How Barron Trump connected his father to the manosphere
This online universe of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers and online pranksters vary wildly in their tone, substance and obsessions. Some are jokey; some are vile. Donald Trump may have been a pilgrim in this strange land – but he had a native to guide him.
One day in the midst of a vicious election campaign whose outcome, Donald Trump had warned, could threaten America’s very survival, the former president spent 90 minutes with a foul-mouthed 24-year-old who has achieved a certain kind of stardom by playing videogames for an online audience.
In meeting Adin Ross in August for a livestreamed chat, Trump was entering the manosphere.
It is an online universe of YouTubers, podcasters, live-streamers, online pranksters and more. They vary wildly in their tone, substance and obsessions. Some are jokey; some are vile. Running through them all is a certain unreformed notion of “Bro-dom.” Trump may have been a pilgrim in this strange land. But he had a native to guide him: his 18-year-old, 6-foot-9-inch son Barron, a freshman at New York University.
“My son Barron says hello,” Trump told Ross at the outset of their chat. “He’s a big fan of yours.” “What’s up, Barron?” Ross chirped. “Yeah, Barron’s awesome. Amazing. Great kid. He’s tall. Very tall.” This week, the manosphere, the kind of secret that young men tend to hide on their laptops or at the bottom of a sock drawer, was dragged into the spotlight when Trump won a commanding election victory. It was fuelled, in part, by vigorous support from the kind of young men more typically concerned with videogames than voting.
In his victory speech in the wee hours of Wednesday morning, the triumphant president-elect saluted Dana White, the bullet-headed boss of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, the manosphere’s sport of choice and the sun at the centre of its universe. White, in turn, called out Ross and two other manosphere stars, including the Nelk Boys and Theo Von, for mobilising their vast followings on Trump’s behalf.
In the crowd that night at the Palm Beach County Convention Center, cheering alongside well-heeled donors and evangelical organisers, were an abundance of fresh-faced MAGA dudes and the women who love them – many with Ivanka-like platinum tresses.
To Blake Marnell, a 60-year old from San Diego who has gained his own MAGA fame for attending rallies in a suit whose pattern resembles a brick wall, the manosphere is an organic phenomenon that grew out of terrain abandoned or overlooked by traditional media outlets. It has some of the DNA of now-defunct lads’ magazines and raunchy television shows from a previous generation, like Jackass or The Man Show, unlikely to be greenlighted in today’s culture. It loves crypto, energy drinks and Elon Musk.
“If you were in college recently, you knew about it,” Marnell said. “If you’re over 35, probably not.” Older men can congregate around CNBC or golf. But not so much the younger guys. “You’ve got a show named The View. Five women sitting down talking,” Marnell noted. “Is there an equivalent for men?” It is hard to say with precision where the manosphere’s boundaries begin and end. (“There’s no credentialing board,” as Marnell put it.) Joe Rogan, one of America’s most popular podcasters, is probably too old and mainstream to qualify. Think of him more as the manosphere’s winking uncle who slips beers to underage nephews like podcasters Ross and Von, a stand-up comedian and self-styled streamer who also bagged a Trump interview.
Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic who blames modern society for castrating young men, is a sort of manosphere intellectual. There are female fellow travellers, like H. Pearl Davis, who has gained TikTok fame with her tart anti-feminist takes.
The group known as the Nelk Boys are its jesters. Their online pranks have spawned an empire that includes a YouTube channel with 8 million subscribers, 4.7 million TikTok followers and a popular podcast called Full Send, on which Trump, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and JD Vance have all appeared this political season.
Arguably, the crown princes of the manosphere are Jake and Logan Paul, beefcake 20-something brothers from Ohio who began building their audience more than a decade ago by posting videos on Vine. They have since moved into boxing. Jake is set to fight Mike Tyson next week, an event that will be streamed on Netflix and has already proved a content gold mine.
In June, Trump appeared on Logan’s ImPaulsive podcast and spoke knowledgeably about his favourite UFC fighters. (Paul’s Prime is the sport’s official energy drink.) Asked if he’d ever been in a fistfight, Trump replied: “Probably not.” Then he quipped: “I’d like to say I fought my way out of the Wharton School of Finance.” Finally, mouldering in the manosphere’s darkest corner is Andrew Tate, the British-American kickboxer and self-proclaimed misogynist who is accused of rape and human trafficking in Romania and sexual assault in the U.K. He has denied the charges.
Spending months under house arrest in Romania has not appeared to hurt Tate’s standing in the bro world. Being kicked off an online platform for hate speech and offensive imagery, as Ross has been repeatedly, has only increased his buzz.
There is an incestuousness to the manosphere. Its stars hop back and forth on each other’s streams, mutually promoting one another. But UFC is what binds them all and, more recently, provided a link to Trump.
The president-elect may be a boxing fan at heart, but the promoter in him sensed mixed martial arts’ juice among a younger generation. He sat cage-side with White in June, drawing a raucous ovation as Kid Rock’s “American Badass” roared from the sound system. Time and again, manosphere stars like the Nelk Boys’ principal members will recall having met Trump through White and UFC.
“The strategy is reaching an audience that maybe isn’t being recognised. Or an audience that loves Trump, and they’re just not being acknowledged, ” Bo Loudon, Barron’s best friend, told journalist Piers Morgan, explaining Trump’s outreach. Loudon was the subject of a recent Vanity Fair piece that described him as the force shaping the candidate’s “podcast offensive.” Asked about Barron’s role in his father’s strategy, Loudon told Morgan: “He’s definitely playing a hand... He’s in my age group, he knows who’s popular at this time.” Trump said as much when he sat with Ross, who later gifted him a Rolex watch and a custom-wrapped Tesla Cybertruck. The latter was stamped with the image of the bloodied but defiant candidate after surviving an assassination attempt in July.
Said Trump: “All I know is, my kid said, ‘Dad, you have no idea how big this interview is!’” The Wall Street Journal
