemies: former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Rep. Thomas Massie, and former counterterror chief Joe Kent. Ever since the private pow-wow, they’ve been on a media tour attacking Trump and promoting the idea of a third-party run against his chosen candidate in 2028.
Greene, for example, went on an online show hosted by conservative “Walkaway” activist Brandon Straka—himself increasingly critical of Trump—to claim the president said her son deserved to be killed by MAGA activists angry over her efforts to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Kent said in an appearance on the lefty show The Young Turks that they all urged Carlson to run for president at their get-together.
“Hopefully he wakes up one day and Tucker says he’s going to run,” Kent said.
Carlson centered his speech on ten words for how he thought the country should be, including “fair,” “sovereign,” and “decent.” Each one led into more specific grievances—the idea that America should be “optimistic,” for example, was really about the declining birth rate.
“A country that doesn’t care about kids doesn’t care about the future,” Carlson said.
In his speech, Carlson positioned himself at the center of several populist concerns: opposition to AI data centers and Flock surveillance cameras, the sense that Epstein associates are getting away with it. Carlson even suggested some sort of debt forgiveness or other radical economic restructuring of consumer debt, saying the country could never be moral in a “society organized around debt.”
“Now the ‘fruited plain’ is just a place to build data centers and windmills, and make ethanol,” Carlson said, evoking a sense of a lost American heartland.
Like any good campaign speech, it was also pretty boring. Aside from calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “a deranged, bloodthirsty monkey,” Carlson hit his usual beats—criticism of Israel and Ukraine, and a sense that Trump has brought the country to the brink of nuclear war by attacking Iran.
Still, the import of Carlson’s video wasn’t lost on his enemies. Idiosyncratic conservative writer Rod Dreher, who recently announced a falling-out with Carlson over Carlson’s refusal to take seriously a potential case of demonic possession, said Carlson’s “fascinating” speech suggested he could launch a new “radical” party.
Jeremy Boreing, the former Daily Wire CEO now trying to build his own podcast empire, summoned a host of Carlson critics, including James “Conceptual James” Lindsay, to hash out exactly what Carlson meant. The panel’s conclusion, essentially, was that Carlson is a dupe following the orders of pro-Putin ideologue Aleksandr Dugin, albeit one who harbors real third party ambitions. Boreing added that Carlson “alluded” to a third party in his speech, and gave the camera “a slight grin” when he hinted at making a future announcement.
“Tucker has a political project, and that project is to create a new American majority out of a coalition formed from left-wing economic populists and right-wing social populists,” Boreing said.
Rep. Chuck Edwards faces House Ethics censure over harassment allegations involving young staffers—Christmas tree visits, 30 tubs of ice cream, matching guns, a custom Adam Sandler puzzle. Will Sommer and Sarah Matthews dig into the creepy details, the power dynamics on the Hill, and why GOP colleagues are staying quiet.
Sean Duffy and Rachel Campos-Duffy visiting the Liberty Bell with their family, in a scene from the trailer for The Great American Road Trip. (Screenshot via YouTube)
SECRETARY OF TRANSPORTATION SEAN DUFFY and his family promised back in May to help American families bond during vacation season. The plan: The Great American Road Trip, a new online television show starring, well, the Duffys—Sean, his wife Rachel Campos-Duffy, and their nine children.
The idea is that the Duffys would drive around together—with cameras documenting their every wholesome conversation in the car, and then following them around on their sightseeing escapades.
These trips for the family of eleven didn’t come cheaply, and were seemingly funded to the tune of millions of dollars in donations from corporations Duffy regulates. Still, there was theoretically a noble goal involved. Campos-Duffy—who is a Fox News host and, like her husband, a former reality TV star—said that the show would be an antidote to Americans’ typical lives in what she bafflingly called “a Pornhub world.”
Describing the show—on Fox News and in a promotional conversation in the Oval Office with President Trump—Duffy said their motto is “To love America is to see America.”
Maybe so, but you know what part of America nobody has seen? Duffy’s show.
This Saturday marks three months since the Duffys’ Fox News appearance. Summer is more than half over. The celebrations around the Fourth of July that Duffy’s show was supposed to promote—the project was “aligned” with Trump’s sketchy Freedom250 alternative celebration—are well in the past. Many American school students will go back to school this week.
