What Russell Brand revealed about the delusion of Trump officials

What Russell Brand revealed about the delusion of Trump officials Brand was embraced onstage by MAHA just weeks before being convicted of rape and sexual assault, and is now headed to prison in the UK. The jovial way in which Trump administration officials embraced him is a clue to why they lost the midterm elections so badly, writes Holly Baxter - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Already a member? Log in Russell Brand has been sentenced to more than 10 years in prison for rape and sexual assault in London, but just a few weeks ago, he was sitting onstage next to Trump administration official Mehmet Oz at a September conference for MAHA Action, joking obliquely about the very serious allegations against him. Brand had almost been late because he was distracted backstage, “hugging the secretary for agriculture,” said Oz, during introductory remarks. “She initiated that contact, I should make clear, doctor!” Brand replied. Both Oz and Brand laughed heartily at the apparent cleverness of the joke. Of course it looks bad now, but it should’ve looked bad then, when the court case was on the horizon, so let’s not expect much hand-wringing from Oz, MAHA-maven RFK Jr., and the other Trump health officials who embraced Brand over the past two years. And indeed, Brand has been making jokes like this for years in plain sight. His ‘I’m just telling it like it is’ persona meant that he was announcing he would sleep with pretty much anyone from under the age of consent upwards during his early 00’s standup routines. He often encouraged young women to line up outside gigs and wait for him so he could have sex with them afterwards. For a long time, yes, Brand managed to get away with just looking like a shameless Lothario. He managed that even when there was evidence of an undercurrent of viciousness and misogyny: calling up Andrew Sachs to “prank him” on-air while lewdly describing how he’d slept with Sachs’ granddaughter; saying during a live interview with Vanessa Feltz that he’d like to have sex with her and her two teenage daughters, the youngest of whom was 15 at the time; performing a mean-spirited comedy routine about Katy Perry in the immediate weeks after their divorce, where he heavily implied that she was bad in bed. In other words, Brand wasn’t just a tomcat who strutted around talking about the size of his libido. He was someone who, again and again, spoke about women with dehumanizing derision. Whether that woman was an ex-wife or an interviewer or the secretary for agriculture, it always came back to objectification. (Remind you of anyone?) What’s interesting about Brand is that he’s a man with no fixed identity beyond being a sex pest, a one-time leftie who had a loyal gathering of progressive young fans and a fairly successful stint in Hollywood. He did the tried-and-tested routine of learning a few long words and deploying them once every half hour or so to make it seem like he was clever and thoughtful. And then he started to get a bit weirder. He famously told people not to vote in 2013, having decided that the entire political system was a sham. He then followed the algorithm, got lots of YouTube money and was embraced by the far right, becoming an “I’m just doing my own research” guy on health and science before getting himself baptized in the River Times by survivalist Bear Grylls in 2024. By the time he was on trial in 2026, he was married to fellow born-again Christian Laura Gallacher (who’s standing by him) and had three kids (who he has publicly admitted to barely ever looking after.) Because Brand talked so loudly about his drug and alcohol addictions and about his “dodgy” sexual behavior, that was supposed to make it all OK. He was the walking personification of the famous cartoon by Paul Noth, where a political billboard of a wolf in a field proclaims ‘I’M GOING TO EAT YOU’ and one sheep in the field says to another, “He tells it like it is!” In that topsy-turvy world, which so many men benefited from over the past two decades, it’s fine to be a rapist because everyone’s a rapist, and it’s fine to be corrupt because everyone’s corrupt: you’re just the one who admits to it! We are now seeing a collective exhaustion with the ‘everyone’s doing it anyway, I’m just honest about it’ persona. Voters made it clear that there are limits to how long they are willing to believe it. Donald Trump deftly convinced everyone he was a man of the people, despite being a non-self-made multimillionaire from a privileged background whose houses were covered in gold. He never wasted time denying much of what he was accused of; instead, he convinced people to look at reality differently, to believe that Democrats were shady liars and formidable enemies who achieved much worse things behind closed doors. You’re better off sticking with the one who talks about it openly rather than the Illuminati establishment elite globalist commies, went the narrative. Convincing people they live in a dangerous, cutthroat world is central to far-right appeal. But the rage-baiting divisiveness of MAGA had a time limit. Stephen Miller was ranting and raving about illegal immigrants driving Mercedes Benzes in the Oval Office a few days before the midterm elections. It turns out that people didn’t really care about that; what they cared about was the fact that they couldn’t afford the gas for their own cars. But where MAGA made the most bizarre misstep was in its treatment of women. Having somehow forgotten that women are not actually a “woke” minority but are actually the majority of the population, at 51% — and also much more likely to be registered voters in US elections than men — MAGA built itself an echo chamber of truly extraordinary proportions. Vivek Ramaswamy ran an ad campaign against Amy Acton that tried to turn voters against her by saying she’d lied, as a child, about being raped by her stepfather, who had been indicted by a grand jury. The ad featured Acton’s estranged mother, who Acton and her brother had had no contact with since they were removed from her care as children by social services. Supposed committed Christian JD Vance backed the ad and said that if people had a problem with it, they didn’t understand politics is supposed to be tough. But most normal people don’t think that “tough politics” includes aligning yourself with a pedophile rapist. Elsewhere, Pete Hegseth heavily implied that women shouldn’t be in the military at all, and unceremoniously fired a bunch of decades-long female professionals in military leadership for no apparent reason. These included retired Navy Vice Admiral Nancy Lacore, who was fired by Hegseth in August 2025 without explanation, and who just won election in South Carolina. In a satisfying turn of events, Lacore flipped a Republican seat nobody even seriously considered competitive. And across the Atlantic, things were looking worse and worse for MAHA darling Russell Brand, fellow anti-vaxxer and fellow defender of the women-as-things ideology. He was convicted just as it became clear that the blue wave had delivered in the midterms, and he was sentenced as Trump began trying to claim that the election was stolen from him and his political party, having previously said he’d accept the results. MAGA is flailing; Brand is going to prison; JD Vance is trying to distance himself from a war he defended for two years; and Marco Rubio is telling the public that the war was the right thing to do, even if they don’t like it. But it seems that voters are done with being paternalistically condescended to. They’re also done with being told that someone else can define the parameters of reality to them. Because it turns out that most of the time, when someone loudly talks about how much of a malevolent creep they are, they’re not one of the good ones after all — they’re just a malevolent creep. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments