Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced that UFC President Dana White would become his press secretary. The American president hoped that the creator of Power Slap, a slapping league that one of the world’s greatest neurologists describes as “a sport incompatible with human intelligence”, would be the ideal man to refute his remarks daily to the media.
Trump later walked back his nomination, saying he was “just joking,” but it’s easy to see why he might crave White’s muscles, trash talk and lust for athleticism. violence. White is representative of how Trump has transcended politics in 2024 to become a celebrated figure in the manosphere, the loosely defined group of male content creators who have a direct connection to bored and aggrieved young American men. On election night in 2024, White stood at the victory podium and read “thank you” to the once-heterodox podcast bros who came out for Trump: “the Nelk Boys, Adin Ross, Theo Von, Bussin’ With The Boys, and last but not least, the mighty, mighty Joe Rogan.” Trump ended up winning 63% of young white men that night, unheard of for a Republican politician.
Two years later, it’s a different story. Republicans lost a lot of young white men in the 2026 midterm elections: only 43% voted for a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives. So what went wrong? Has the manosphere lost its ability to convince young voters, or have its most influential figures simply lost faith in Trump?
Analysts may debate the precise contours of the manosphere, but its incarnation in 2024 emerged from the alignment of three existing groups: the far-right Maga media universe of Tucker Carlson, Shawn Ryan, and Dan Bongino; the mainstream “broadcast” comedy world dominated by the likes of Rogan, Theo Von, the Nelk Boys, Tim Dillon and Andrew Schulz; and a darker, overtly misogynistic online underworld led by Andrew Tate, Sneako and Nick Fuentes. Together, these factions combined to stoke men’s grievances with gay jokes, casual racism, and rape apologia. They have also normalized or openly defended Maga politics with their programs, although some, like Fuentes, have also criticized Trump for not being far-right enough.
After Trump’s election, the manosphere relished its own growing cultural influence. Tony Hinchcliffe, who declared Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage” at a 2024 Trump rally, has landed a huge deal with Netflix for his comedy series Kill Tony. Rogan and Von had the two most popular podcasts in the United States (of Rogan’s last 50 guests, 49 were men). The Nelk Boys, who before their support for Trump were best known for YouTube videos like Farting in a Black barbershop prank!, were granted an interview with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, almost two years after the start of his genocide in Gaza.
Fuentes did not vote for Trump, because he said Trump “belongs to the Jews.” He nonetheless celebrated Trump’s victory by tweeting “your body, my choice,” a grotesque inversion of the pro-choice slogan that signaled the expectation of systemic subjugation of women. Since then, sections of Republican youth groups on American college campuses have been taken over by Fuentes-affiliated “Groypers” who preach a more virulent, pro-misogyny, ethnonationalist anti-Semite than even Maga. And Fuentes’ channels have generated increasingly large donations, according to the Washington Post.
But as Trump’s popularity waned, particularly as public opinion shifted regarding Israel’s war in Gaza, and after the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran, the manosphere’s enthusiasm for him also increased. Voices such as Carlson and Fuentes were openly critical of the president. Von said in April that Trump’s policy toward Iran was “fucking confusing” and suggested he had been compromised by Israel’s “dark government.”
Mariel Barnes, an assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs who studies manosphere spaces, says some podcasters were opposed to the Iran war for an unexpected reason. “They immediately started talking about conscription, which has no basis in fact,” Barnes said. “The United States will not implement the draft to fight a war against Iran, but the manosphere has always viewed the draft as deeply unfair because it doesn’t recruit women. And they hate that.”
As the midterms approached and Trump’s unpopularity deepened, some podcasters stopped talking about him much: Media Matters for America’s analysis of nine manosphere podcasts that hosted Trump or JD Vance in 2024, including those of Rogan and Von, found that mentions of Trump fell from an average of 35 per podcast episode in early 2026, to just five mentions in the weeks leading up to the midterms (and most of the mentions came from the Patrick Bet-David podcast, which is more hardcore Maga than shows like Rogan’s). On the comedy side, these voices ditched politics and started talking about pop culture and sports again.