Yet The Great American Road Trip, which Duffy promised would premiere in June, has not released a single episode. That’s a pretty significant failure for a show the Department of Transportation once described as a “key initiative.”
What happened to The Great American Road Trip? Why have the Duffys failed to help a single American family grow closer or disconnect from the “Pornhub world”?
Perhaps the public’s appetite for accompanying Duffy
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Will Sommer, Sam Stein and Andrew Egger went live to cover the growing calls on the right for GOP Rep. Max Miller to resign, whether Jeanine Pirro will be fired over the botched Reflecting Pool case, Tucker speaking with foreign agents, and the audience collapse among right-wing MAGA media figures.
Andrew Egger and Will Sommer give their takes on the stunning new developments surrounding GOP Rep. Max Miller. After facing mounting abuse allegations, Miller launched a livestream to defend himself and released a Dropbox full of what he claimed was exculpatory evidence. Instead, his response appears to have intensified scrutiny. Ohio Sen. Bernie Moreno, Miller's former father-in-law, publicly condemned the congressman, saying he should no longer serve in office. Andrew and Will examine Miller's unusual defense and why Republicans are just now beginning to distance themselves.
Sonny Bunch and Bill Kristol take on the dismissed felony vandalism case against Olympic canoeist David Hearn—who was accused of damaging the Reflecting Pool—after government officials acknowledged problems with the work itself. They consider what the case reveals about political pressure, government misconduct, the costs of defending against unjust prosecutions, and Trump’s fixation on remaking Washington.
The Washington Post is in turmoil once again. Opinion editor Adam O’Neal is stepping down after just over a year, raising fresh questions about Jeff Bezos’s controversial overhaul of the newspaper’s opinion section to focus more on “personal liberties and free markets.” Will Sommer sits down with Semafor media editor and Mixed Signals podcast cohost Max Tani to break down what O’Neal’s departure means, why the Post’s conservative pivot has struggled, and whether the paper’s expensive push into YouTube and podcasting was doomed from the start.
(Photo Illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Instagram)
THERE’S A NEW MAGA PERSONALITY on the scene: Savanna Cannon.
Parroting talking points about wacko liberals and often wearing a Charlie Kirk–style “Freedom” shirt, Cannon looks and sounds like she came straight out of the Turning Point USA or PragerU conservative influencer pipelines.
“People who don’t like what I say are, more than likely, braindead,” Cannon declared in one video last week that sums up her facts-don’t-care-about-your-feelings style.
But Cannon has one big advantage over her rival conservative commentators: she sits in an unusual way.
Cannon typically records her videos leaning back in a chair while wearing yoga pants, with her legs pulled up on either side of her. It’s a pose that highlights everything a more prurient viewer might hope to see: her bare feet and—forgive me, I am only reporting the facts here—the faint outline of her genitals.1
(Photo: X.com)
Cannon’s recumbent poses put her groin right in the center of the vertical-video frame.
“This person sits like this every time,” one Instagram commenter wrote this week. “It’s really weird.”
Cannon isn’t subtle about it. Scroll through her Instagram page and a good 80 percent of the posts are her sitting in that pose, wearing yoga pants, often pulling them up to make them fit tighter. “My videos are for straight men,” she explained.
And lest you have any lingering doubt about the audience Cannon is cultivating, it is probably settled by knowledge of Cannon’s other career: She also posts sexual photos of herself on the subscriber site OnlyFans.
The OnlyFans gig actually came first for Cannon. She tried to grow her presence on the site by, among other things, posting videos of herself working out in the gym. But it can be tough out there for an OnlyFans girl. In search of a large, particularly male audience with a track record of falling for a pretty face, she made a play to become a MAGA influencer. It was a smart call. Pro-Trump social media is a rich field for finding new, smitten subscribers—or, in the language of the industry, “simps”—who could end up following you on OnlyFans, too. While Cannon’s gym page has 42,000 followers on Instagram, her political Instagram page has 285,000. (The number of followers she has on her OnlyFans accounts is not publicly listed.)
Politically, Cannon is offering the kind of unremarkable conservative opinions you might hear on Fox News or Ben Shapiro’s Daily Wire, such as saying that being transgender is a mental illness, or that Democrats are the real racists.
