On July 10th, the Trump White House announced the nomination of Nick Adams to be US ambassador to Malaysia. 

A native of Australia who became a US citizen in 2021 as well as a Newsmax TV commentator, what most distinguishes Adams as a political figure is his blatant sexism. In his career as a social media influencer, he has been known by the moniker Alpha Male. He enjoys “owning the libs” with his sexist trolling: Ben Terris of the Washington Post reported in 2024 that while dining with Adams, the latter requested of the male server assigned to their table that he be replaced by a “pretty female waitress.” He has a peculiar enthusiasm for the restaurant chain Hooters, which, of course, is known for the accentuation of bodily cleavage on the uniforms of its waitresses. He has tweeted on the subject of Hooters more than 500 times according to one count. To give an example of his discourse on the topic, in August 2024 on X he posted a picture of Alexandria Ocasio Cortes and asked his followers: “If AOC was your waitress at Hooters, how much would you tip her?” 

In his 2024 book Alpha Kings–to which President Trump wrote the forward–Adams further showed his misogynist colors. The publisher’s summary of the book claimed that it “shows the young men of America what it means to be a true alpha male in today’s hyper-feminized world.” Adams’s conception of a “true alpha male” was indicated in several of the book’s anecdotes detailing how he delivered tongue lashings to various female romantic partners whom he deemed insufficiently submissive to him. For example he reported that he told one girlfriend who refused to carry his luggage through an airport: “Let me explain something to you, sweetheart. I’m an alpha male. I lead, you follow…I am a king and I expect to be treated like it.” 

Adams’s philosophy is par for the course in the Trump administration, examples of whose contempt for women–especially the minimization of crimes against women–are plentiful. One example is the appointment by Trump of NFL Hall of Famer and registered sex offender Lawrence Taylor to the  President’s Council on Sports, Fitness and Nutrition. Taylor was convicted on two misdemeanor counts of sex with an underage prostitute in 2011. Taylor, who claimed to believe the victim was of legal consenting age, procured her sexual services from a sex trafficker who had coerced her into prostitution.Another demonstration of the administration’s misogyny took place in March, when the mixed martial arts superstar Conor McGregor was warmly received by Trump at the White House, an event which the Dublin Rape Crisis Center in Ireland said “effectively normalizes sexual violence and trivializes its impact on survivors.” McGregor had been found civilly liable the previous November by Ireland’s High Court for raping a woman in a Dublin hotel room in 2018. The High Court rejected McGregor’s appeal of the verdict in July. Of course, in some ways it makes sense for Trump to be friendly with McGregor. After all, the president himself was found civilly liable in 2023 for committing sexual abuse against writer E. Jean Carrol and has had numerous credible sexual assault complaints against him. 

Andrew Tate: Predator King

In the world of online right wing influencers, a person who has equaled Trump in the ability to garner millions of followers with unabashed lying and charlatanry is Andrew Tate. Born and raised for much of his childhood in the US but subsequently residing in Great Britain, Tate has built up an enormous online empire as a self-help influencer targeting young males, many of them teenagers. He has repeatedly promised his followers that following his methods will lead them to fabulous riches and also attract beautiful women who will submissively follow their every command. He is noted for his extreme misogynist statements. Tate and his brother Tristan are currently facing multiple criminal and civil charges of sexual assault, sex trafficking and money laundering in the United States, United Kingdom and Romania. 

Tate has long been an enthusiast for Donald Trump although to be fair his reception in MAGA world has been somewhat mixed. For example, Republican U.S. Senator Josh Hawley has denounced Tate for being a completely unwholesome figure–citing Tate’s public bragging about his personal sexual promiscuity and abuse of women. Ron DeSantis and Ben Shapiro, among others, have also been hostile towards him. However President Trump’s former personal attorney–and current US Attorney for New Jersey–Alina Habba gushed that she was a “big fan” of Tate when she appeared with the latter–while he was under house arrest awaiting trial on sex trafficking and money laundering charges in Romania–on a podcast in January. Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson’s reaction to Tate was described by the BBC journalists Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea in their 2024 book Clown World: Four Years Inside Andrew Tate’s Manosphere. For his podcast, Carlson travelled to Romania in July 2023 for an interview with Andrew and Tristan Tate (who again, at the time, were confined to house arrest by Romanian authorities). Tahsin and Shea wrote: 

“Tucker was beaming with an almost deranged grin when Andrew Tate appeared. He broke out into what appeared to be an explosive nervous laugh, exclaiming, ‘Wow! What’s up man!’ Tucker and Tate embraced, and Tucker seemed undeniably star struck, lost for words while gazing up at Tate.” 

The most intriguing connection between the Trump administration and the Tate brothers came to light in the still somewhat mysterious circumstances surrounding their release from travel restrictions by the Romanian authorities in February, allowing them to travel to the U.S. It appears that Trump administration envoy Richard Grenell–partly operating under the influence of former Tate lawyer and current Department of Homeland Security official Paul Ingrassia–privately applied pressure on Romanian authorities to lift the travel restrictions. 

While MAGA figures from Roger Stone to Tucker Carlson have taken the Tate brothers’ claims at face value that the sexual assault, human traficking and money laundering charges against them are part of a frame up conspiracy by global elites, serious journalists have gone to work exposing the Tate brothers in all their gutter glory. For example, the BBC journalists Shea and Tahsin, in their gripping book, reported being delivered transcripts of logs from private chat forums patronized by paying members of Tate’s War Room (one of his purported self-help programs). These chat forums almost entirely featured discussion among male War Room members about how to establish revenue streams from online pornographic sites by grooming female romantic partners into appearing on those sites. Much of the advice in the forums about psychologically manipulating the female targets came from one of Tate’s chief lieutenants, Iggy Himmelweiss. 

Andrew Tate, in some ways, is MAGA distilled to its essence. Whatever its populist sounding rhetoric, the Trump administration offers ordinary people only an intensification of  economic exploitation and wealth hoarding by the 1 percent. Tate’s messages to his followers glorifies that wealth hoarding while also offering a psychological wage, the opportunity to punch downward: the feeling of domination over women. The fact that he has been openly embraced by mainstream right wing figures shows what a sewer MAGA truly is. 

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