Donald Trump Courts the Manoverse

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Donald Trump Courts the Manoverse

On a sweltering Saturday in the suburbs of Las Vegas, inside a cool casino miles from the Strip, about 100 people lined up to see the Nelk Boys. Most of the fans were young men, in their 20s, there to meet their favorite crew of

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pranksters and podcasters. Two young women, in short shorts and tight tanks, handed out Happy Dad hard seltzers, part of the Nelk Boys’ growing line of merchandise.

Hours later, the Nelk Boys were inside a packed T-Mobile Arena, in the heart of the city, as Dana White, the chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, welcomed a sellout crowd to the latest U.F.C. event. Donald Trump Jr. was sitting cageside.

About two weeks later, Mr. White introduced former President Donald J. Trump at the *********** National Convention, where Senator JD Vance of Ohio was announced as Mr. Trump’s running mate. The Nelk Boys popped up there, too. Soon, they interviewed Mr. Vance on their Full Send podcast.

These repeated collisions of testosterone-fueled orbits are a campaign strategy, not a coincidence.

At a time of an immense gender gap in politics among young people — women leaning left, men leaning right — the Trump campaign has been aggressively courting what might be called the bro vote, the frat-boy flank. It’s a slice of 18-to-29-year-olds that has long been regarded as unreliable and unreachable, but that Republicans believe may just swing the election this year.

To find them, Mr. Trump and his allies have been exploring deep into the universe — a manoverse — of social media stars with male-centric audiences: the Nelk Boys, Mr. White and U.F.C., Dave Portnoy and his Barstool Sports media network, YouTubers like Jake and Logan Paul, podcasters like Theo Von and streamers like Adin Ross.

These figures have become a generation’s Hannity, Carlson and Limbaugh, but without the obvious political shroud. They are just guys having a good time, talking about sports, gambling, partying — and, more than ever, presidential politics.

The Nelk Boys have played golf with Mr. Trump, been on Air Force One and visited Mar-a-Lago. They have had the former president on their podcast twice. They are sometimes mentioned by him in his stump speeches — a reference that is likely to go over the heads of older attendees, but not over those of the young men in the audience.

“I feel like we need you back right now,” Kyle Forgeard, the 30-year-old public face of the Nelk Boys, told Mr. Trump near the start of an on-camera interview in 2023. “Like, we need you back in office.”

Mr. Trump, unencumbered by filter or rebuttal, riffed on the folly of windmills and electric cars, on the “invasion” of foreign castoffs from “insane asylums,” on Hannibal Lecter, on U.F.O.s, on President Vladimir V. ****** of Russia and Kim Jong-un of North Korea, on the prospect of nuclear war. And on Democrats.

“It’s almost as if they truly hate our country,” Mr. Trump said.

Mr. Forgeard and Aaron Steinberg, the two members of the Nelk Boys who conducted the interview, nodded along. After Mr. Trump left, they and a supporting crew laughed and hugged one another, seemingly tickled by proximity and access.

Maybe you did not hear the podcast or see it on

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. Perhaps you have never heard of the Nelk Boys, or the Paul brothers or Mr. Portnoy.

But millions of others have. Most of them are young men who might vote and if they do, might have a major influence on who wins.

The Bro Vote

In the college town of Bozeman, Mont., thousands of people in Trump T-shirts and hats lined up to enter a rally for the former president on Aug. 9. Many of them were young men. And most flashed smiles of recognition when the subject of the Nelk Boys was raised.

Among them were Louis Wagner-Lang and Van Ricker, both 21-year-old seniors at Montana State University, and Mr. Ricker’s 23-year-old brother, Charlie Ricker.

“The Nelk Boys and politics go hand in hand,” Van Ricker said. “Social media has blown up at the same time politics is blowing up.”

They noted the Tesla Cybertruck that Mr. Ross, an internet celebrity with millions of followers, had given Mr. Trump during a livestream a couple of days earlier. They said that they followed political happenings through the Nelk Boys and others.

“Kind of like older people do with the news,” Charlie Ricker said.

They appreciate the informal format of the podcasts, they said, without the slick network veneer of punditry.

“They’re so straightforward,” Mr. Wagner-Lang said. “They say something, and you think, ‘That makes a lot of sense.’”

The three young men detailed their concerns about the country: housing costs, grocery prices, the border. They said that Mr. Trump fed into a sense that men, especially white men like them, had been cast as villains, when really all they wanted was to be able to provide for their future families.

“The Democrats say that they want people of all colors to be successful, but so do we,” Charlie Ricker said. “I feel like Democrats are making us out to be the ******* side.”

The three have followed the Nelk Boys through

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stunts and pranks (and, recently, a slickly produced spoof of “The Bachelor”) and their tours of college campuses. The Nelk Boys formed near Toronto as teens, but the ever-shifting troupe is now based in Southern California. Nelk is an acronym representing the original members — K for Kyle, the frontman and last original member.

They are raunchy and irreverent. Women are little more than adornments to be ogled and teased. It’s a bit as if “****** Gone Wild” and “Impractical Jokers” had an entertainment baby, later adopted by the Trump family.

That profile gives their bits a lowbrow brashness. In one recent

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, the Nelk Boys are watching Kamala Harris’s acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention on a large television when one of them suddenly stands and bashes her face on the screen repeatedly with a sledgehammer.

No Longer Sticking to Sports

In the summer of 2016, another election year featuring Mr. Trump, politics was creeping into sports and pop culture in other ways. The N.F.L. quarterback Colin Kaepernick began kneeling for the national anthem to protest police brutality against ****** men. Mr. Trump and his supporters lashed out, giving voice to the “anti-woke,” “stick-to-sports” critique often heard today to complain when athletes or celebrities endorse Democratic causes.

Yet internet celebrities like the Nelk Boys and sports leaders like Mr. White now delve into the deep recesses of ********* politics, for principle or profit. Should they stick to what made them famous, too?

“I used to think that,” Charlie Ricker said. “But they make sense. And I really want Trump to win.”

Mr. Trump’s first public appearance after a New York jury convicted him on 34 felony counts was at a U.F.C. event in Newark. He entered the arena to **** Rock’s “********* Bad ****,” and used the event, alongside Mr. White,

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.

Soon, Mr. Trump appeared on the

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, a professional wrestler and social media star. His first question: Why would Mr. Trump give his time to a country that is trying to take him down? String pulled, Mr. Trump spent most of an hour winding his way through theories of election ******, media unfairness and a world aflame. “This country is going to *****,” he said.

Weeks before, Logan Paul had the N.F.L. quarterback Patrick Mahomes on his show. Then, the conversation had been about Travis Kelce and Super Bowls; now it was about the prospect of World War III.

“I’m telling you, we would have had a nuclear war if Hillary Clinton got in,” Mr. Trump said.

They also talked about U.F.O.s. Mr. Trump said that a key to border safety was more ******* shepherds. Asked if he had ever been in a fist ******, Mr. Trump stammered. “Probably not,” he said, finally joking, “I’d love to say that I fought my way through the Wharton school of finance.”

At the end, the men shook hands. “Oh, they’re going to get big ratings on this show,” Mr. Trump said. He was right. The interview garnered more than six million views on

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, compared with one million for the sports-centric episode featuring Mahomes.

Jake Paul, Logan Paul’s brother, a U.F.C. fighter and another social media juggernaut (now hoping to ****** Mike Tyson) is also overt in his Trump support.

“When you try and ***** ****’s angels and saviors of the world it just makes them *******,” he

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. “Good beats evil every time. #Trump2024”

Weeks later, he posted a clip on

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of him with the former president, hamming it up, as if in a tough-guy weigh-in. “We need Trump to knockout all his opponents on Election Day to save America,” he wrote. Mr. Trump reposted it to his 26 million

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followers, nearly as many as Paul.

Barstool Sports and its leader, Mr. Portnoy, were among the first to capture the male-centric demographic on social media that Mr. Trump is tapping into now. Mr. Portnoy has found huge audiences for coverage of sports, gambling and pizza, despite a history of misogynistic behavior and ******* misconduct allegations leveled at him.

He, too, has interviewed Mr. Trump, at the White House in 2020, and greeted the former president at a U.F.C. event this past spring. When President Biden stepped out of the race, and Ms. Harris claimed the Democratic nomination, Mr. Portnoy was among the most vociferous critics.

