John McEntee (political aide)

McEntee was raised in a Roman Catholic family in Fullerton, California.[10] His father is John D. McEntee, a producer/manager who books celebrities for private and corporate functions, as well as for resorts including the MGM Resorts, Caesars Palace, and Venetian Properties.[11] 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.[12]

McEntee was a redshirt his first year at the University of Connecticut, and completed his communications degree in the spring of his senior year.[13] He played college football for the Huskies, but was used sparingly in his first two seasons.[14] McEntee would be named the starting quarterback during the 2011 season, after a strong performance against Buffalo.[15] In the next game against Western Michigan, he recorded his season and career-high, after throwing for 300 yards and four touchdowns.[16] 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.[17]

In 2015, McEntee worked as a production assistant for Fox News, focusing on the channel's social media accounts.[10] 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.[18] 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.[2] 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.[19]

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 a problem with his gambling debts and an inability to obtain a necessary security clearance.[20][21]

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.[22] McEntee's role was Director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office,[6] reporting directly to the President. 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.[21][23][24][25] His reappointment was controversial given the circumstances of his dismissal.[26][7][8][27] On November 9, 2021, McEntee was issued a subpoena to testify by the House January 6th Committee.[28] On two occasions in 2022, he appeared before the committee in a taped deposition,[29][30] before returning in person in January 2023.[31]

Jonathan Karl, White House correspondent for ABC News for the duration of the Trump administration, wrote a November 2021 profile of McEntee, characterizing him as particularly subservient because "Trump knew he was the one person willing to do anything Trump wanted." Karl observed that McEntee hired his young friends and, as one senior White House official said, "the most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find," including Instagram influencers and a dance instructor. Karl characterized McEntee's power late in the Trump presidency:

McEntee and his enforcers made the disastrous last weeks of the Trump presidency possible. They backed the president’s manic drive to overturn the election, and helped set the stage for the January 6 assault on the Capitol. Thanks to them, in the end, the elusive “adults in the room”—those who might have been willing to confront the president or try to control his most destructive tendencies—were silenced or gone. But McEntee was there—bossing around Cabinet secretaries, decapitating the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, and forcing officials high and low to state their allegiance to Trump.[5]

McEntee also sent a series of bullet points via text message to Pence's chief of staff to incorrectly 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."[5]

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.[9]

In May 2023, it was announced that McEntee was joining The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 as a senior advisor.[32]

In 2011, while he was a college football player, McEntee appeared in a viral YouTube video that featured him throwing football trickshots.[4][10] The video was later featured on CNN.[33]