But Seth Simons, who analyzes comedy’s right-wing bias in his Substack, Humorism, says some things remain the same.
“It’s true that a lot of these guys have stopped talking about Trump, but they haven’t given up on the politics that led them to Trump in the first place,” Simons said via email. “The other week, Andrew Schulz praised Nayib Bukele, the Salvadoran dictator, for his policy of mass incarceration. In his Patreon episode in response to the midterm elections this week, Tim Dillon wished Trump would pursue a “smart” immigration policy, essentially ignoring the ICE theaters and simply deporting “the 10 million people who arrived under Biden.”
What changed was that “these guys correctly detected that Trump is not cool more,” Simons continued. “They will happily rally behind a Republican candidate without the baggage of Trump.”
Trump is no longer their male candidate either. Despite attempts to feminize Democrats in the midterms, calling them “low-T” (as in testosterone) or “trans,” it seems that the manosphere no longer views Trump as butch now that his candidates have lost. The day after the midterm elections, Carlson told his listeners: “A lot of men who voted for Trump two years ago imagined him to be a strong, masculine leader. But then… here’s a vain, venal, indecisive guy… he’s more like a bitchy old woman than an alpha male.” In the darkest corners of the manosphere, the revulsion was even more evident. The far-right Christian podcast NXR announced, for example: “Maga is dead, Maga is gay… Maga is effeminate, Maga is for losers. »
Trump, perhaps insecure, had attempted to recruit Dana White as his press secretary, hoping for a testosterone injection to bolster his flagging popularity. When that didn’t work, Stephen Miller, newly named White House chief of staff, told aides that he was going to make the return of young men to Maga the goal of his term, according to Axios.
More explicitly political manosphere podcasters such as Bet-David, Gerry Callahan and Steven Crowder are already reflecting on their post-Trump careers. In the days following the midterm elections, they congratulated a man who had succeeded in his election while remaining faithful to the anti-woke cause: Florida Governor Ron DeSantis.
The manosphere continues
Will anyone care about the manosphere between now and the 2028 elections? Because not only have podcasters soured on Trump, but it seems the public has soured on them as well. Since 2024, Rogan’s favorable rating among young men has fallen by 11 points, Carlson’s by 12 points and Tate’s by 30 points, according to a Sam Project study.
John Della Vope, director of youth polling firm SocialSphere, told Puck that research suggested that because brocasters had “endorsed and sort of poured grist for Trump and said ‘trust us,'” they were now tied to his agenda. But exit polls suggest young men are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the economy, health care and war. So, Vope argues, as they became disillusioned with Trump, they felt betrayed by the people who vouched for him: “and a year later, each of these figures has a little less influence among young people.”
Similarly, a July New York Times analysis of the audience of Maga media creators through YouTube, Rumble,
However, according to Barnes, it is a misunderstanding to say that the manosphere is losing its influence, especially as the economy remains precarious for young people. “The manosphere existed before Trump was elected, it existed independently of Donald Trump and although Maga has been very successful in attracting these kinds of disaffected men, it will continue without Trump,” she said. “Manosphere participants want to know: ‘What will make things better for men?’ » and also “what will harm women?” » These are ideas that can arise at any time.
Perhaps the most revealing analysis came from David Sacks, a venture capitalist and former Trump AI czar, on the All-In podcast. During his mea culpa over the completely wrong prediction of the outcome of the midterm elections, Sacks said: “The Republicans depend on the podcast circuit, and we lost all the podcast brothers…frankly, we should have done a better job of giving them all front-row seats. I think our side needs to pay a lot of attention to them because without them, we don’t have a media.” If it is to be believed, Maga needs the manosphere much more than the manosphere needs Maga.
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