Big Pimpin’

The Tate boys are on their way back to America and some very respectable conservatives are mad about it.

The Tate boys, for the blissfully uninitiated, are Andrew and Tristan, dual citizens of the United States and the United Kingdom but lately residents of Romania. I wrote about them when news spread last month that the Trump administration had begun pressuring the Romanian government to let them travel abroad.

Why couldn’t they travel, you ask? Because that’s what tends to happen when you’re under arrest on suspicion of human trafficking and money laundering.

Romania isn’t the only nation where Andrew Tate is facing criminal charges. He’s in hot water with UK authorities for alleged sexual misconduct and is being sued there by four women who claim that he raped and abused them. But Andrew had a political ace up his sleeve: Over the last few years, he built a following among young American men for his commentary on what we might charitably call “gender relations.”

Nothing I can say will give you the flavor of that commentary more succinctly than this one-minute clip will. Suffice it to say, Andrew Tate running into criminal trouble for pimping isn’t the usual case of a celebrity turning out to have a dark side that was hidden from fans. It’s the opposite: His dark side is what made him a celebrity in the first place. The aggressive sexual bullying is what his young American fans liked about him.

As you’d expect of any boorish predator obsessed with his own machismo, Tate also admires Donald Trump—and at least one prominent Trump toady admires him back. And so, on Election Day 2024, the stars aligned for him. With Trump back in the White House and eager to abuse American power to threaten anyone at home or abroad who won’t do favors for him, it was a matter of time before the Romanian government was squeezed into letting the Tate boys “travel.”

In this case, “travel” means “flee.” The Tates surely won’t return voluntarily to Romania or to the UK to face the music, and the Trump administration is highly unlikely to comply with extradition demands from those countries. When the White House demanded that they be allowed to “travel,” what it was demanding was that the Tates be allowed to abscond to America and use it as a safe haven from criminal charges. It was offering the United States as a de facto hideout for outlaws accused of grave sexual offenses for no better reason than that they have the right politics.

The Tates will touch down in the U.S. on the same day that Keir Starmer, the prime minister of the country in which they’re wanted for “sexual aggression,” happens to be visiting the White House. Even more absurdly, they’ll be welcomed home by right-wing fans at the very moment those fans are expecting the Justice Department to expose the liberal establishment’s supposed enthusiasm for … sex trafficking.

Many respectable Trump-supporting conservatives are appalled. I’m sure they’ll be even more appalled if Trump meets with the Tates for one of those dopey thumbs-up photo ops, the likelihood of which can’t be less than 50 percent.

Those conservatives deserve your contempt.

It’s their fault that this happened, and will go on happening.

Red lines.

My editors at The Dispatch can get fidgety when I start ranting about what Americans deserve for …

reelecting Donald Trump, although they indulge me more often than they’d probably like.

I understand why they dislike it. Most Trump voters are personally decent. They’re friends and family. And lord knows, vanishingly few voted in November because they wanted the Tate boys to be turned loose in the United States to sexually enslave American women.

Besides, we don’t usually wish suffering on other citizens over political differences. Americans have managed to navigate friendships despite disagreements over matters as divisive as abortion. How can voting for Trump because you wanted cheaper groceries and a tighter border amount to crossing some sort of moral red line?

All of these points are well taken. My response is this: Where is the moral red line, then?

There has to be one. No matter how willing you are to overlook political differences in the name of friendship, I promise that there’s some line which, if crossed, would color your impression of a friend so darkly that you would begin to view them as a villain. At what point would it become villainous for the Trump voter in your life to go on supporting the president?

After he ignores a court ruling? After he deploys the military against American citizens? After he quits NATO and hands Taiwan to China on a silver platter? After he jailbreaks a pair of low-rent pimps for no better reason than that the most sexually stunted “bros” in his base worship them?

For most Trump voters, I don’t think there is a moral red line. There are things the president can do to offend them, as we’re seeing today with the backlash to the Tates, but there’s nothing he can do to offend them so terribly that they’ll withdraw their support. Look no further than the two feeble examples I linked above: As supposedly appalled as the Daily Wire cohort is about today’s news, they didn’t dare to even mention Trump’s name in complaining about the Tates’ deliverance.

