When Donald Trump won the 2024 presidential election, one of the factors in his narrow victory was the Manosphere — an assortment of anti-feminist groups and influencers known for their intense disdain for political correctness and “woke” ideology. But according Democratic insider Sidney Blumental, a former adviser to Bill and Hillary Clinton, many Manosphere influencers that helped propel him to victory are now turning against him.
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Blumenthal, writing for The New Republic, explains, “The Manosphere emerged in the 2024 campaign as an innovative component at the center of Trump’s political machine — a network of podcasters, influencers, and shock jocks serving as a pipeline to young men, exploiting their social and economic anxieties, particularly by targeting them with crude misogynist messages serving as vicarious defiance against an oppressive, woke feminist culture…. It became instant conventional wisdom that the bros’ allegiance to Trump would be a permanent factor in American politics for a generation or more to come.”
President Trump’s son Barron Trump, Blumental notes, aggressively courted the Manosphere.
Blumental points to podcaster Joe Rogan as a key example of Trump’s growing problems with the Manosphere. Rogan was an enthusiastic Trump supporter in 2024, but now, he is a frequent critic who has lambasted the president on everything from the Jeffrey Epstein files to immigration raids to the war in Iran.
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“Trump’s Iran war has shattered the once-awestruck projection of him as the invulnerable alpha male,” the former Clintons adviser observes. “‘There’s no one like that guy,’ said Joe Rogan. ‘It’s the only reason why he survived all the s– – they tried to put him through.’ Now, symptomatic of the breakdown of Trump’s once-seemingly granitic support along generational and ideological lines, Rogan calls the war ‘crazy,’ ‘insane,’ ‘nuts’; says Trump has ‘betrayed’ his followers, and that Trump is blithering along with ‘no clear way to resolve this at all.’ Trump has gone haywire. He is the arsonist igniting the bonfire of the Manosphere.”
Blumental notes that “for many of the Manosphere performers,” the Iran war “was the decisive event that shifted their tone from adulation to betrayal.”
“If the Republicans lose the midterm elections, in part having alienated the constituency that returned Trump to the White House, the Manosphere will become the subject of an intense congressional investigation,” Blumental writes. “Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari of Arizona, who sits on the House Oversight Committee, sent a letter to the Republican Chairman James Comer requesting a formal probe and specifically subpoenas of communications from the Department of Justice, the State Department, the White House — and, by name, Barron Trump.”
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