As the polls began to dramatically shift in favor of Donald Trump on the evening of the election, Elon Musk, arguably Trump’s biggest supporter in recent months, tweeted: “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.” The top reply came from the notorious influencer and accused rapist and human trafficker, Andrew Tate. His summary of the election: “It’s men vs gays n chicks.”
Tate’s political analysis had the tone of a 14-year-old playground bully, but Musk’s excitement at men turning out to vote spoke to something fundamentally true: that Donald Trump’s plan was working. When I first read the tweet, I began searching for evidence that men were indeed turning up in record numbers. On Musk’s platform, X, I was greeted with videos from Philadelphia and Miami of young men wearing red caps celebrating in the streets—pickup trucks tearing down street-lit highways with MAGA flags trailing from their cargo beds. After covering the Manosphere and the hyper-online ‘Bro’ Right for the past five years, I knew that in recent months they had mobilized like never before behind Trump, and that if they were motivated enough to actually go out and vote, Trump had a serious edge.
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Videos began to spread of frat boys across the US declaring their support for Donald Trump. When his victory was announced, one group filmed themselves performing Trump’s dance moves to “Y.M.C.A.” on the steps of their fraternity.
Men aged 18-29—a group that has been politically unengaged in recent years—voted decisively for Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported a shift to the right of 28 points among this group. According to the Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning, 56 percent of young male voters opted for Trump in 2024—a marked increase from 41 percent in 2020. In Trump’s successful courtship of this cohort, his secret weapon appears to have been his 18-year-old son, Barron.
In the early hours of November 6th, Trump took to the stage in West Palm Beach, Florida, to declare victory. The very first people to join Trump in front of the cheering crowds were his wife Melania, and the apple of his eye, Barron. At 6’7”, Barron towered over his father as he smiled at the MAGA loyalists in the audience, some of whom have come to see him as his father’s political heir in recent months. Reportedly his father’s favorite son, what many don’t realize is how crucial Barron may have been in helping his father secure re-election.
When UFC boss Dana White was summoned to the podium by Trump, he thanked a cadre of podcasters and influencers, including his close friend Joe Rogan. There were three other names in that list, however, that show Barron’s hand in Trump’s media strategy—Adin Ross, the Nelk Boys, and Theo Von. The content Trump made with these creators in the run up to the election was viewed hundreds of millions of times, primarily by that key demographic of 18- to 30-year-old men. In Trump’s interview with comedian Theo Von, which has now been viewed by over 14 million people on YouTube alone, Trump tells him: “Your thing is going really great. My son’s a big fan of yours.” But Barron isn’t just a fan of alternative media stars like Theo Von—he’s a friend to some of them, too.
Adin Ross is a 24-year-old American influencer and streamer, whose career highpoints include being the man who sniffed Andrew Tate’s chair after interviewing him, hosting a stream with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, and repeatedly being banned from streaming site Twitch for his use of “hateful slurs or symbols” and “hateful conduct.” In August of this year, Adin Ross and his team set up in the living room of Mar-a-Lago for a livestream with Trump, who began by passing on a “hi” from Barron. At the end of their interview, Trump told Ross: “Barron says, ‘Dad, he’s really big,’ he said, ‘He’s also a friend of mine.’” The pair then exited Mar-a-Lago, whereupon Adin Ross gifted Trump a Rolex and a custom wrapped Cybertruck featuring the image of the returning President raising his fist after being shot in the ear. This inadvertently sparked a debate over whether the gift constituted a campaign finance violation. The clips of Trump and Ross dancing in front of the car went viral.
But Barron’s role in Trump’s media strategy goes beyond just introducing Trump to figures like Adin Ross. Barron and his best friend, fellow 18-year-old Bo Loudon, were tasked by the campaign with helping Trump reach a young male audience. Loudon is a pro-Trump influencer, and son of the conservative media personality Gina Loudon, former co-chair of Women for Trump. Bo and Barron reportedly set up the Adin Ross stream, and Bo has claimed he helped set up Trump’s interview with Joe Rogan, too.
On the day of the election, figures from across the vast and frequently depressing multiverse that is the online ‘Bro right’ gave their ringing endorsements of Donald Trump, and implored their fans to go and vote for him. Upon the announcement of his victory, John Shahidi of the Nelk Boys tweeted: “Idc what anyone says, podcasts helped us win this election.” When the Wall Street Journal reported that ‘Younger Men Voted Decisively for Donald Trump,’ Shahidi reposted it alongside the message, “Shout-out to our entire team!”