I hold Trump voters, particularly the respectable ones, more culpable for his immorality than I would another president’s supporters because the moral stakes of last year’s election were unusually stark. To vote for him after January 6, two impeachments, four indictments, and endless chatter about “retribution” was necessarily to assume the risk of a freakishly amoral and criminal presidency. Those who did so might have cast their ballots wishing for nothing more than less expensive eggs (oh well!), but they did so knowing that the trade-off would be truly gonzo moral and civic depravity by presidential standards. And they accepted that.

To vote for Trump was to erase the moral red line. “Respectable” conservatives understood it and, in their zeal to see Democrats defeated at all costs, rationalized it. They don’t get to complain today about the Tates if they spent the last two years working to make America safe for degenerate autocracy. They signed up for a presidency unrestrained by morality; they’re getting what they voted for.

They handed Trump a mandate for perversion and he’s using his mandate. No wonder liberals, classical and otherwise, have been so demoralized since the election.

I’ll go further. I think Trumpism, which all of these “respectable” cretins spend most of their waking hours defending, is less a political project than a moral one. Jailbreaking the Tates isn’t an unfortunate quirk of postliberalism. It’s the point.

A moral project.

The point of postliberalism is to discredit notions of morality championed by “the system” and fill the vacuum with … something else.

What that something else should be differs depending on whom you ask. For Donald Trump and the galaxy of grifters who surround him, it’s straightforward: America’s new morality should be based on letting Donald Trump do what he likes by whatever means he likes, without consequence.

For certain nationalist ideologues, the new morality should aim to secure the political primacy of whites, Christians, and right-wingers more generally and to subjugate inferior tribes. Mainstreaming authoritarianism at home and abroad is part of that. If the lesser tribes can’t vote themselves into power, the preeminence of the ruling tribe is safe.

For “manosphere” losers who idolize Andrew Tate, the new morality should be geared toward restoring men’s social primacy. That includes greater permissiveness about getting rough with women who don’t know their place.

Whatever a given populist’s particular grievance happens to be, there’s some moral precept favored by the liberal “system” that’s irritating them. Trumpism is a coalition waging a multi-front assault on that system. The common thread among its factions is ruthlessness: Certain liberal norms are constraining each faction’s ability to dominate its respective enemies, so those factions are encouraging Americans to question those norms, weakening them through remorseless contrarianism until they’re hopefully discarded altogether.

The Tates’ liberation is part of that. “This really feels like a moral watershed,” commentator Richard Hanania wrote of their return to America on Thursday. “Everything else MAGA does has some kind of twisted moral logic that maybe you can see if you squint really hard. This time it’s just ‘we love pimping.’” That’s not exactly true—“we love pimping when populist chuds do it” is more accurate—but Hanania is right to see moral significance in the episode. It’s an opportunity for Trump and his fans to turn up the moral heat a few more degrees on the frogs they’ve been boiling and make them get used to the new temperature.

It’s a test of credibility, essentially. Do you trust our feminist “system” when it tells you that Andrew and Tristan Tate are perverts, rapists, and pimps who belong in prison? Or do you trust our president and his many Republican supporters, who insist that the moral equities in this case favor the Tates? If the average joe is willing to let his suspicions about “the system” justify laying aside his qualms about repatriating accused rapists, we’re already very far down the moral slope.

Columnist Matt Lewis drew a shrewd analogy when he compared Andrew Tate’s legal trajectory to Trump’s. “And so, the cycle repeats,” he wrote. “A man builds a brand off the backs of the vulnerable, dodges the fallout, and returns to an audience that sees his evasion of justice not as an indictment, but as proof of his genius.” Many populists are so crazed with antipathy toward “the system” that whether Tate is or isn’t a rapist simply might not matter to them. Whatever evil he’s guilty of, his opponents are assumed to be guilty of worse. If he’s wily enough to escape them, he deserves America’s adulation.

