Trump administration quietly decides not to block Andrew Tate extradition to UK

*The following is a lightly edited transcript of the July 28 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.*

Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I'm your host, Greg Sargent.

The Trump administration has quietly let it be known that it will not block the extradition of Andrew and Tristan Tate to Britain, where they're set to face new criminal charges of rape and sex trafficking. This is dividing MAGA, with most MAGA figures rapidly distancing themselves from the Tates—who are big MAGA manosphere superstars—while other MAGA figures defend them.

Yet there's another layer to the story that matters for Democrats and liberals. The Tate brothers' travails highlight a failing on our part. We all overread the meaning of Trump's 2024 successes with young men, and as a result, we've hamstrung ourselves in winning them back now.

Moira Donegan, a columnist for The Guardian, has a good new piece arguing that we have to break out of that rut. So we're talking to her about all of it today. Moira, nice to have you on.

Moira Donegan: Thank you so much for having me, Greg. It's great to be here.

Sargent: So let's start with who the Tate brothers are. Why are they so important in the MAGA manosphere and MAGA universe? And what is it that they reflect about Trump's successes with young men?

Donegan: Yeah, so the Tate brothers are really a pair of influencers. Andrew and Tristan Tate are brothers who grew up in the U.K. Andrew had a career as a professional kickboxer before a star turn on the British reality TV show Big Brother.

But he was kicked off of that show for his alleged treatment of women. And that really became a jumping-off point for the brothers, who became far-right, anti-feminist, anti-woman influencers, as well as running an online pornography business. They parlayed that into a really pretty massive following, and into some connections with the American right.

And I think in 2024 in particular, the Donald Trump campaign tried to harness what is known as the manosphere—this kind of network of often very popular, far-right, anti-feminist, sort of ideologically misogynist content creators who have achieved a pretty widespread degree of popularity with young men and teenage boys. And the MAGA movement's courtship of Andrew and Tristan Tate was really the sort of centerpiece of that project.

Sargent: All right, so the Tate brothers were just arrested in Miami, and the U.K.'s prosecution service says they face seven counts of rape, three counts involving sex trafficking, three counts of assault, and 19 related to porn. The Trump administration has quietly announced that it won't intervene, which means they are going to get sent back.

But that's not all. Many people around Trump are abandoning the Tates now, including Donald Jr., Barron Trump, Alina Habba, Candace Owens, and many more. Given all this, it's likely that Trump has signaled to his loyalists that the Tates are now finished in MAGA world, right? Moira, what do you make of all this?

Donegan: Well, it's a real 180 from where we were just under a year ago. Because last year, the Tates were actually under house arrest in Romania, where they had headquartered their sort of porn camgirl empire, and where they were accused, once again, of sexual violence and sex trafficking.

In that case, members of the Trump administration, then sort of newly restored to power, leaned on the Romanian authorities quite heavily to allow the Tates to leave the nation of Romania, to be released from house arrest, to be released from their travel ban, and to escape the prosecution there. That Romanian investigation has since really ground to a halt, right?

And this is also kind of a revival of the British charges, because these incidents that the Tates are being prosecuted for now in the U.K. stem from actions they allegedly took between 2010 and 2017. That British i...