This is Totally Normal Quote of the Day, a feature highlighting a statement from the news that exemplifies just how extremely normal everything has become.
“Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct in the air, and I don’t know how it came to this.” —Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, responding on Thursday to the news that the Tate brothers were on their way to Florida
The notoriously misogynist British-American Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan are now in Florida. We don’t know exactly how they were able to get to the U.S.—how they were able to convince the Romanian government to allow them to leave the country while still facing charges of human trafficking—but reporting indicates that the Trump administration had something to do with it.
That, if it turns out to be true, would be shocking. The Tate brothers are perhaps two of the most disreputable manosphere influencers in the world. Andrew, the more infamous of the two, became a household name in the U.K. for his violently offensive behavior as a cast member on Big Brother and afterward as a misogynist influencer, gaining more than 10 million followers on X, where he likes to argue against women’s rights and for greater permissiveness toward sexual assault. (Other major platforms have kicked him off for hate speech.) He revels in being offensive. “I dont buy that time of the month crap,” he wrote in one recent post. “Control your whore moans or get out of my house.”
But the outrage surrounding the Tates isn’t just about their influence on the minds of impressionable teenage boys. In Romania, they were charged with human trafficking and forming an organized crime group related to a webcam pornography scheme. (Romanian prosecutors are continuing to investigate them for human trafficking and money laundering.) Separately, the U.K. has issued a warrant accusing them of human trafficking; four British women also accused Andrew Tate of rape. And, notably, an American woman sued the brothers, accusing them of coercing her into sex work. For two years, while under investigation, they were not allowed to leave Romania.
But fortunately for the Tate brothers, they are also very political. Their far-right politics have driven them to support the anti-Islamic politician Tommy Robinson in the U.K. and appear on conspiracy theory shows such as Alex Jones’ Infowars. It has also won them supporters, who see them as victims of political attacks. Andrew Tate was also able to spin the accusations against him as a kind of anti-conservative lawfare, akin to Trump’s claims of political persecution. “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back,” he wrote earlier in the month. That tactic, and the broader support of right-wing politics, may have turned out useful after the brothers’ legal troubles caught up to them: According to reporting last week from the Financial Times, U.S. officials had pressured Romania to lift travel restrictions on the Tates. On Wednesday, Romania did just that.
We can’t say with certainty that the Trump administration is responsible for the Tate brothers leaving the country. Romania has denied it, and on Thursday, Trump said he knew “nothing about that.” But their lawyer had been lobbying for the brothers in Washington for more than a year, working connections he made representing Jan. 6 defendants. (The brothers are dual citizens of the U.S. and the U.K.) The FT reported that Richard Grenell, a close Trump ally and special envoy for the United States, had mentioned the Tates’ case to Romania’s foreign minister this month. (He confirmed this to another outlet but did not describe the conversation as pressure.) The New York Times reported that the Tates’ lawyer refused to answer questions about the political campaign directly on Thursday but seemed to allude to the administration’s involvement: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”
On Thursday, the brothers took a private plane to the U.S., arriving in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the late morning. If their situation was a product of the administration’s work, then Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis was clearly left out of the loop. He told reporters on Thursday that he had found out about the Tates’ pending arrival from news reports.
For a Republican Party that loves to talk about human trafficking and protecting women, any cozying up with Andrew Tate would seem like a baffling decision. So despite the reporting of the administration’s involvement, some Republicans have been offended enough to speak up. In a post on X, for example, commentator Ben Shapiro wrote that “America does not need more self-proclaimed pimps and terror supporters with outstanding criminal allegations of sex trafficking and a history of pornographic distribution, plus a grift ‘university’ that suckers young men out of thousands of dollars”—a description of a fuller set of allegations against Andrew Tate.
“I would hope our government wasn’t involved in any way,” Sen. Josh Hawley said Thursday. “I don’t think conservatives should be glorifying this guy at all.”
And the pundit Erick Erickson saw a potential warning in the news. “We should wait and see, but I can say that if Trump really did bless allowing the Tate brothers to come to the US, it would be the primary exhibit that his administration is guided by a hyper-online right that is very out of touch with the real world and needs to touch grass,” he wrote.
And perhaps because DeSantis, Trump’s former rival, has never had a warm relationship with the president, he was able to express frustration at the situation. “We were not involved, we were not notified,” he said.
Romania has said it is still pursuing the charges against the brothers, but the legal process will be more challenging now that the Tates are on U.S. soil, living under what appears to be a friendly administration. Florida, at least, seems eager to move against the brothers. The state attorney general, James Uthmeier, has said that his office would conduct a “preliminary inquiry” into them. “Florida has zero tolerance for human trafficking and violence against women,” he said. “If any of these alleged crimes trigger Florida jurisdiction, we will hold them accountable.”
