Donald Trump has told many stories and denied many others about his ties to Jeffrey Epstein. But those questions center on Epstein’s actions and crimes, which Trump says he denounces and wasn’t a part of. The White House has moved heaven, earth, the truth and much else to protect Trump from what the Epstein files might tell us about him. But there is a larger question about what Trump makes of Epstein’s values. Does he reject them, or does he endorse and embrace them? Looking to his administration’s ties to Andrew Tate may be instructive.

According to Heidi Blake’s thorough investigation of Tate in the New Yorker earlier this month, the Trump administration intervened last year to buffer Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan from the consequences of their criminal charges in Romania. The Tate and Trump circles, she also reports, have overlapped at Mar-a-Lago.

She’s not the only one digging into the connections. A December New York Times report by Megan Twohey and Isabella Kwai quotes a text message by Tate, reviewed by the outlet, from January 2025: “I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things. Ive been told ill be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami.” Two Trump sons, Don Jr and Barron, have reportedly cultivated friendships with Andrew, though the White House told the Times that it was not involved in the Tates’ legal matters, and the Tates’ lawyer said the outlet’s findings about Andrew and Barron were “fake news”.

It’s pointless to debate who’s worse, Epstein or Tate. Their monstrous misogyny echoes their respective eras. Epstein seemed a relic of the 1980s obsessed with clawing his way into elite circles and obsessed with recruiting and abusing pubescent to young adult women. Tate on the other hand, came up through the 21st-century machinery of the manosphere, which is in turn largely a part of the internet and the powerful men who run it. But both seem to define masculinity through the dehumanization of women and girls. While he has called himself a misogynist before, Tate told Blake that his reputation as one was “completely unfair”.

A former mixed-martial arts fighter, Tate became, in his own words, a pimp, recruiting women by pursuing relationships with them and then allegedly coercing and manipulating them into webcam sex work and otherwise controlling them.

Blake reports that in 2014, as he realized his career as a kickboxer had limited financial possibilities, he moved on: “Webcam porn, now a multibillion-dollar industry, was then a nascent phenomenon, and Tate considered himself a pioneer,” she writes. Porn may be an inadequate description: a webcam worker performs live for remote customers, and the pressure to meet their demands is ongoing.

Blake describes how Tate exploited his first recruit, a 17-year-old, and “persuaded her to get a tattoo of a cobra down one side of her body and another reading ‘Tate Property’ above her crotch … Andrew said that more than thirty women had his name tattooed on their skin.”

The Tate brothers left the UK “after three British women accused Andrew of rape and strangulation”, Blake continues, and relocated to Romania, where they operated with impunity for almost a decade, building a webcam empire with women and girls who were recruited. According to messages from Andrew reviewed by the Times, some of them became essentially captive, prevented from leaving and punished and threatened, if they succeeded in doing so. At one point, 75 women were working for them.

But by the time of the Tate brothers’ arrest in Romania, Andrew’s primary income came not from women performing sex acts for webcams; it was videos of himself for a vast audience of boys and young men he was instructing in misogyny, exploitation, and cartoonish versions of masculinity. Their US lawyers said the two “have maintained their innocence, arguing the accusations against them are defamatory and false”.

His major platform was Rumble, in which Peter Thiel and JD Vance were new investors, and Rumble paid him lavishly as he posted his lessons in abuse, according to a confidential contract reviewed by Blake. (Rumble condemned human trafficking and sexual abuse and said allegations against him do not relate to content on its platform.) Buzzfeed reported that he offered a course titled “Pimpin’ Hoes Degree” on his website from 2018 to 2022. Shortly after Trump returned to the White House, “under pressure from the U.S., Romania lifted the Tates’ travel ban,” the New Yorker reported.

The Epstein affair is not over; in an excerpt from a forthcoming book, the New York Times reports on situation-room meetings last July reportedly led by Vance to try to cover up statements about Trump in the Epstein files. It includes this line: “The vice president said he thought the president would be OK with releasing the nipple-related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse.”

While Epstein abused victims directly, the Tates were most impactful for how, their accusers say, they taught countless other males to abuse, exploit and dehumanize females. But, Blake reports, they did continue to brutalize women. Allegations of rape and strangulation recur in Blake’s account, all the way through charges by an American woman last year that Andrew Tate beat and choked her, which he denies. But “he has repeatedly advocated throttling women during sex as a way to assert masculine power,” states the New Yorker report.

There are many ways that Trump and his associates have told us that human rights and human life mean nothing to them, from the 2024 campaign lies about Haitian immigrants in Ohio to the brutalities of masked ICE goons across the USA, to the dismantling of USAID, to the murder of civilians in small boats in the Caribbean to the bombing of a girls’ school in Iran, to name only a few more dramatic examples. But who they are is shown not just by who they choose to harm. It’s shown by who the Trump family has sought to ally with and protect.

• Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. Her newest book is The Beginning Comes After the End: Notes on a World of Change