John McEntee

John McEntee was Trump’s Presidential Personnel Office (PPO) Director, where he was responsible “for vetting and hiring everybody, including ambassadors, Cabinet secretaries, and top intelligence officials.” Under his leadership, Trump aides likened McEntee’s PPO to the “Gestapo,” and McEntee has been described as the “the deputy president” and chief enforcer of “MAGA purity.” McEntee is a senior advisor to Project 2025, and in 2023, the Heritage Foundation announced McEntee would play a “vital role” in its “personnel pillar,” which solicits resumes of potential exec branch employees, as a senior adviser to Project 2025. “The 47th president must and will confront the Deep State and will turn to John McEntee to do so,” according to Paul Dans, former director of Project 2025. McEntee is also expected to have a key role in implementing Schedule F in order to purge at least tens of thousands of public servants, including national security and scientific experts, enabling the Administration to replace them with partisan, political operatives who are hand-picked for their loyalty to the President.

John McEntee started in the Trump administration as Donald Trump’s personal aide or “body man.” For the first year of the Trump administration, McEntee stood at Trump’s side throughout the day and had a workspace directly outside the Oval Office. McEntee was “the one who greet[ed] the president in the morning inside the White House residence and the one who walk[ed] the president back upstairs at night” and “one of the only White House employees whose contact with the president span[ned] his political and personal lives,” according to Politico. In early 2018, however, then-Chief of Staff John Kelly fired McEntee for potential financial crimes that turned out to be activities related to online gambling. Almost immediately after McEntee was ousted, the Trump campaign announced that it would hire McEntee as Senior Advisor for campaign operations for the 2020 election, allowing McEntee to remain close in Trump’s orbit.

In January 2020, McEntee, then age 29, reentered Trump’s White House and was swiftly made the Director of the PPO. Emma Doyle, who oversaw the then-current Director of the Presidential Personnel Office, responded, “Mr. President, I have never said no to anything you’ve asked me to do, but I am asking you to please reconsider this. I don’t think it is a good idea.” Trump screamed back, “You people never fucking listen to me! You’re going to fucking do what I tell you to do.”

McEntee used his power to try to ensure that every official in the administration was entirely loyal to Trump. He and his enforcers ousted the ‘adults in the room, those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies. For example, in June 2020, virtually all top-level officials in the administration were informed they would need to be re-interviewed. McEntee’s office called in appointees to force them to prove their allegiance to Trump: numerous appointees reported being asked if they support specific policies unrelated to their agencies.

Under his leadership, McEntee’s staff would watch over select appointee’s activities, including monitoring their social media and voting records. When one found so much as a low-level staffer liking a Taylor Swift Instagram post including Biden-Harris themed cookies, it was quickly reported to higher-ups. The office was staffed by a mostly inexperienced group of young Trump loyalists and what others in the administration called the “Rockettes and Dungeons and Dragons” crew, alluding to physical appearance biases in McEntee’s seeming hiring preferences.

One of McEntee’s tactics was to hire White House loyalists committed to relaying the President’s demands as liaisons to Cabinet agencies. Heidi Stirrup, who McEntee hired as a liaison to the DOJ, screamed at a senior official on Attorney General Bill Barr’s team on her first full day in the office, “You need to wake up to the fact this election is being stolen!” Stirrup successfully escalated the conversation to speak directly to Barr, telling him she had a list of “better people” he should hire to be “doing these investigations.” Barr banned Stirrup from the DOJ building for that week. In another example, Josh Whitehouse, who was hired as a liaison to the DHS, tried to unscrew a plaque naming former DHS chief of staff Miles Taylor from the series of plaques naming all former DHS secretaries and chiefs of staff, asserting Taylor was a traitor for criticizing Trump.

A few months later, McEntee advanced Josh Whitehouse to serve as a liaison to the Pentagon. Whitehouse and McEntee’s office wrote a series of memos recommending the firing of nearly two dozen Pentagon officials that allegedly transgressed against Trump. One memo on Mark Esper lamented that he barred displaying confederate flags on military bases and pushed for diversity and inclusion, among other apparent MAGA “sins.” Per the memo’s suggestion, Esper was fired and replaced with Christopher Miller as the Acting Secretary of Defense just six days after the election.

Also just after the election, McEntee, who has no military or legal background, issued a hand-written note of military-related commands to Douglas Macgregor, who was installed as Miller’s new senior adviser. In its entirety, it listed “Get us out of Afghanistan.”, “Get us out of Iraq and Syria.”, “Complete the withdrawal from Germany.” and “Get us out of Africa.” The note, which included Trump’s signature at the bottom, appalled top Pentagon officials and was issued without consultation from White House Counsel Pat Cipollone and National Security Adviser, Robert O’Brien. Its demands were deemed null and void due to not going through the correct clearance process.

McEntee’s actions also paved the way for election interference; a note written by McEntee to Trump reveals how Chris Miller was positioned to reign in and threaten the jobs of Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy and Chief of Staff of the Army James McConville after they issued a joint statement consistent with long-standing legal policy, that the U.S. military has no role in determining U.S. elections. Per Mark Meadows’ indictment, between Dec. 1 and Dec. 30, 2020, Meadows and Trump met with political adviser John McEntee to request that McEntee prepare a memorandum outlining a strategy for disrupting and delaying the joint session of Congress on January 6, 2021. The plan included Pence only counting some of the electoral votes while sending the rest back. Just days before January 6th, McEntee sent a memo to Mike Pence urging him to declare Trump the winner of the 2020 election, claiming Pence would be following in Thomas Jefferson’s footsteps. The note misrepresented history to assert the Vice President held such power and was also a rogue diversion from other expert legal guidance, such as that of White House Counsel Pat Cipollone.

In March 2022, McEntee testified before the U.S. House’s January 6th committee, which revealed his closeness to Trump in moments and meetings leading up to the insurrection. He was also subpoenaed by the Justice Department as part of its Trump-related investigations. Jonathan Karl reported extensively on McEntee’s actions and the lead up to January 6th, noting that senior Trump officials described McEntee to him in terms alternately positive and negative, including as “the deputy president” and “a fucking idiot.”

McEntee reportedly has remained in close contact with Trump since leaving the White House, including socially such as accompanying Trump on a trip to Trump’s golf club in New Jersey in June 2020. In 2022, McEntee co-founded the right-wing dating app The Right Stuff, which is backed by MAGA billionaire Peter Thiel, and which restricts mentions of same sex relationships. The app was allegedly used by the FBI to find January 6 rioters after a prompt encouraged users to finish the sentence “January 6th was […]” for display on their profile. On his @daterightstuff TikTok profile, which has over 2 million followers, McEntee has shared racist, anti-LGBTQ+ rhetoric and downplayed COVID-19. McEntee has also supported voter suppression tactics and complained about American citizens whose parents are not citizens being able to vote. He recently made headlines for a TikTok in which he made the morally repugnant claim that he gives unhoused people fake money so “when they go to use it, they get arrested.” (George Floyd, was murdered after being arrested for allegedly using counterfeit currency, by the way.) McEntee has also signaled a ban on pornography in a second Trump term, and stated that he was “rethinking the 19th amendment.”

This profile has been updated.