Tate’s combination of bombast, grievance and transgression has won him allies in Trump’s circle. He’s reportedly a longtime friend of Donald Trump Jr., who called his detention in Romania “absolute insanity.” One of Tate’s former lawyers, Paul Ingrassia, is now the White House liaison for the Department of Justice. In January, when Tate announced plans to form a British political party and run for prime minister, Elon Musk endorsed his analysis of British politics, writing, “He’s not wrong.”
So while it is shocking that the Trump administration seems to have pressured Romania to release him, it is not surprising. As The Financial Times reported, U.S. officials first raised the Tates’ case in a phone call with the Romanian government in early February. A week later, encapsulating the current state of American diplomacy, Richard Grenell, a Trump special envoy, brought up the issue with the Romanian foreign minister at the Munich Security Conference. “I support the Tate brothers, as evident by my publicly available tweets,” Grenell told The Financial Times.
And now the Tate brothers are here. Their spokesman has even said that they’re getting their seized property back from Romania, including cars. They are supposed to return to that country if and when their trial starts. I’ll believe it when I see it.
The meaning of what looks like an astonishing American intervention on behalf of accused sex traffickers is clear enough. An implicit promise of the most recent Trump campaign was to restore patriarchy. Not the softer, pious kind of patriarchy once promoted by evangelicals like Mike Pence, but unfettered male domination. In seeking alienated and resentful young men, Trump appeared on podcasts and livestreams like Adin Ross’s. At the Republican National Convention, he was introduced by Dana White, chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, who was once caught on tape slapping his wife in a nightclub. Trump’s election, after a jury found him liable for sexual abuse, was a sign that the MeToo movement was definitively dead.
His appointments have reinforced this new age of male impunity. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, paid off a woman who accused him of sexual assault. His own mother accused him of abusing women, though she later disavowed her words. Robert F. Kennedy Jr., secretary of health and human services, was accused of sexually harassing his family’s nanny, and at one point kept a diary of his conquests, which his wife at the time found. One of Musk’s companies, SpaceX, reportedly paid $250,000 to a flight attendant who said he exposed himself to her, and in a lawsuit filed last year, former employees accused him of “treating women as sexual objects to be evaluated on their bra size.”
