The three tribes of MAGA men Jocks, dorks and bullies rule the White House

In 1989 David Duke, former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan, was elected to Louisiana’s house of representatives. At college, he had marched around campus in a Nazi uniform; by the time he was running the Klan in the Seventies, he was enforcing besuited respectability on the white-supremacist group’s members. He banned them from using the n-word in front of the press, and was careful to be seen in the clothes of an aspiring politician rather than the white robes of a Klansman. He also admitted women. When he won office, the Los Angeles Times wrote that Duke, then 38, had “humbled the media by putting distance between himself and ideas he had advocated for 20 years”. Its horrified report of his election concluded: “Duke, with his blond hair, dark moustache and articulate delivery, was as cool as the other side of the pillow — a perfect media candidate.”

Duke’s election was an embarrassment for the Republican Party and was viciously opposed by its mainstream members. He had, however, successfully co-opted the aesthetics of that mainstream. Now, this dynamic is at play in the Republican Party once more, except this time those in power have discovered an unprecedented tolerance for extremists. Duke was quickly hustled out of political life, the centrist machinery cranking up to eliminate a poisonous anomaly. But in Donald Trump’s second term, the courting of those with extremist views has become not only accepted, but an asset.

The ultras need not hide anymore. Americans have surpassed the age of the “perfect media candidate”, of crisp suits and Persilschein; what they want now is a firecracker whose madness and badness is well and truly on display. This is how they ended up with the leader of a government department doing a Nazi salute, something Duke would never have dared — but with this new crop of Republican livewires, the volatility is the point.

Duke’s ascension had much to do with race — he stood in the dystopian-sounding District 81, where 99.6% of the population was white and many resented the black population of nearby New Orleans. Trump, conversely, was elected by a broad sweep of Americans, surprising commentators with his victory across racial lines. This time around the biggest zealots are the misogynists, and the divide is between men and women.

So much of MAGA is about reclaiming masculinity, dusting off a Mussolini-esque credo of virility crumpled by decades of feminisation. In practice, the population of the White House mirrors the generic high school cafeteria. Trump’s MAGA superpower is based on his embrace of three distinct “crowds”: the jocks, the nerds and the bullies. These are no easy alliances: Trump himself represents that first class, the winking American patriarch surrounded by blonde women and strapping men. His brand of masculinity is a departure from the patrician, family-man Reaganism; here is a president known, to put it generously, for his red-bloodedness, who has been caught on hot mic bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”, and who told an Apprentice candidate that her offer to drop to her knees to beg judges would “be a pretty picture”. His is a Seventies sleaziness, that of an executive who gooses secretaries — and despite his advancing years and, well, job title, it shines through undimmed. So it is that he compliments Britain’s prime minister on his “beautiful wife”, adding that he is “very impressed” by Victoria Starmer. Props, dude — how’d you bag that! Trump, you see, is the quintessential jock.

But even jocks must sometimes associate with nerds. For the freakish excrescences of Silicon Valley, Elon Musk and his teen hacker henchmen at DOGE, have proved generally useful to Trump. These unsexy, unslick, and unelected neurodivirgins are the alleged brains behind the operation. But perhaps these bucktoothed mathletes might fail at slashing departmental spending. They might instead make a complete hash of it, as happened during Musk’s toe-curling admission that DOGE had “accidentally cancelled” Ebola prevention initiatives as part of USAID cuts. But Trump’s assumptions about Musk within the mythos of the American high school make sense: accounts of Musk’s actual schooldays draw him as a member of the chess team, thrown down staircases by popular kids, put in hospital by the beatings of bullies. He makes a strange bedfellow of the macho MAGA crowd, one might think — but his presence makes sense when seen through the lens of Trumpian masculinity.

Burnished by their sudden importance as titans of social media, the nerds can for the first time bag all the babes and kudos they might once have dreamed of. Musk, a pronatalist father-of-14 with a herd of babymamas, has been linked to Talulah Riley, Grimes, Amber Heard and many more besides. His first wife, Justine, wrote in 2010 that she had been his “starter wife”; he told her, on their wedding day, that he would be the “alpha” in their relationship, and later that if she was his employee, he’d sack her. He banned teddy bears for his sons once they turned seven, and later on, he fathered twins with a mutual friend while the surrogate (who else?) was pregnant with his and Grimes’s third baby.