“OK, OK, I’ve got to do another rant here,” Mr. Portnoy said on an

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post. He anticipated that he would get messages saying, “Hey, pizza man, stick to pizza, or hey, sports guy, stick to sports.” Then he called the candidate switch “the lowest point for democracy in my lifetime.”

“There’s a lot on the right I don’t agree with,” he said, adding, with an expletive, that he hated the left.

The political post got more than a quarter-million likes, 10 times more than his next post about pizza.

Masculinity Politics

Every four years, campaigns and political analysts slice the electorate into tiny subgroups that they believe may swing the vote. Suburban mothers in Michigan. Retirees in Arizona. Latinos in Nevada. ****** voters in Georgia.

But the gender gap is a megatrend spanning across swing states and ******* groups. And it is most prominent among young voters. In a series of New York Times/Siena College polls in six swing states this month, young men favored Mr. Trump by 13 points, while young women favored Ms. Harris by 38 points, a 51-point gap.

John Della Volpe, the director of polling for the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School, has found a similar divide in his surveys.

“Young men tell me that they’re thinking about what it means to be masculine, what it means to be grown up,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “Many of them saw Trump as someone who could be their version of masculinity.”

Those potential voters, some voting for the first time, follow Mr. Trump more for his personality than his policies, Mr. Della Volpe said. They see him speaking against political correctness and absorbing waves of attacks, from high-minded criticism and court cases to an ************** attempt.

The question is whether Mr. Trump can lure young men to the ballot box. There is reason for skepticism: New York Times/Siena College surveys show that about a third of young men who say they plan to vote for Trump did not vote in 2020. Young men also report they are less likely to vote than older voters.

Of the young men who do show up to vote, Mr. Della Volpe noted that the youngest of them — first time voters — seem more likely to vote for Mr. Trump.

“The first-time voter was in middle school when Trump came on the scene in 2015, 2016,” Mr. Della Volpe said. “They see him more as an antihero than as a villain.”

The Nelk Boys are stirring engagement. They opened their recent interview with Mr. Vance by announcing

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to get more young men to vote.

The Democrats may hope to counter Trump’s hold on the young male vote with Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota, Ms. Harris’s running mate. Mr. Walz was raised in the rural Midwest and is a longtime teacher and football coach who served 24 years in the National Guard. He has been surrounded by and has led young men most of his life.

Before he accepted his nomination at the Democratic National Convention, his former football players, now middle-aged men squeezed into high school jerseys, filled the stage.

Flying High With Trump

Soon after he was nominated as vice president, Mr. Vance sat among cases of Happy Dad seltzers. The questions went down easy.

“What are the main scary things about Kamala Harris becoming president?” Mr. Forgeard asked Mr. Vance.

Like many others in the manosphere, the Nelk Boys’ foray into politics was an unexpected right turn. They inhabited a juvenile social media niche when in 2020, during the Covid-19 pandemic, they caught the attention of Mr. White, the U.F.C. leader. He pulled the Nelk Boys into his orbit, and soon they met Mr. Trump. They interviewed the former president in 2022, but

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because of Mr. Trump’s election *****. Mr. Trump

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that served as a commercial.

“Incredibly, but not surprisingly, the Big Tech lunatics have taken down my interview with the very popular Nelk Boys,” he wrote.

The Nelk Boys’ “Full Send” podcast became a regular stop for other Trump world figures, including Donald Trump Jr. (twice), Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro and Elon Musk. Some athletes and entertainers have been interviewed, too, such as Will Smith, Jelly Roll, Don Lemon and Deion Sanders.

The Nelk Boys also crisscross the continent, building their fan base through events. In late June, hours before the U.F.C. event in Las Vegas, they were at the Sunset Station Hotel and Casino in Henderson, Nev. Under a faux, partly cloudy sky painted on the ceiling, amid the electronic dings and whirs of machines, devoted fans voiced their shared affinity for the Nelk Boys and their support of Mr. Trump.

“These guys have an influence on us young guys — we want to be like them when we grow up,” Rylan Bogue, 22, said after meeting Mr. Forgeard. “They’re dominating right now.”

His father, Derek Bogue, 48, stood nearby. Like his son, he wore a “Make America Great Again” hat, but he did not know much about the Nelk Boys.

“I just follow him,” the elder Mr. Bogue said, nodding to his son. “My exact thing was, if they support Trump, I support them.”

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#Donald #Trump #Courts #Manoverse

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