“It’s probably an AI script, go in, talentless, there’s nothing being contributed,” podcaster Steven Crowder said of Cannon’s videos on his show Wednesday. “There’s nothing of value.”
CANNON’S UNSUBTLE APPROACH to combining politics with sex appeal is just the latest in the symbiotic relationship developing between right-wing commentators eager to grow their male audiences and aspiring OnlyFans models hoping to grow subscriber bases through any form of online attention. The Venn diagram of their potential audiences is almost a circle, including even those spaces where pro-Trump commentators claim to want a return to more traditional values.
Take the short-form video content produced by manospheric dating podcasts like “Whatever” or “Fresh and Fit.” Those podcasts typically feature one or two conservatives, usually men, facing off around a gigantic semicircle table with numerous scantily clad women. The conservatives ask the women titillating, often rude questions, like how many men they’ve slept with. Firing Line this is not!
What kind of woman would subject themselves to that kind of treatment? Often, the answer is OnlyFans models looking to gain monetizable internet infamy, even from “trad” men. In a 2023 video, the hosts of the Miami-based Fresh and Fit—whose podcast has featured figures like Candace Owens and Milo Yiannopoulos in the designated conservative role—defended themselves from a viewer asking why they hosted so many OnlyFans models hoping to get rich off of their audiences.
“To get the most eyeballs. Unfortunately, sex sells,” host Amrou Fudl (aka Myron Gaines) said. “There is a method to the madness, and to get eyeballs on us, sometimes we have to bring in certain girls, whatever it may be.”
Fudl argued that their fight for traditional values was still being accomplished if they could draw in “simps and suckers” and direct even a fraction of them toward the less-sexualized media products they put out. Products like “Money Monday” and, I kid you not, “Womanizer Wednesday.”
The Los Angeles-based Whatever podcast runs on a similar model, featuring conservative commentators like the Daily Wire’s Michael Knowles facing off against OnlyFans models eager to promote their accounts. In 2024, YouTube commentator Daniel Keem described the podcast’s business model as “line up some only fans sluts to roast.”
WHAT CANNON’S BEEN DOING seems to be working for her: She appears to have built a successful customer funnel for her OnlyFans by getting political. After posting conservative videos for just a few months, she now regularly gets tens of thousands of views on every short video on Instagram, as well as adoring comments and thousands of likes on each.
But not everyone on the right has been thrilled by her success.
“Conservative female talking heads are just a bunch of shallow, disgusting skanks spewing low-IQ takes,” complained far-right commentator Lauren Witzke on Tuesday, posting a video of Cannon’s legs-akimbo pose.
Crowder, displaying his usual respect for women, said Cannon’s pelvis-centric posing was merely a matter of degrees difference from female TPUSA influencer “ambassadors” or Fox News hosts.
“This is the sex appeal nuclear arms race,” Crowder said.
Cannon didn’t respond to a request for comment.
You could write dozens of dissertations on the gender politics going on here. But clearly the growing symbiosis between OnlyFans models and conservative activists—many of them ostensibly opposed to OnlyFans on religious grounds—has proven successful for all parties involved. Florida GOP gubernatorial candidate James Fishback saw his first major burst of attention when he called for a 50 percent tax on OnlyFans models’ income. That started a “feud” with OnlyFans star Sophie Rain (a Florida resident) and a debate between her and Fishback on Piers Morgan’s show. It was a win-win. Fishback was platformed on a popular news program. Rain got more exposure to atypical audiences.
White nationalist Nick Fuentes—not incidentally, a regular guest on Fresh and Fit—has also benefited from a largely one-way association with Rain. On his show, Fuentes frequently talks about how hot he finds Rain.
“Dude, she was bad as fuck. Did you see her at the fashion show?” Fuentes asked his fans.
When Fuentes’s incel-heavy fanbase revolted over his “simping,” he persisted.
“It’s like, dude, if she spit in your direction, you’d be all over that,” Fuentes told his followers.
After a viewer named “Miami Groypette” gave him $10,000, Fuentes speculated that it could be Rain.
“Who is this mystery woman?” Fuentes said. “Chat, is it Sophie Rain? Dude, that would be crazy.”
