How the MAGA Movement Is Erasing the Legacy of #MeToo

Sexual predators are getting free passes from Donald Trump and the right-wing mediasphere.

Harvey Weinstein at a preliminary hearing last year for his retrial on rape charges in New York

(Jefferson Siegel-Pool / Getty Images)

It’s raining toxic men. On Friday, President Trump took questions in the Oval Office and addressed an issue only Trump could bring to the presidential level: the possibility of pardoning Sean “Diddy” Combs in his sex-trafficking and racketeering trial—before a verdict of any kind has been reached. After warmly acknowledging their past friendship from Combs’s days on The Apprentice in 2012, the president said, “I would certainly look at the facts.”

No distancing, no “Sean Combs? I might have met him once in passing…”? Trump, in a rare moment of nonpartisanship, said he would put Combs’s criticism of his politics aside to see if Combs had been treated fairly. This comes from the same president who just dumped NASA nominee Jared Issacman because of unseemly “prior associations”—meaning Democrats, not sexual predators.

That same day in Southwark Crown Court in London, Russell Brand, a MAGA convert and vacation buddy of Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., was charged on counts of rape, sexual assault, and indecent assault. Two days earlier, the UK also confirmed that Andrew and Tristan Tate will face up to 21 charges, including rape, assault, and human trafficking. The Tates currently enjoy strong support within the Trump administration and family; their roster of White House–aligned fans includes Donald Trump Jr., FBI deputy director Dan Bongino, and Trump legal counselor Alina Habba. The brothers are far from garden-variety sex pests—they stand accused of forming a criminal sex trafficking organization in the UK and Romania.

Then, a new Harvey Weinstein interview dropped on The Candace Owens Show. And not long afterward, it was reported that for his current trial, Weinstein may take the stand himself—a move he shunned in his previous trials. He ultimately did not, and the case has gone to the jury. But that was before seemingly any #Me Too’d man could count on unqualified MAGA and manosphere support, when the shocking character of the allegations against Weinstein squelched any hope that he might appear as a sympathetic figure to the public.

MAGA’s tireless efforts on behalf of the credibly accused, the fairly convicted, and the justly imprisoned start at the top. Trump himself has successfully shrugged off #MeToo political damage ever since the Access Hollywood tape dropped in 2016, and after later lawsuits with porn stars and endlessly looped clips of him with his own creepy prior associations, like Jeffrey Epstein.

E. Jean Carroll’s charges that Trump sexually assaulted her are another matter. Carroll’s successful civil suit against Trump may not have cost him politically, but he can’t shrug off the $83.3 million judgment against him. He continues to fight Carroll in court, and successfully got ABC/Disney to pay a $15 million donation to his presidential library after the network’s news host George Stephanopoulos said that Trump was “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape.”

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Trump’s sense of grievance apparently runs so deep that that he has taken it upon himself to vindicate just about anyone accused or convicted of some form of sexual misconduct. Within days of his reelection, he announced that he would nominate the odious former representative Matt Gaetz for attorney general, even as Gaetz faced a House ethics committee investigation that accused him of paying a 17-year-old girl for sex. Trump then proceeded to nominate Fox News personality Pete Hegseth as secretary of defense, despite a sexual assault accusation that Hegseth settled for $50,000 (among many other questions about Hegseth’s conduct and character). Trump also nominated Linda McMahon, co-owner of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), despite multiple lawsuits pending against WWE that name McMahon and her company in connection with charges of sexual abuse by WWE employees involving minors as young as 12.

Gaetz’s House colleagues despised him long before Trump named him and they scuttled his nomination, but the Senate approved Hegseth and McMahon. The point in shrugging off these issues is to normalize predatory behavior. It’s all bad, but unlike the allied rollbacks of DEI and antidiscrimination law, the MeToo restoration project isn’t principally about sanctioning insensitive language; it’s about turning sexual assault into a victimless crime.

During the Gaetz, Hegseth, and McMahon nominations, it became clear, via the Tate case, that the administration’s zealous #MeToo rollback would extend beyond the White House proper. Andrew Tate rose to fame as an MMA fighter and a contestant on Big Brother, then became a manosphere star spouting a gym-rat self-empowerment philosophy that also urged misogynistic views and attitudes on young men.

In 2022, the Romanian government restricted the Tate brothers’ travel after authorities there formally charged them with rape and human trafficking. After Trump’s reelection, Tate hinted at his influence in the new administration when he responded to a fan on X on November 7, 2024, with a prediction: “My case being dismissed. Watch this space 😉.” On February 12, 2025, he posted again: “The Tates will be free, Trump is the president. The good old days are back.” By the end of February, after White House special envoy Richard Grennell met with a Romanian official at the Munich Security summit, the Tates announced that they would be leaving Romania. On February 17, the Financial Times reported two conversations between Trump administration officials regarding the Tate brothers, as well as bullying claims from the White House that USAID funds were allegedly weaponized against right-wing Romanian politicians.