But he is no Andrew Tate; if manipulative, he is not honest about it, and this is no harem. Tate would not be caught telling an interviewer he was a “fool for love”. Instead, Musk is a romantic technocrat — that aforementioned mutual friend was not a lover but a woman, Shivon Zilis, in need of a sperm donor; “He really wants smart people to have kids, so he encouraged me to,” she told Musk’s biographer. “I can’t possibly think of genes I would prefer for my children.” Though Musk’s borderline incontinent fecundity might seem threatening to the conventional American family — modelled by Vice President JD Vance — it also helps his case as a nerd doing the popular kids’ homework.

On Trump’s other flank are the school bullies, of whom Andrew Tate is surely the meanest. Tate and his brother Tristan flew to Florida on 27 February after being released from house arrest in Romania, where they are accused of human trafficking, with Andrew also accused of rape. A video of a 25-year-old Andrew which purports to show him whipping and sexually abusing a girl — reports about her age vary — has resurfaced on X since his arrival in America; outrage has been expressed, but nothing, predictably, has been done about it. Tate’s MAGA links go way back: Musk restored his banned X account upon taking over the website in 2022; Trump’s son Donald Jr has referred to the brothers’ Romanian arrest as “absolute insanity”; the Tates’ lawyer responded to a question about whether the President had personally helped in their release by saying: “Do the math. These guys are on the plane.”

The Trump administration’s covert courting of the Tates is not just about them. It’s about a vision of violent masculinity — specifically of the self-made man, who climbs to the top on a pile of women’s bodies. The Tates embody this aspirational misogyny. Trump’s own track record has been conveniently forgotten, but let’s not forget that he has himself been found guilty of sexual assault. His defence secretary, Pete Hegseth, agreed a financial settlement with a woman who accused him of rape in 2017; Trump’s initial choice for attorney general, Matt Gaetz, was alleged to have “regularly” solicited prostitution, including from an underaged girl.

These are not coincidences: yes, gross men like company — but the implicit sanctioning of woman-hatred and abuse under the guise of swaggering machismo holds appeal for a generation of disenfranchised young men who feel hard done by with feminism and who split the Gen Z vote in November. These boys live in the ambient world of the podcast bro, with which Barron Trump encouraged his father to engage during his campaign. Almost all of the MAGA men, including Trump, Musk, and Tucker Carlson, have appeared, for instance, on the “Nelk Boys’” Full Send podcast, a prank channel-turned-Right-wing commentary hub. The show had Andrew Tate on last week, who bragged that “I would be in a jail right now” if Trump hadn’t won.

Just like David Duke, bringing in Tate from the cold legitimises repressed hatreds in voters, who feel vindicated in their resentment of a group (then, black people and Jews; now, women) by the presence of someone who has acted on that resentment in the most explicit and baroque way possible before shaking hands and smiling with the mainstream once more. Duke’s election is now looked upon as a dark period for the Republican Party; the MAGA associations with Sieg-Heiling Silicon Valley dork Musk and probable sex trafficker Tate may one day be viewed in the same way.

The alliance between the jocks, nerds and bullies of Trump’s new court may prove shaky. Elon Musk and Andrew Tate are dynamic disruptors of the type often seen in the early, anarchic stages of authoritarian regimes. But though united by “alpha” compulsions and trails of victimised women, they are not a natural union by any means. Either should expect a long knife in his back when he is no longer useful to Trump.

Until then, we must settle for the fact that we have lowered the accepted standards of public life beyond comparison, in service of a vision of masculinity which we know is already having real-life, and often fatal, consequences for women. The most frightening thing about this new crop of Trump-supporting men is that, rather than burying their radicalism in suits and euphemisms, they flaunt it — dog whistles have become overt provocations. MAGA machismo is about the spectacle of chaos and domination, a truly fascist vision of man. These acolytes’ raw unpredictability is their strength: it means nobody can look away.

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