In return, Rain has courted Fuentes’s groypers. She reposted a photoshopped picture of herself in groyper merchandise that praised her as hotter than the usual “chopped groypettes,” and thanked Fuentes for the compliments.
“Can someone explain to me what a groyp is and what’s going on here 😭,” Rain wrote on X.
If anything, Cannon stands out because she merges the two roles. Rather than being an OnlyFans model subject to the whims of a dating podcast host or a feud with a far-right pundit, she is creating the MAGA content on her own. Perhaps it was only a matter of time before some enterprising ingénue tapped this particular market.
And apparently, she’s pleased with how it’s going for her. After critics accused her of taking money from Israel this week, Cannon responded in a video that she didn’t need foreign money to state her opinions.
Stephen Miller has a free hand to pump out his racist policies; Trump regularly says blatantly offensive things that are way past a dog whistle; and one-time insurgents at the Heritage Foundation and other MAGA institutions are muscling out people who aren't comfortable with openly embracing bigotry. The groypers are running today's Republican Party. At the same time, Trump's Iran war has opened divisions within the administration, and the leaks are coming fast and furiously. Plus: the gullible people who think their bribes will keep them safe from Trump, Rod Dreher's falling out with JD Vance, the ties between the Tates and the White House should be a bigger scandal, Mitch McConnell may be doing the most Mitch McConnell thing of all, and how Cincinnatians fought back against DHS to protect a local chaplain.
Zeteo’s AsawinSuebsaeng joins guest host Will Sommer.
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(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Ukrainian Presidential Press Office via AP, Shutterstock)
RIGHT-WING ACTIVIST LAURA LOOMER has been on a surprise whirlwind tour of Ukraine to drum up positive press about the country, meeting soldiers, visiting bomb sites, and even sitting for a friendly interview with Ukrainian president Vladimir Zelensky.
All of this has her erstwhile allies in the traditionally anti-Ukraine MAGA movement wondering: What is Loomer up to and, more importantly, who’s paying her off?
“You’ve got to ask yourself what in the name of sweet holy hell is going on here?” asked right-wing commenter David Freiheit, who goes by the name “Viva Frei.”
Alex Jones, who once frequently hosted Loomer on InfoWars, quipped that Loomer should stay out of global politics and go back to eating dog food. Loomer retorted that Jones should pay the Sandy Hook families the money he owes them.
But if Loomer’s embrace of the Ukrainian war effort hasn’t impressed the MAGAverse, it has earned positive mentions from one key figure: Donald Trump. The president reposted a video of Loomer interviewing Zelensky with the caption: “Very Good!!!”
Loomer herself has acknowledged that she has made a complete 180 when it comes to Zelensky and Ukraine.
“I’ll admit, I’ve said some pretty terrible things about Ukraine, and terrible things about you as well!” she told Zelensky during their interview.
All of which has further confused former allies and longtime Loomerologists. As someone who’s devoted a good portion of his professional life to mulling over Loomer’s unique psychology, I too have been curious. What should we make of it? I have a few theories.
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(Photo illustration by Bill Kuchman/The Bulwark | Photos: Getty, Shutterstock)
Can MAGA Fight the Charges Against Andrew Tate?
PROMINENT MANOSPHERE INFLUENCERS and accused sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested by U.S. marshals in Miami last weekend, as they were set to host—what else?—a bare-knuckle boxing match.
Video of their arrest, which quickly went viral, showed Andrew Tate dressed in clamdigger pants and an unusual purple shirt unbuttoned down almost to his navel. But maybe the most surprising thing is that it happened on American soil at all.
That’s because, despite years of accusations involving rape and sex trafficking, the Tates have enjoyed a strangely close relationship with Trump world that seems to have extended to preferential treatment from the government. Andrew Tate has had numerous friendly conversations with Barron Trump and Donald Trump Jr., according to the New York Times. With the influencer brothers unable to leave Romania for years as the investigation went on, prominent Trump world figure Ric Grenell reportedly spoke to Romanian officials about their case. Soon after those conversations, the Tates were allowed to leave Romania.
Another time, after the troubled pair had their phones seized last year, Trump officialPaul Ingrassia reportedly intervened to help them.1 And just days before their arrest last weekend, the Tates were partying in Washington with Trump administration luminaries.