Hint taken! By February 27, the Tates arrived in Florida—much to the disgust of Governor Ron DeSantis, who never quite gets the MAGA agenda. He announced that “Florida is not a place where you’re welcome with that type of conduct,” and the state’s attorney general opened an investigation into whether Florida has any jurisdiction over the Tates’ current legal issues. DeSantis found himself immediately attacked on social media by loyal MAGA-ratchiks Laura Loomer and Candace Owens. “The Tate brothers are US citizens,” Loomer posted on X. “Good thing Ron isn’t President.” Candace Owens concurred, reposting Loomer and adding, “Utterly deranged thing for a Governor of any state to say… Yes—Good thing Ron isn’t president.” Nevertheless, the Tates soon left Florida.

The MAGA movement and the manosphere have found common ground in championing predators as victims and erasing any legal responsibility or even disgrace in sexual misconduct. Given Trump’s slim win in November, these manosphere influencers may indeed have played a serious new role in the last election, akin to the influence of radio in 1932 and televised presidential debates in 1960. Russell Brand and the Tates have large followings that can translate into important shifts in political support. A day after Andrew Tate posted his prediction, Tristan Tate posted on X to remind Trump what his brother had done for him. In a long screed about the evils of the woke mind virus and the need for young men to hit the gym and overturn left-wing tax policies, he let it be known the Tates were owed some favors. “Millions of young men in Europe and the USA have a healthy right wing approach to politics that they would NOT have if Andrew Tate had never appeared on their phone screens. His role in this cannot be overlooked. He literally RAISED a generation of republicans.” It’s not all hype; social media industry analyst Matt Navarra has argued that the impact of the toxic manosphere on our politics is very real. “He’s got a huge ability to mobilise large online followings, and that’s a big potential political asset,” Navarra has said of Andrew Tate. “Social media is the new battleground and influencers are the new generals and Tate is perfectly aligned to Trump’s mission.”

If celebrities alone swayed elections, Taylor Swift would have delivered us a Harris administration. It’s the right-wing social media industry as a whole that makes a difference. Andrew Tate has 10.7 million followers on X alone. Russell Brand’s YouTube channel has 6.8 million YouTube subscribers—and it now features clip after clip of himself cheering on RFK Jr and the MAHA movement. Now that Brand faces criminal charges, it would be no great shock to see him leverage his following into a legal defense fund, with plenty of MAGA figures cheering him on. It’s now MAGA’s fallback position to scoff at any kind of credible harassment accusation or conviction. When The Daily Wire recently hired Mike Rogers as its new president for its entertainment division, the press announcement laughed off his forced resignation by Sony for sexual misconduct accusations and discriminatory firings against women. “Thank you to the purple hairs,” the Wire’s Gloria Taylor crowed, “Please ‘cancel’ more creative geniuses.”

Yes, it’s one more way to own the libs. But following Trump’s lead is always good for business on the right, so the benefits in defending even the worst male predators no doubt played into Candace Owens’s calculations in taking on Harvey Weinstein’s case as a cause célèbre. After getting fired from The Daily Wire for her anti-Israel and antisemitic views, Owens found a way back into the news cycle by championing Weinstein in two sympathetic interviews. Owens now believes Weinstein innocent of all charges against him. And it’s not hard to see why Weinstein went on her show—she has 12 million YouTube subscribers. Given that she needs a story and Weinstein desperately needs someone to tell his story his way, they both put aside her long history of platforming lurid antisemitic conspiracy theories.

Owens’s most recent Weinstein interview offers no fresh vantage on his legal strategies to get out of jail, nor does it supply any explanation of why exactly Owens thinks he’s innocent. Instead, she gives Weinstein time to refute past statements from Gwyneth Paltrow and her account of Brad Pitt roughing Weinstein up for asking her for a massage. Weinstein then dismissed the box office numbers on the Pitt-produced She Said, a movie about the New York Times reporters who broke the Weinstein story, as proof that people do not believe the case against him.

That’s one theory—another is that the public has simply moved on to a new celebrity circus. As The Guardian noted last week, compared to the Combs trial, “Weinstein’s retrial in Judge Curtis Farber’s dingy courtroom exists in a virtual vacuum of attention, though the court cases—one for a fallen movie mogul, one for a rap entrepreneur—share similarities around issues of sexual consent that, prosecutors allege, crossed over into serious crimes.”

Weinstein’s case involved horrific charges of predatory sexual behavior, but, in the current MAGA-fied climate of right-wing discourse, he can be depicted as a victim of a woke mob of feminist hysterics. Politics has made all the difference in his case history. Once, when he had clout in New York, Weinstein managed to keep the Manhattan DA’s office at bay. Then, when the story broke and he became a pariah, prosecutors rushed into his case as it finally got scheduled, resulting in a mistrial for Weinstein in 2024.

Previously, Weinstein avoided taking the stand to avoid cross-examination, but the fact that he seriously considered doing it now shows it’s a different ballgame altogether under a second Trump administration. For many people, Trump has managed to normalize another form of criminality into an “oh whatever, everybody does it” shrug—and it may be enough to spring Weinstein from prison.

Ben Schwartz

Ben Schwartz is an Emmy-nominated writer whose work has appeared in The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The New Republic, The New York Times, and many other publications. His Bluesky address is @benschwartz.bluesky.social.