The last two years and 10 months have brought a series of unfortunate events for Donald Trump—notably the four criminal indictments, the $5 million sexual abuse and defamation verdict, the ongoing fraud trial that could trigger a death sentence for his family-run Trump Organization, and last week’s political catastrophe, in which voters in three different Republican-leaning states rejected Trumpy candidates and policies in off-year elections.
And yet, while the 77-year-old GOP frontrunner has every right to be grumpy, he can still take a measure of comfort in the sycophantic fealty of a carnival-barking Australian who goes by “Nick Adams (Alpha Male)” on Elon Musk’s anarchic social media platform.
In his mania for personal publicity and self-celebration, along with an insouciant contempt for simple facts, Adams might be better described as Trump’s mini-me.
ADVERTISEMENT
A firehose-stream of his tweets and videos give free rein to his antagonism for Taylor Swift (she’s “a Jezebel” and “a gold digger” who, despite being a billionaire, is angling for Travis Kelce’s fortune), his obsession with masculinity, his craving for red meat, his insistence on manspreading, his devotion to golf “foursomes with the boys” and the Hooters restaurant chain, his seductiveness to women (or “sheilas,” as Adams calls them, in a braying “Strine” straight out of Crocodile Dundee), and—in various Stuart Smalley-like affirmations—his athletic physique, dazzling brilliance, irresistible sexiness, and overpowering magnetism.
Typical of Adams’ self-advertisements:
“I go to Hooters. I eat rare steaks. I lift extremely heavy weights. I read the Bible every night. I am pursued by copious amounts of women. I am wildly successful. I have the physique of a Greek God. I have an IQ over 180. I am extremely charismatic.”
This past January, Adams went viral with his indignant crusade against “woke M&M’s,” elaborating on Tucker Carlson’s bizarre jihad against “less sexy” M&M’s which the then-Fox News star had declared the previous year.
Amid a nonstop fusillade of tweets calling for a boycott of candy maker Mars for its introduction of brown, green, and purple female M&M’s characters to “celebrate women everywhere who are flipping the status quo,” according to a Mars corporate website, Adams videotaped himself in front of the Times Square M&M’s store inveighing against this “slap in the face to men everywhere.”
“Yes, you heard me right—feminist M&M’s!” he shouts in the video. “Egregious sexism of the worst and most conceivable kind! It is outrageous! It is disgusting! And it must not stand!” Ironically, given his frequent claims of intimidating physical prowess, Adams appears in the video to be not so much a “Greek God” as a stocky, round-faced fellow several inches under six feet tall and (like many an M&M’s lover) a tad overweight.
“Any male that buys a packet of M&M’s from today forward must hand in their man card, because they are a soft, woke, beta male feminist who has serious, serious problems!”
The video ends with Adams tossing an M&M’s package to the sidewalk and stomping on it.
Observers can be forgiven, of course, if they assume that Adams is actually a brilliant satirist, commenting on the sad absurdities of American political discourse.
“He’s such an over-the-top version of the character he claims to be, it just doesn’t feel genuine,” podcast mogul Bill Simmons mused recently. “Like he cooked up the lamest possible human being in a lab and is playing that character.”
“I am the least satirical person you will ever meet,” Adams responded in an email to The Daily Beast. “Look, I enjoy pissing off the lefties as much as anyone, but the assertion that I don’t believe what I say is offensive and unfounded.”
Ditto the occasional online speculation that Adams’ frequent paeans to the joys of communing with other alpha males don’t seem quite heterosexual.
“I am disgusted by how many Godless liberals project their own sexual deviancy onto my wholesome content,” Adams emailed. “There is nothing even remotely sexual about male companionship. People need to get their minds out of the gutters.”
The Sydney-born, 39-year-old Adams, who anglicized his identity from Adamopoulos (his Greek father’s surname) before running for local office two decades ago in Australia, is a bona fide online influencer. He claims 536,000 followers on X/Twitter, an additional 35,000 on Instagram, and–here’s the sweet spot—more than 2 million on Facebook, where he brags that he’s “PRESIDENT TRUMP’S FAVORITE AUTHOR.”
“I have a fantastic relationship with the President,” Adams emailed. “He is a true alpha male to his core and the greatest man to ever hold political office in this nation’s history, period. I have visited with him several times at his world-class properties, and we always have fantastic conversations. He WILL be re-elected again in 2024. You can take it to the bank.”
Guardian columnist Jason Wilson, an Australian based in the United States, first encountered his fellow countryman in June 2015 at the Western Conservative Summit in Denver, Colorado, where Adams was a featured panelist discussing “the decline of the mainstream media.”
“I was struck by this astonishing reinvention of himself,” Wilson says. “By the time he left Australia, he was this notorious grifter really—an attention-seeker and a clown in many ways.”
By 2015, Adams had decamped permanently from his native land, where his two terms on Greater Sydney’s Ashfield municipal council—to which he’d been elected at age 19 and managed to get himself voted deputy mayor by colleagues after reportedly threatening a rival candidate, “I will destroy you”—were punctuated by his preposterous yet headline-grabbing policy proposals, such as DNA-testing dog poop to catch scofflaw owners who didn’t clean up, prohibiting the use of leaf blowers until after his 10 a.m. wakeup time, and banning both pigeons and feminist author Germaine Greer from the council’s geographical jurisdiction.