Incredibly, nearly all of the MAGA movement’s embrace of the brothers has come after they were first accused of sex trafficking in 2022. That seemed pretty crazy for a bunch of people who claim their biggest issue is child sex trafficking. But it seemed the friendly feelings for the Tates might have reached their limits last week after they were arrested to be extradited to the United Kingdom, where they face new charges related to allegedly choking women unconscious and raping them.
And yet, despite the seriousness of the crimes, there is still a growing movement on the right urging the Trump administration to intervene and prevent the extradition.
Rep. Abe Hamadeh (R-Ariz.) has become one of the Tates’ most prominent defenders in the aftermath of the extradition, claiming in a tweet that they’re victims of politicized “lawfare” in both the U.K. and Romania. He doesn’t specify why he thinks the brothers would be targets of lawfare—what political reasons these countries would have for taking down the Tates. Nevertheless, Hamadeh said the Trump administration should refuse to extradite the brothers, who are dual American and British citizens.
“There should be no extradition of American citizens when the charges are unclear and political,” Hamadeh wrote.
Right-wing influencers and media figures are also supporting the Tates. White nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes said their extradition would be a “national humiliation.” Far-right influencers the “Hodge Twins” compared the Tates to pro-Trump comedian Russell Brand, himself facing rape charges in the U.K., ostensibly to imply both were being unfairly targeted. And hustle-bro podcaster Patrick Bet-David went so far as to say the Tates were an inspiration to fatherless children.
“I think they’re doing more good for society than bad, if you ask me,” he said on his podcast following the extradition, though he admitted that the Tates were “very complicated human beings.”
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THE RALLYING AROUND THE TATES has put meaningful pressure on Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has the power to block their extradition or see it go through. While both Rubio and Trump are reportedly unwilling to intervene to help the influencers, Rubio didn’t entirely foreclose the possibility at a press conference Wednesday, saying he didn’t see a role for the State Department “at this moment.”
“I’m not going to opine on something that’s still working through a legal process,” Rubio said.
That’s a fairly neutral stance to take on two men accused of being prolific international sex criminals! And given the Trump administration’s willingness to drop investigations into political allies or give them pardons and commutations, it doesn’t seem impossible that a pro-Tate pressure campaign could end up winning the brothers their freedom.
Tate lawyer Joseph D. McBride, a MAGA figure who has also represented January 6th defendants, appears to be courting administration support. When Ingrassia, now acting general counsel of the General Services Administration, tweeted on Sunday that the American system must protect “the presumption of innocence” in an apparent reference to the Tates, McBride retweeted him and other prominent Tate supporters.2
The online defense of the Tates is congealing around the idea that the brothers simply can’t receive a fair trial in a British court. Pointing to news stories and an exaggerated report on the British government’s slow response to immigrant “grooming gangs”—combined with its enforcement of laws that would violate American free speech standards—many on the right are convinced that the British justice system is essentially illegitimate.
But there is a secondary element to MAGA’s continued Tate brothers embrace that can’t be ignored. This movement has become instinctively distrustful of these types of allegations—at least when directed against one of their own.
Donald Trump himself has faced numerous rape and sexual assault allegations that he claimed they were politically targeted against him. While Trump blamed his legal woes on the “deep state,” Tate has adopted a similar concept, saying he’s being punished by operatives from an unspecified social control scheme he calls “The Matrix.” Per his telling, Tate is not facing legitimate criminal investigations because of his misdeeds, but, like Keanu Reeves’s Neo in The Matrix, is being punished by Mr. Smith-type “agents” for attempting to pull the rest of humanity into the real world.
That argument hasn’t always landed. In a 2024 interview with Tucker Carlson, Tate grew frustrated after his attempt at explaining away his criminal charges foundered when Carlson said he had not actually seen The Matrix.
“There’s a bunch of other similarities, which are difficult for me to explain because you haven’t watched the movie,” Tate said.
Ingrassia denied helping the Tates in an interview with ProPublica, though the outlet said it had reviewed a written request from Ingrassia supporting them.
Ingrassia, who received his law degree from Cornell in 2022, absurdly claims that the presumption of innocence “is what separates America from the world, and is what makes this country exceptional.” In fact, British law, which provided the foundation for American law, also holds the presumption of innocence sacred.
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