When US senator JD Vance, an Ohio Republican, was rolled out as former president Donald Trump’s running mate last month, the move had several seeming aims. It was a nod to rich supporters like Vance’s patron, Peter Thiel; a way to present the electorate with a more youthful face than Trump’s; and a play for the working-class voters around whom Vance grew up, as he wrote about in his bestselling book Hillbilly Elegy.
All of this was almost immediately undermined when comments Vance made in a 2021 Fox News interview, claiming the country is being run by “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” came to light. There was, it quickly became clear, more where that came from.
Among other things, Vance has suggested that people in “violent” marriages shouldn’t get divorced. In a 2021 interview, Vance criticized abortion exceptions for rape and incest, saying that the unborn fetuses in pregnancies resulting from these situation were seen as “inconvenient.” Vance has said that US representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez had a “sociopathic attitude towards family,” claiming that the New York Democrat said it is “immoral to have children because of climate change concerns.” (She did not say this.) Vance also suggested in a 2021 speech that adults who have children should get extra votes.
“We have to go to war against the anti-child ideology that exists in our country,” Vance told the Federalist in an interview in 2021.
Vance and the Trump campaign have dismissed these remarks as taken out of context, but like many other comments related to women that Vance, Trump, and their allies have made, they do not exist in a vacuum. In fact, they almost perfectly echo the rhetoric of accused rapist and human trafficker Andrew Tate and members of the online misogynist community. (Tate, the most prominent and influential of a group of professional misogynist influencers, has denied the allegations against him.) And the Trump campaign is not just passively repeating the misogynistic talking points of the so-called manosphere, but actively engaging with it to court the votes of isolated young men—a group to which both Trump and Vance have a history of attempting to appeal.
Examples abound. Tate has, for instance, called women who don’t want kids “miserable stupid bitches” while telling the misogynistic Fresh and Fit podcast, in an episode now deleted from its YouTube channel, that “life without children […] is inane and it’s pointless.” He went on: “If you sit here and genuinely think you’re going to work your ass off through your fertile years and by the age of 54, you’re not going to be suicidal, alone with a cat, then you are dumb.”
Trump, for his part, is reported to have repeatedly called Harris a “bitch” in private and has called women “dumb” as well as “crazy” and “low IQ” on multiple occasions. (In the past month alone, Trump has called Harris “low IQ” and “dumb as a rock” at rallies and in social media posts.) Trump once referred to former White House aide Omarosa Manigault Newman as a “crazed, crying lowlife.” He also called her a “dog.”
Tate has repeatedly compared women to dogs, telling Barstool Sports’s Dave Portnoy in an interview in 2022, “You can’t be responsible for something that doesn’t listen to you. You can’t be responsible for a dog if it doesn’t obey you, or a child if it doesn’t obey you, or a woman that doesn’t obey you.” (Portnoy, who is known for his own misogynistic views, responded to Vance’s suggestion that childless adults should pay more in taxes on X: “This is fucking idiotic.”)
“President Trump has empowered women throughout his career as a businessman and in politics, promoting women to senior roles in both his company and campaign,” Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign told WIRED, labeling the premise of this article “outrageous.”
“It’s shocking to see rhetoric typically reserved for the annals of internet forums repeated by some of the most powerful politicians in America,” Nina Jankowicz, the former Biden administration disinformation czar, who is now CEO of the American Sunlight Project, tells WIRED. “Well beyond the presidential race, these sorts of attacks aim to denigrate women and their value as human beings, and aim to encourage women to stay out of politics and public life. They have no place in our politics.”
Of course, it should also be remembered that both Trump and Tate have been accused by multiple women of sexual misconduct. Trump has been found in court to have sexually abused E. Jean Carroll, and just last week Romanian authorities opened another investigation into Tate in relation to accusations of trafficking women as young as 15.
Trump and Tate appear to be aligned on another subject: porn.
Tate, who is facing allegations of sexually exploiting women by forcing them to make pornographic videos for financial gain, has long railed against what he sees as the evils of pornography.
