John McEntee (political aide)

John David McEntee II (born May 9, 1990) is an American political advisor and dating app CEO who served in the Trump administration. He has been a Trump loyalist during and after the Trump presidency. He began as a body man and personal aide to the president but was dismissed by White House Chief of Staff John F. Kelly in March 2018 after failing a security clearance background check, which discovered he was under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security due to issues related to gambling.

After Kelly was dismissed in December 2018, Donald Trump rehired McEntee and named him Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in February 2020. After leaving the White House, McEntee founded The Right Stuff, a dating app for conservatives, which he leads as CEO. Through his promotion of the app on TikTok and Instagram, McEntee has become a social media user, having amassed millions of followers to his social media handle "@DateRightStuff".

Early life and education
McEntee was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Fullerton, California. His father is John D. McEntee, a producer and manager who books celebrities for private and corporate functions, as well as for resorts including the MGM Resorts, Caesars Palace, and Venetian Properties. Hid mother's name was Julia. She was deeply religous. McEntee has a sister named Joan. He first attended St. Angela Merici Parish School in Brea, California, and then attended Servite High School in Anaheim, where he played quarterback on the varsity football team.

McEntee was a redshirt his first year at the University of Connecticut, and completed his communications degree in the spring of his senior year. He played college football for the Huskies, but was used sparingly in his first two seasons. McEntee would be named the starting quarterback during the 2011 season, after a strong performance against Buffalo. In the next game against Western Michigan, he recorded his season and career-high, after throwing for 300 yards and four touchdowns. McEntee lost the starting job to transfer Chandler Whitmer in the 2012 season, and dropped down the depth chart to third-string, making just three appearances for the Huskies.

Career
In 2015, McEntee worked as a production assistant for Fox News, focusing on the channel's social media accounts. He successfully lobbied for a job on the Trump campaign, joining as a volunteer in July of that year, later being promoted to a full-time position as trip director. McEntee was responsible for executing the campaign's rallies while traveling with the candidate and coordinating the campaign's travel for all staff.

After Donald Trump won the 2016 election, McEntee was asked to join his staff as an aide, serving as his body man. McEntee accompanied Trump on all trips, most notably the President's trip to Saudi Arabia in May 2017, where "Man in red tie" (McEntee) and "#Trump's_daughter" (Ivanka Trump) were the most trending hashtags in the country.

McEntee's service in the White House ended on March 13, 2018, when he was fired due to an "unspecified security issue" that was later revealed to be an issue related to gambling.

McEntee was hired by Trump's 2020 reelection campaign as a senior adviser for campaign operations. In January 2020, McEntee returned to the White House, where he shared some of his former duties with Nick Luna, the Director of Oval Office Operations. Shortly after his return, McEntee was then promoted to Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office, the role overseeing the President's 4,000 appointments to the federal bureaucracy. McEntee reported directly to the President and continued to hold his role as Trump's bodyman concurrently. He was tasked with identifying and removing political appointees and career officials deemed insufficiently loyal to the administration, despite having no previous personnel or people management experience. His reappointment was controversial given the circumstances of his dismissal. On November 9, 2021, McEntee was issued a subpoena to testify by the House January 6th Committee. On two occasions in 2022, he appeared before the committee in a taped deposition, before returning in person in January 2023.

McEntee has developed a loyal following with the Republican Party base for his actions within the Trump Administration. Right wing media outlet Revolver News has described McEntee as "one of the very few who truly believed in and was willing to fight for the agenda Trump ran on in 2016." Breitbart News has gone into detail about how McEntee "fought back against the efforts of establishment Republicans and permanent bureaucrats to sabotage the Trump presidency". McEntee is often credited with purging the neocons from the senior ranks of the Pentagon and installing Christopher Miller as Acting Secretary of Defense and Colonel Douglas Macgregor as Senior Advisor to the Secretary. McEntee's subsequent attempt to engineer a military withdrawal from Afghanistan in order to fulfill Trump's campaign promise was thwarted by other officials, though McEntee was able to get the Pentagon to withdraw 700 troops from Somalia.

McEntee also used his position to take on big tech companies. In 2020, he appointed Adam Candeub to lead the National Telecommunications and Information Administration at the Department of Commerce. Candeub would go on to lead the effort to have the FCC use its rulemaking powers to stop social media censorship of conservatives. McEntee also withdrew the nomination of FCC Commissioner Michael O'Rielly after he criticized President Trump's Executive Order on combatting big tech censorship. McEntee replaced O'Rielly with Commissioner Nathan Simington.

McEntee also sent a series of bullet points via text message to Pence's chief of staff to assert that Thomas Jefferson "Used His Position as VP to Win" the 1801 election, which McEntee claimed "proves that the VP has, at a minimum, a substantial discretion to address issues with the electoral process." In a piece about McEntee, journalist Jonathan Karl characterized the analysis as "absurd" because "Jefferson didn't discard electoral votes, as Trump wanted Pence to do. He accepted electoral votes from a state that nobody had questioned he had won."

In 2021, McEntee met with Peter Thiel to pitch him on several tech startup ideas, one of which was the idea for a conservative dating app called The Right Stuff. Thiel agreed to fund The Right Stuff and subsequently made a seed round investment of $1.5 million. The app launched on September 30, 2022.

In May 2023, it was announced that McEntee was joining The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 as a senior advisor. Described by the New York Times as "one of Trump's most trusted aides", McEntee's association with Project 2025 serves as the main link between the Heritage Foundation and former President Trump. The New York Times has reported that his role includes working as "part of a team searching for potential lawyers" for Trump's next Administration. McEntee has stated that as part of project 2025, he supports a total ban on pornography and abolishing the 19th amendment, saying "the country will flourish".

ABC News correspondent Jonathan Karl wrote in November 2023 that in the closing weeks of the Trump presidency McEntee worked with Douglas Macgregor to draft a brief document ordering swift withdrawal of U.S. military forces from Afghanistan and Somalia. The president signed it and it was forwarded to Kash Patel at the Pentagon without any review by the legal, military or national security apparatus, nor it being recorded by Derek Lyons, the White House staff secretary responsible for filing and transmitting official presidential orders. After acting defense secretary Christopher Miller and Joint Chiefs chairman Mark Milley went to the White House to inquire about the order, it was rescinded.

In popular culture
In 2011, while he was a college football player, McEntee appeared in a viral YouTube video that featured him throwing football trickshots. The video was later featured on CNN.

In May 2024 he posted a satirical video to TikTok claiming that he deliberately gives homeless people movie prop currency hoping they will be arrested for using counterfeit money when they try to use it. McEntee wrote in the caption of the video "Just a joke. Everyone calm down".

McEntee has become popular on TikTok and Instagram Reels through his account @DateRightStuff where he posts satirical videos to promote his dating app, The Right Stuff. Outlets have noted that given McEntee's relationship with former President Trump and his involvement with Project 2025, Trump could end up appointing a "TikToker" to one of the most powerful positions in government if he wins again.

McEntee has made several media appearances where he defends TikTok from Republican efforts to ban the platform. He has ridiculed Republicans as "such nerds" for their attacks against TikTok and said the real reason TikTok is getting banned is because its information the "uniparty" in Washington can't control. McEntee has debated multiple TV hosts on whether TikTok should be banned, pointing out that TikTok has satisfied concerns about data security and rebutting claims about the Chinese government pushing content on TikTok's algorithm.

On June 20th 2024, on the HBO show Last Week Tonight, host John Oliver mocked McEntee's many ventures into dating apps, online videos, conservative political views, and conservatives perspectives on issues of race, nationality, sexuality, and other controversial takes on popular culture.