After President Trump took office in 2025, Andrew Tate proclaimed, “The Tates will be free.” It reflected an expectation that Trump would extricate the controversial 39-year-old influencer and his brother from legal troubles in Romania.

By then, Andrew Tate had spent years building political connections with the Trump family and other Republicans.

But now those ties are being tested: Andrew and Tristan Tate were arrested on July 18 and are now in a Florida prison, as the United Kingdom seeks to extradite them to face dozens of charges for serious crimes, including rape and human trafficking. The brothers, who are dual U.S.-British citizens, deny the charges and are fighting extradition.

It’s a striking turnabout for the brothers, whose fans have included people who work in the U.S. government.

“The Tate brothers have friends on Capitol Hill,” says Jared Holt, senior researcher at Open Measures, a company that monitors online extremism and disinformation. “There’s people in the Trump administration that have cozied up to them before, people in the MAGA movement that have cozied up to them before, certainly.”

Known for his polarizing views, Andrew Tate is one of the most famous faces of the international “manosphere” — a movement touting male dominance and extreme misogyny that has been embraced by some prominent voices in right-wing media.

“He is a huge star,” Holt says of Tate.

But with a raft of criminal indictments in both the U.K. and Romania targeting Andrew and Tristan Tate, their support seems to be waning in the White House and fracturing elsewhere, according to analysts who study right-wing media.

“It seems like the [Trump] administration is trying to distance themselves a little bit now,” says Kayla Gogarty, a research director at Media Matters. “But in general, we see some of the MAGA media kind of split” on the Tates.

The shift would reverse years of increasingly close ties between Andrew Tate and U.S. political players.

Far-right media figures embrace Tate 

In 2017, Andrew Tate, a former kickboxer, was running a lucrative webcam porn business with his brother Tristan — an enterprise that would lead to accusations that the Tates coerced women to perform sex acts on camera and withheld their earnings from online work. Tate also faces charges related to indecent images of a child and extreme pornography.