During Donald Trump’s raucous victory party on Tuesday in West Palm Beach, Florida, a fired-up Dana White, president of the wildly popular UFC fighting league, approached the microphone to thank the people who made the Republican’s dominant win possible.
After praising Trump as one of “the most resilient, hardworking men I’ve ever met in my life,” White said, “I wanna thank the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, ‘Bussin with the Boys,’ and last but not least, the mighty and powerful Joe Rogan!”
You’d be forgiven for not knowing who some of these men are, but, if you’re the Democratic party, you ignore them at your peril: this collection of edgy alternative podcasters, social media influencers, and comedians are part of the “manosphere” that may have helped win Donald Trump the election.
According to Associated Press exit polling, Donald Trump decisively won the male vote, with 52 percent support among 18 to 44-year-olds, and 56 percent backing among those 45+. That’s a major flip from 2020, when Joe Biden at least managed to pull a slim majority of young and early middle-age men, drawing on Democrats’ typical popularity with younger people.
Trump did even better with non-college-graduate white men, earning more than two-thirds of their vote, according to The Washington Post. He also made major gains among Latino men, surprising Democratic leaders who assumed Trump’s repeated demonization of immigrant communities might ward off their support.
There were plenty of other influences on the ballot outside of gender-related concerns, of course, from the economy to the border to the war in Gaza, but gender certainly seems to have been a key influence.
To reach this army of male voters, Trump met them where they increasingly spend their time: online, listening to podcasts and watching content creators. It meant an enormous audience of eyeballs were suddenly plugged into his campaign.
The Nelk Boys have over 8 million followers on YouTube. ‘Bussin with the Boys’ is part of the Barstool Sports network, the often politically incorrect, culturally if not politically conservative, online sports and culture juggernaut. Von and Rogan’s podcasts together have something like 18 million subscribers, not to mention the countless others who saw highlights of both men’s late-campaign Trump interviews packaged into viral clips.
Trump, despite what might be his vulnerabilities in another election—his historic criminal conviction, his serial lying and speculation, his unpredictable behavior, his open embrace of fascist ideas and alleged praise of Hitler—seems to have done little to harm his credibility with the men in these online spaces. In fact, some of those same qualities made him a perfect fit.
The Republican has the gift of gab. The same rambling, politically incorrect style that makes him difficult to cover in print and fact-check in real-time is a perfect fit for the multi-hour bro sessions that are increasingly found on top podcasts and livestreams.
For an online right obsessed with cancel culture, and deeply aggrieved by efforts to increase diversity, equity, inclusion and multicultural acceptance, they may have found in Trump a man who was able to say anything he wanted to about anyone and get away with it, from falsely accusing Haitian immigrants of eating neighborhood pets during his debate with Harris, to demonizing transgender “insanity”, to opening his Madison Square Garden rally with an insult comic who called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” and made racist remarks about Latinos and Black people.
For the part of the manosphere that’s obsessed with money, entrepreneurship, and cryptocurrency, Trump is a billionaire who aggressively courted the crypto vote and backed a cryptocurrency of his own, despite once calling such products a “scam.”
He selected a former Silicon Valley venture capitalist who demonized “childless cat ladies” on the left as his vice president. He won the support of Elon Musk, a fellow right-wing billionaire with an online legion of male fans, as well as top venture capitalists like Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz.
Online betting markets, meanwhile, many of which use crypto, were hugely bullish on Trump for months even as polls showed a narrow Harris win.
And for the online manosphere’s more right-wing, conspiratorial corners, the countless shows on the right-wing video service Rumble and lesser-known podcasts where hosts see George Soros lurking behind every corner and disinformation flourishes, Trump provided plenty of red meat for them to chew on, too.
During the 2024 campaign, he leaned even further into fascist rhetoric about immigrants during his rallies, spreading false stories like the Haitian scandal and claiming that migrants are bringing crime, drugs, and “destroying the blood of our country.”
And Trump aligned his campaign with that of independent Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a well-known skeptic of commonly accepted public health measures like vaccines.
Kennedy, who eventually dropped out of the race and endorsed Trump, is seen as a likely appointee to the new administration, and has suggested he will follow through on the kinds of priorities conspiracy theorists have long sought, such as ending fluoridation in the water and wiping out large portions of the Food and Drug Administration.
All of this combined so that on Election Night, Trump and his allies were clearly counting on a surge in male votes.
As Musk wrote on Tuesday evening, “The cavalry has arrived. Men are voting in record numbers. They now realize everything is at stake.”
Musk also shared an image neatly summing up this emergent coalition, showing Trump, White, and himself huddling at a banquet table, as a massive screen tuned to CNN behind them showed Trump’s electoral votes piling up.
It’s hard to ignore the flip side of all this manosphere-centricity. American voters, again presented with the chance to elect their first female president, decided otherwise, in resounding fashion. Trump was the first Republican to win the popular vote alongside the Electoral College since George W. Bush in 2004.
The result was all the more striking because Trump was instrumental in installing the Supreme Court justices who ended federal constitutional protections for abortion, a fact the Harris campaign made a central part of its pitch to voters.
Moreover, it’s hard to find another candidate with a worse record towards the women in his own life. Trump has been recorded bragging (he says in jest) about sexually assaulting women, found liable of sexual abuse, associated socially with the serial pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and has been accused by scores of women of sexual misconduct.
After the race, many on the left concluded that, all else aside, a deep-seated misogyny helped explain Harris’s loss.
Whatever the case may be, people will surely be talking about it, at length, with dodgy information, outrageous language, and millions of pumped-up followers on the manosphere.
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