As the independent journalism site Crikey recalled, he ultimately earned a formal censure from his colleagues for improperly billing taxpayers for more than $4,200 in personal cellphone and cab charges. (Adams had to repay the money.)
“His public life was just a series of publicity stunts and a milking of the public purse,” says Adams’ former colleague Marc Drury, who served alongside him for six years on the Ashfield council. “He achieved nothing but notoriety and I suspect that’s exactly what he wanted.”
Mark Receretnam, another of Adams’ colleagues on the council and an immigrant from Singapore, where he was raised by an Indian father and a Chinese mother, recalls that Adams occasionally mocked his complexion and his accent during contentious council meetings.
An Oct. 4, 2007, account in the local newspaper, the Inner West Weekly, reported: “Several times during the night, Liberal Councillor Nick Adams mimicked the accent of Greens Councillor Mark Receretnam and told him to ‘go back to Singapore.’… Cr Adams also had several jabs at the Greens, calling them ‘Communists’ and ‘reds under the beds.’”
As Jason Wilson noted in the Guardian, Adams’ term on the council was followed by a stint “as the PR guy for ‘The Halloween Institute.’ This was a fictional front group which organised a ‘protest’ attended exclusively by paid lingerie models [and] got a whole lot of free media for a costume hire store…
“At this point, Adams seemed destined to become a footnote in some future history of Australian political chancers. But nope, there he was, giving an unctuous on-stage introduction to the governor of Texas, Rick Perry, who in 2013 appointed Adams an ‘honorary Texan.’”
Having obtained legal U.S. immigration status in 2016 (an adventure chronicled in his quickie book Green Card Warrior) and ultimately American citizenship, Adams can’t restrain his adulation for the twice-impeached, voted-out-of-office 45th president.
“President Trump is a WINNER. Joe Biden is a LOSER,” he tweeted the morning after last week’s off-year election debacle. Not surprisingly, Adams regularly demands that President Biden be tried for treason. Trump, meanwhile, has reciprocated his acolyte’s over-the-top flattery, blurbing Green Card Warrior as a “must-read” and providing Adams with a fulsome video in which he pronounced his mini-me “a special guy” who is “doing amazing things.”
Indeed.
“I would bathe in a pool of molten hot lava if it meant President Trump would return to the White House for 4 more years,” Adams wrote in a Sept. 21 post on X/Twitter—one of several death-defying activities he’s vowed to undertake to ensure Trump’s re-election.
The same day, Adams gushed: “President Trump builds the tallest buildings, hits the longest drives, hosts the biggest rallies, wins the most votes, wins the most club championships, negotiates the best deals, raises the most impressive children, and gives the most inspiring speeches. Who wouldn’t want a man like that as their President?”
“The world is descending into chaos without President Donald Trump’s strong masculine presence,” he recently tweeted. “The black community is rallying around President Trump!” Adams claimed in another post, offering as proof a recent Trump endorsement by hip-hop performer Benny the Butcher.
In other social-media posts, Adams ranked the obese, exercise-averse former president No. 1 on his list of the “10 Greatest Athletes of All-Time,” and—over a Photoshopped image of a miraculously chiseled and flinty-eyed Donald in a Yankees uniform—claimed “President Trump is the greatest pitcher in MLB history” (prompting a waggish detractor to reply, “…aaaaand youre [sic] the catcher…right?”).
Nick Adams has been splashing around his adopted country’s right-wing ecosphere for more than a decade, making self-promotional visits from Oz to secure speaking gigs in praise of American exceptionalism, appear periodically on Fox News and especially Fox Business shows, and ingratiate himself with various Red State office-holders. In 2020, Adams’ relentless Trump-fawning was rewarded when the then-president burnished his fanboy’s gravitas by appointing him to a six-year term on the board of trustees of the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, a taxpayer-supported Washington think tank.
In 2016, Adams founded a non-profit dubbed the Foundation for Liberty and American Greatness (“FLAG” for short), which is headquartered in a strip mall in Tarpon Springs, Florida, in a one-story building named for his late father, the “Andrew Adamopoulos Logistics Center.” It sells patriotic educational materials—rendering the Constitution, the Federalist Papers and other founding documents in simple language for elementary and high school students. FLAG raised more than $1 million in 2021 (according to its most recent public IRS filing), and Adams has achieved an opulent version of the American Dream, having purchased, in 2021, a 7,000-square foot mansion with a private gym and screening room in nearby Palm Harbor.
“I use the theater room to break down films and watch the President’s speeches. It’s more utilitarian than luxury,” Adams emailed. “I don’t work out at home, I prefer to hit a local gym with other alpha males because iron sharpens iron.”
Meanwhile, FLAG paid him more than $300,000 in 2021 alone. Adams supplements that income with Cameo videos (birthday greetings, pep talks and other services at $100 a pop, with proceeds going to FLAG, he says), and as a motivational speaker represented by the Premiere agency, whose roster also includes Mike Pompeo and Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Adams is also a paid celebrity endorser for a MAGA-themed medical insurance company, America First Healthcare. “Brands are beating down my door on a daily basis for product endorsements,” Adams emailed.
He added: “I have been blessed with generational oratorical talent and a plethora of other abilities that have made me the wildly successful alpha male I am today. Look, 76 oz tomahawk ribeye steaks aren’t cheap.
“Yes, I am an inspiring speaker. Yes, people from all walks of life seek me out to speak at their events. No, I will not be apologizing.”