A part of Trump’s message that particularly resonated with his young male audience, and the podcast hosts he made appearances with, was his seemingly favorable stance towards cryptocurrencies, and his puzzling claim that Bitcoin will be “made in the USA.” Earlier this year, in Austin, Texas, I interviewed an African-American man who told me he would vote Trump for the first time, almost entirely because of his stance towards crypto.
Trump has hailed his son Barron for showing him the potential of crypto, claiming: “Barron knows so much about this… he knows it inside and out.” When the Trumps launched their own crypto venture World Liberty Financial (WLF) in September this year, a leaked document obtained by CoinDesk listed Barron as its “DeFi [decentralized finance] visionary.” But it appears WLF wasn’t Barron’s first involvement in a crypto project.
Shortly after the Trump-inspired ‘DJT token’ launched in August 2024, its price began to spike when rumors emerged that Trump and his son Barron were behind the project—then the market crashed when a ‘whale’ sold roughly $2million worth of the token. A $150,000 bounty was put out online for whoever could identify the token’s creator, which set off a chain of events that led to the creator outing themselves. It was Martin Shkreli, the comic book villain known for his price gouging of essential medicines, and purchasing the only copy in existence of a rare Wu-Tang Clan album, which he then repeatedly threatened to destroy. There was, however, another twist: Shkreli claimed he was not alone in the project, and that he had indeed created the token with the help of Barron Trump.
Given his track record—including serving a six-and-a-half-year stretch in federal prison for financial crimes—it’s not surprising that many did not believe Shkreli’s claim. But Shkreli was adamant. He claimed he had thousands of pieces of evidence that he created the token with Barron, and he shared one of them: a screenshot with the notorious influencer Andrew Tate. It appears Tate was one of the ‘celebrities’ contacted to promote DJT to his audience, in a bid to ‘pump’ the price of the token. The screenshot showed messages between Shkreli and Tate, in which the manosphere figurehead appeared to confirm Barron’s involvement.
If Shkreli is telling the truth, then Barron Trump isn’t just ushering his father into a media sphere of which he is a fan, but one of which he is an active part. With direct links to figures like Andrew Tate and Adin Ross, Barron has the ability to rally support from them for his father like no child of a candidate before him. Tate has over 10 million (mostly young male followers) on X, and spent election day live-streaming and repeatedly tweeting, telling all his American followers to get out for Trump. His brother Tristan shared the same Wall Street Journal stat as Shahidi before him, claiming a part in the male shift towards Trump.
“It’s men vs gays and chicks.”
I’ve spent the last five years investigating Andrew Tate for a series of documentaries, including one for VICE, as well as a book. Tate and his team have been working towards this kind of election impact for a while. During production, we acquired a tranche of private messages sent between senior ‘War Room’ members, and for the past four years the election has been referred to as an impending “gender war,” where the modern markers of identity politics would fall away, and it would all become a case of men vs women. Young male voters across a wide range of economic and racial backgrounds did vote for Trump, including Hispanic men, who many had expected to turn against him.
The rise of influencers like Tate and Ross aren’t just a symptom of young men shifting to the right, but an active factor that has exacerbated it. The ideology gap is widening between young men and women, not just in America, but all over the world. In the UK there is a 25-point gap between the views of young men and women; in Germany, this rises to 30.
The factors that have led us here are wide-ranging, but in making a concerted effort to reach out to disaffected young men, Trump gained an edge in what is being described as one of the most consequential elections in US history. We saw a similar effect in the UK during the last election, as young men shared their support for Nigel Farage and his Reform Party.
Many of the complaints coming from young men may appear to be misguided. Yet if politicians on the Left do not find a way to reach out to this group, and engage with it where it dwells online, opportunist populists like Trump and Farage most certainly will.
In this election, one of Trump’s strongest weapons appears to have been his gigantic, chronically online 18-year-old son, his best friend Bo, and the ‘Bros’ they swung for Trump.
Clown World, a book on Andrew Tate co-authored by Jamie Tahsin and Matt Shea, is available now through Quercus Books.
