Teens Say Trump’s Former Personal Aide and Project 2025 Higher-Up Made Them Uncomfortable in Chats

In October of 2023, when Grace Carter was an 18-year-old freshman at North Carolina State University, she received a message on Instagram from the business account of the conservative dating app The Right Stuff. It was reaching out to ask if she wanted some merchandise.

Carter didn’t know much about the app but was interested in a free hoodie. And as it turned out, she wasn’t just corresponding with a brand manager but with John McEntee—the app’s cofounder, a former official in the Donald Trump administration, and at one point, a senior adviser to Project 2025.

In messages sent to Carter and to another young woman and reviewed by WIRED, McEntee pushed conversations in directions that made them extremely uncomfortable and invited both, one repeatedly, to visit him in Los Angeles.

Neither McEntee nor The Right Stuff responded to repeated requests for comment.

McEntee, 34, is a former quarterback at the University of Connecticut who served as a personal aide to Trump at the beginning of his presidency. He was reportedly fired in 2018 after his security clearance was denied—according to The Atlantic and the The Wall Street Journal, he had deposited large sums of money from online gambling winnings and had mishandled his taxes; he would later say under oath in a deposition related to January 6 that he resigned—but in February 2020 returned to the White House, this time as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office. Reflecting his stature in Trump’s inner circle, The Atlantic’s profile refers to him as the unofficial “deputy president” and, in the headline, as “the man who made January 6 possible.”

In May 2023, the Heritage Foundation, which did not respond to a request for comment, announced that McEntee would be joining the Project 2025 team as a senior adviser. Project 2025 is a roadmap for a second Trump administration that would radically roll back the rights of women and LGBTQIA+ people and unwind protections for racial minorities, among many other policy recommendations. The plan also promotes biblical morality that includes a heteronormative view of marriage and criminalizes pornography. The announcement noted that McEntee would be “supporting the personnel pillar” of Project 2025, an effort to staff a second Trump administration with loyalists.

McEntee, in addition, was and is the face of The Right Stuff, a dating app for conservatives that launched in 2022 with backing from billionaire Peter Thiel, who appears to be the company’s only investor. At its initial launch, the app faced criticism for being filled with mostly men; some users alleged that there was a screening question on the app about the January 6, 2021, insurrection.

While the app might not be taking off, McEntee’s profile has nonetheless risen online. With McEntee featured in nearly every video, The Right Stuff has 3.3 million followers on TikTok and 1.8 million on Instagram. The account’s posts almost exclusively show McEntee, usually eating food in situations staged to make it seem like he’s being filmed while on a date, offering quippy conservative takes attempting to debunk liberal logic. In one video, with a caption that says it is a joke, McEntee claims he gives fake money to homeless people so “when they go to use it, they get arrested.”

When Grace Carter heard from The Right Stuff’s account on Instagram, the person controlling the account introduced himself as John. He also offered a phone number with a Southern California area code—a number that a WIRED reporter has used in the past to contact McEntee.

There was no obvious reason why he would have reached out to her in particular. At the time he contacted her, Carter had about 17,000 followers on TikTok, she says, and still has only a modest 1,500 on Instagram. “I actually have no idea how he found me,” she says. “Based on the other accounts I follow and things I post, it’s very leftist. So I was surprised when he found me.”

Carter says she never used McEntee’s phone number, though she did accept his offer of a free branded hoodie. While messages viewed by WIRED indicate that Carter sparsely responded to McEntee, he repeatedly offered to fly her and a girlfriend to Los Angeles. “My treat,” he wrote.

“I remember I told my boyfriend about it, and I was joking that he was going to be the other girl,” says Carter, who says that she continued to talk to McEntee as a kind of “trolling.” “I was like, I could use a free trip, that’s initially why I kept the conversation going.”

In messages seen by WIRED, McEntee says to Carter, “I think you’re a liberal” but tells her, “as long as you’ll be fun I don’t care.” The conversation, she says, died out after Carter declined to visit McEntee over her winter break.

“I would have been uncomfortable with him in person,” she says.

Following the presidential debate on September 10, McEntee posted a video saying, “Can someone track down the women Kamala Harris says are bleeding out in parking lots because Roe v. Wade was overturned? Don’t hold your breath.” The comments section of that video were soon flooded with women across the country sharing their experiences.

It was this post that Carter says made her feel like it was important to share her experience. “That video he made about abortions really upset me,” she says. “And I was just like, it needs to be called out.” Carter posted a video on TikTok sharing her messages with McEntee and says that she has received messages from several other young women who allege similar experiences.

One of those women, who spoke to WIRED and asked to remain anonymous because she’s concerned about her security, says that she connected with McEntee on The Right Stuff dating app before moving to texting him. The number provided matched the one given to Carter and the one used previously by a WIRED reporter; messages reviewed by WIRED also included selfies that clearly appear to be of McEntee. Like Carter, she was 18 at the time.

“I would label myself as semi-conservative,” the young woman says. Unlike Carter, she knew who McEntee was and at first thought his profile on the app was an example for users, as opposed to his actual account. (Last year, a series of TikTok videos showed McEntee going on first dates with women he matched with on the app in various cities.) “I had seen him on TikTok. I’d see him on the news. My family is quite conservative, so I had seen him before.”

Once the young woman and McEntee began texting off the app, she says, the conversations took a sexually explicit turn, including repeated mentions of specific sex acts even after the young woman said she was not comfortable with this. We are withholding details out of concern for the woman’s privacy; her descriptions of their conversations are consistent with text messages she showed to WIRED.

“It was very sexual from day one,” she alleges. “He kept making comments about my age and how hot it would be to sleep with someone who was my age.”

As he had with Carter, McEntee encouraged the woman to come visit him in California.

Asked to recall the conversations, she says, “he would say things like, ‘I come and visit you and we hook up or whatever, you should bring one of your friends or you should take a couple of your friends’ and was like verifying that my friends were the same age as me as well.”

After a couple of weeks the conversation petered out because, she says, “it was obvious I wasn’t going to fly out to California or something to see him.”

“The more I thought about it, the more it makes me sad that he’s sort of a role model, especially for young conservative men,” the young woman says. “And I feel like this person isn’t a great role model for those young conservative men.”

During his time at the White House, The Atlantic notes, McEntee regularly hired young, attractive women. “The most beautiful 21-year-old girls you could find, and guys who would be absolutely no threat to Johnny in going after those girls,” an official told The Atlantic. McEntee’s hires were known as the “Rockettes and the Dungeons & Dragons group.”

Steven Cheung, communications director for the Trump campaign, told WIRED that although President Trump has announced a transition leadership team, “formal discussion of who will serve in a second Trump administration is premature.”

Do you know something we should know about John McEntee or other people involved in Project 2025? Contact the reporter at [email protected] or via secure text on the Signal app at 267-713-9832. Confidentiality assured.