‘Maga is dead, Maga is effeminate’: why has the manosphere rejected Trump?

Earlier this week, Donald Trump announced that the UFC president, Dana White, was to become his press secretary. The US president hoped the creator of Power Slap, a face-slapping league which one of the world’s leading neurologists called “a sport inconsistent with the intelligence of humans”, might be the right man to deliver his daily rebuttals to the media.

Trump later backtracked on the appointment, saying he was “only kidding”, yet it is easy to understand why he might be pining for White’s muscles, trash talk and thirst for athletic violence. White is representative of the way Trump transcended politics in 2024 to become a celebrated figure in the manosphere, the loosely defined cluster of male content creators who have a direct line to America’s bored and aggrieved young men. On the night of the 2024 election, White stood at the victory podium reading out “thank yous” to the formerly 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 and powerful 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 young white men badly in the 2026 midterms: only 43% voted for a Republican US House candidate. So what went wrong? Did the manosphere lose its ability to persuade young voters, or did its most influential figures simply lose faith in Trump?

Analysts may debate the precise contours of the manosphere, but its 2024 incarnation emerged from the alignment of three existing groups: the hard-right Maga media universe of Tucker Carlson, Shawn Ryan and Dan Bongino; the mainstream “brocast” comedy world dominated by figures like 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 allied to stoke male grievance with gay jokes, casual racism and rape apologia. They also normalised or openly championed Maga politics with their platforms, even if some like Fuentes also criticised Trump for not being far-right enough.

After Trump was elected, the manosphere relished in its own soaring cultural influence. Tony Hinchcliffe, who said that Puerto Rico was a “floating island of garbage” during a 2024 Trump rally, landed a huge Netflix deal for his Kill Tony comedy show. Rogan and Von had the two most popular podcasts in the US (out of Rogan’s last 50 guests, 49 have been men). The Nelk Boys, who prior to their support of Trump were best known for YouTube videos like Farting in a Black barbershop prank!, scored an interview with the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, almost two years into his genocide in Gaza.

Fuentes didn’t vote for Trump, because he said Trump was “owned by the Jews”. Nevertheless he celebrated Trump’s win by tweeting “your body my choice”, a grotesque inversion of the pro-choice slogan that signaled an expectation of systemic subjugation of women. Since then, chapters of young Republican groups at US college campuses have been taken over by Fuentes-affiliated “Groypers” who preach a more virulent antisemitic, pro-misogyny, ethnonationalism than even Maga. And Fuentes’s channels have brought in progressively bigger donations, according to the Washington Post.

But as Trump’s popularity waned, especially as the public mood shifted on Israel’s war on Gaza, and after the US-Israel war in Iran began, so did the manosphere’s infatuation with him. Voices such as Carlson and Fuentes were openly critical of the president. Von said in April that Trump’s policies around Iran were “fucking baffling” and suggested he had been compromised by the “dark government” in Israel.

Mariel Barnes, assistant professor at the La Follette School of Public Affairs who researches manosphere spaces, says that some podcasters were opposed to the Iran War for one unexpected reason. “They immediately began talking about conscription, which has no basis in fact,” Barnes said. “The US is not going to implement the draft to fight a war with Iran, but the manosphere has always seen the draft as deeply inequitable because it doesn’t draft women. And they hate that.”

As the midterms approached and Trump’s unpopularity deepened, some podcasters stopped talking about him much at all: analysis by Media Matters for America of nine manosphere podcasts that hosted Trump or JD Vance in 2024, including Rogan’s and Von’s, found that mentions of Trump dropped off from an average of 35 per podcast episode at the start of 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 of things, these voices abandoned politics and went back to talking about pop culture and sports.

But Seth Simons, who analyses comedy’s rightwing bent on his Substack, Humorism, says some things remain unchanged.

“It’s true that a lot of these guys have stopped talking about Trump, but they haven’t abandoned the politics that led them to Trump in the first place,” Simons said via email. “Just the other week Andrew Schulz praised Nayib Bukele, the Salvadorian dictator, for his mass incarceration policies. In his Patreon-only episode reacting to the midterms this week, Tim Dillon wished that Trump had pursued a “smart” immigration policy, basically skipping the ICE theatrics and simply deporting “the 10 million people that came in under Biden”.

What has changed is that “these guys have correctly detected that Trump isn’t cool any more”, Simons continued. “They’ll happily rally behind a GOP candidate free of Trump’s baggage.”

Trump is not their masculine candidate any more, either. Despite attempts to feminise Democrats in the midterms, calling them “low-T” (as in testosterone) or “trans”, it seems the manosphere no longer sees Trump as butch now that his candidates lost. The day after the midterms, Carlson told his listeners: “a lot of men who voted for Trump two years ago imagined that this was a masculine, vigorous leader. But then … here’s a guy who’s vain and venal and indecisive … he seems more like a bitchy old woman than an alpha male.” In the darker corners of the manosphere, the repulsion was even more evident. The far-right Christian podcast NXR, for example, announced: “Maga is dead, Maga is gay … Maga is effeminate, Maga is for losers.”

Trump, perhaps insecure, had tried to tap Dana White for press secretary, hoping for an injection of testosterone to boost his flagging popularity. When that didn’t work, Stephen Miller, newly appointed White House Chief of Staff, told aides that he was going to make getting young men back to Maga the focus of his tenure, according to Axios.

The more explicitly political manosphere podcasters such as Bet-David, Gerry Callahan and Steven Crowder are already thinking about their post-Trump careers. In the days after the midterms they praised one man who had managed electoral success while staying true to the anti-woke cause: Florida’s governor, Ron DeSantis.

The manosphere lives on

Will anyone care about the manosphere by the 2028 election? Because not only have podcasters soured on Trump, there is also a suggestion that audiences are souring on them. Since 2024 Rogan’s favorable rating among young men dropped by 11 points, Carlson’s by 12 points and Tate’s by 30 points, according to research by the Sam project.

John Della Vope, the director of the youth-polling firm SocialSphere, told Puck the research suggested that because the brocasters had “endorsed and basically kind of carried water for Trump and said, ‘trust us’”, they were now tied to his agenda. But exit polling suggests young men are unhappy with Trump’s handling of the economy, healthcare and the war. And so, Vope posits, as they grew disillusioned with Trump they felt betrayed by the people who vouched for him, “and a year later each of those figures has a little bit less influence among younger people”.

Likewise, a July New York Times analysis of listenership to Maga media creators via YouTube, Rumble, X and podcasts found that all saw significant audience drop-off across platforms since 2024. (The Times’ Maga media cohort included manosphere voices like Fuentes and Crowder as well as more traditional rightwing hosts such as Megyn Kelly and Ben Shapiro.)

However, Barnes says it’s a misunderstanding to say the manosphere is losing influence, especially as the economy remains precarious for young people. “The manosphere existed before Trump got elected, it has existed independently of Donald Trump and while Maga were very successful in appealing to those kind of disaffected men, it will go on without Trump,” she said. “Manosphere participants want to know, ‘what’s going to make this better for men?’ and also ‘what is going to hurt women?’ Those are ideas that can ignite at any time.”

Perhaps the most telling analysis came from David Sacks, a venture capitalist and Trump’s former AI czar, on the All-In podcast. During his mea culpa on predicting the midterm election result completely wrong, Sacks said: “The Republicans are dependent on the podcast circuit, and we lost all the podcast bros … frankly we should have done a better job giving them all front row seats. I think our side has to pay a lot of attention to them because without them, we don’t have any media.” If he’s to be believed, Maga needs the manosphere a lot more than the manosphere needs Maga.