That really is a moral watershed. But it’s small potatoes compared to some of the moral perversions of Trump’s first five weeks in office.

Pardoning the January 6 convicts was an obvious one, unpopular with Americans but useful in forcing them to recalibrate their moral expectations for how the government should operate. Siding with Russia against Ukraine was also perverse, although not as perverse as mimicking Moscow’s propaganda about which side started the war. And letting DOGE sabotage life-saving programs like PEPFAR that combat the HIV/AIDS epidemic abroad could plausibly end up costing tens of thousands of lives for no grander reason than to signal the grassroots right’s acidic contempt for foreigners.

It’s a moral project, not a political one. Enemies of “the system” are to be celebrated, however poorly they might measure up to traditional moral standards. Case in point: Last week at CPAC, some of the January 6 convicts who received clemency from Trump were initially barred from the event; after an outcry, they were allowed in with an apology from organizers for having offended “this persecuted community.” That incident was a conflict of two moralities. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s prevailed.

Even the administration’s vaccine skepticism feels like part of a moral project. When Robert F. Kennedy Jr. shrugs off the first death from measles in the United States in 10 years as no big deal, when the Food and Drug Administration inexplicably cancels a meeting of experts that was supposed to advance production of this fall’s flu vaccine, it smells less like a bureaucratic snafu than a purposeful rebuke to a medical “system” that’s assured Americans for ages that immunization is less dangerous to their health than disease.

Do you trust that guidance? Do you trust the liberals who claim that Andrew Tate is guilty? Or do you trust our heroic president and the new moral order that he’s building?

The lowest of stakes.

The January 6 pardons, the betrayal of Ukraine, the gutting of PEPFAR, the discrediting of vaccines: All are egregious, potentially life-and-death calamities, yet as far as I’m aware not a single prominent conservative has deemed any of them to have crossed a moral red line that might require them to wash their hands of Trump and his administration.

How can one feel anything but contempt, then, when they turn around and pretend that their conscience is bothered by the Tates’ return to America? It’s a transparent excuse for them to signal their supposed moral respectability when the political stakes are at their lowest, knowing that the Tate story will be out of the news cycle in no time. They’re grousing about this because they don’t have the nerve to complain about the important stuff.

But this is what “respectable” Trump-supporting conservatives have been doing since 2015, no? Year after year, as the right slips further into proto-fascism, they remain dutifully allied with it while taking pains to ensure that everyone understands that they certainly have their problems with that Donald Trump fellow.

In doing so, they serve two important purposes for Trump’s postliberal movement.

For one, they “prove” that the modern right isn’t a cult, which is useful in attracting wary normie voters. You are allowed to disagree with the president without being excommunicated; there are conservatives on Fox News who do so—politely—all the time. Their continued alliance with the right reassures otherwise sensible right-leaning centrists that it’s okay to keep voting Republican. If a “respectable” non-culty conservative who loathes Andrew Tate can rationalize doing so, you can too.

The other purpose they serve is reinforcing the right’s bedrock conviction that, no matter how crazy Trump gets, he remains better for America than Democrats. That’s why criticism of the president from “Fox News conservatives” is unfailingly more measured in tone than their criticism of even pedestrian liberal screw-ups. True moral anger is reserved for the left, always and forever, befitting the right’s sense of who the real threat to America is. Trump could nuke Chicago and they’d be “disappointed”; for them to really get them going, Nancy Pelosi would need to say something impolitic.

And so, ultimately, what will today’s very mild backlash achieve? Until conservatives decide that a moral red line for the president exists and that crossing it will oblige them to oppose him, all they’re doing in grumbling impotently about the Tates is underlining their belief that even a government of pimp aficionados is worth supporting as long as it wears a red jersey. And so the frogs boil a little more.

“Respectable” conservatives have done far more over the past 10 years to enable the advance of postliberalism than they have to thwart it. To feel impressed that they’re shaking their heads over the Tates is to afford them a cheap grace they haven’t earned. Don’t do it. See these frauds for who they are.