“As masculinity has plummeted, a whole bunch of men are simply not having sex anymore, and then they become addicted to porn, which is cucking, effectively,” Tate told Tucker Carlson in an interview last year. “Two people are having sex and you’re just watching it.”
Should Trump succeed in retaking the White House in November’s election, he could seek to criminalize porn, according to the 922-page Project 2025 document that outlines plans for a second Trump term. (While Trump has disavowed the document, it is the product of his allies and of former Trump administration officials. One of the report’s authors, Russell Vought, told undercover journalists from the Centre for Climate Reporting in a meeting earlier this month that Trump’s efforts to distance himself from Project 2025 were just “graduate-level politics.” Vance also wrote a foreword to a since-postponed book written by Project 2025’s architect, Kevin Roberts.)
“Their product is as addictive as any illicit drug and as psychologically destructive as any crime,” Roberts, the president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation, writes of pornographers in the document. “Pornography should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned. Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
The links between Trump, Vance, and figures like Tate and the virulently toxic incel community appear to be, at least in part, strategic.
As Trump’s own campaign managers have outlined his strategy, “secluded, MAGA-sympathetic voters who have proved difficult to engage,” as The Atlantic put it, are one of the campaign’s primary messaging targets.
To that end, a pro-Trump PAC has launched a $20 million campaign to reach young voters that was kicked off with Vance’s appearance on the Full Send Podcast hosted by the Nelk Boys, a group of four men who have a huge following among young conservative males.
The Nelk Boys have in the past hosted Tate as well as Nico Kenn De Balinthazy, another far-right influencer better known as Sneako. De Balinthazy has fantasized about being allowed to hit women as men were 50 years ago. In one video uploaded to TikTok, he was caught on camera hitting a woman and responding that she had “been acting up all night.”
On their podcast, the Nelk Boys have repeatedly defended the misogynistic rhetoric espoused by both Tate and De Balinthazy.
Trump has been interviewed several times by the Nelk Boys, labeling their work “important,” and was recently pictured alongside Sneako at an MMA event.
Trump also was recently interviewed by streamer Adin Ross, an ally of Tate’s who infamously inadvertently tipped off authorities about Tate’s plans to flee Romania. He was also kicked off Twitch for showing “unmoderated hateful conduct” in a chat and hosting the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. During the interview, Ross gifted Trump with a gaudily-wrapped Tesla Cybertruck and a Rolex, which some experts say may have violated campaign finance rules.
Trump’s misogynistic worldview has bled into other areas of conservative politics, too.
Even before Kamala Harris officially replaced President Joe Biden as the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee, the right was demonizing her as a “DEI hire” —a phrase Tate has used to criticize women in the past.
Prominent right-wing media figures have similarly made numerous misogynistic comments in recent months. In April, Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk blamed birth control for creating “very angry and bitter young ladies” and falsely claimed that the medication “screws up the female brain.” Alec Lace, a regular Fox Business contributor, appeared on the station last month and felt it was OK to call Harris the “original Hawk Tuah girl, that’s the way she got where she is” before adding that she is a “DEI vice president.” And just last month, Fox News prime time host Jesse Watters claimed: “When a man votes for a woman, he actually transitions into a woman.”
At the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee last month, the speaker list featured Dana White, who was caught on camera slapping his wife, and Hulk Hogan, who has been accused of physically abusing his wife. (Hogan filed a defamation suit over the claims but asked the court to dismiss it five months later.) It also included a number of conservative figures who have sought to blame the victims of sexual assault, such as David Sacks and Mark Robinson. The speakers also included Representative Matt Gaetz, the Florida lawmaker who has been investigated but not charged by the Department of Justice for allegations of being part of a scheme to traffic a 17-year-old woman.
“Women who know and work for President Trump personally, like myself, know he is encouraging and generous to the women around him,” says Leavitt, the Trump spokesperson. “Most importantly, President Trump’s policies as president uplifted women across the country because they brought down the cost of living and made our communities safer.”
