WASHINGTON — John McEntee, senior advisor to the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 and a former key figure in the Trump administration, is predicting an eventual full ban on pornography, claiming that once it is enacted, “this country will flourish.”
McEntee made the statements during an interview this weekend with right-wing broadcaster Michael Knowles. McEntee was promoting The Right Stuff, a “conservative dating app” he founded.
The full interview is paywalled, but the progressive MeidasTouch Network news site published the excerpt on Tuesday.
While discussing the topic of conservative men dating, Knowles brought up adult content.
“You bring up the elephant in the room, which is a stain on not only society but the entire dating culture as well — which is pornography,” McEntee proclaimed. “Whenever America bans that, which will be happening at some point, everyone will be much better off.
“The minute that goes away, this country will flourish,” McEntee added.
Since 2023, McEntee has served as senior advisor for Project 2025, a coalition of conservative organizations led by the Heritage Foundation, whose road map for the next Republican presidential administration includes a call to immediately outlaw all pornography and imprison people who produce and distribute it.
The introduction to Project 2025’s “Mandate for Leadership” blueprint document declares that pornography “has no claim to First Amendment protection” and should be outlawed.
“The people who produce and distribute it should be imprisoned,” the document states. “Educators and public librarians who purvey it should be classed as registered sex offenders. And telecommunications and technology firms that facilitate its spread should be shuttered.”
The 'Body Man' in Charge of Staffing the Second Trump White House
The Heritage Foundation is currently scouting personnel for a potential upcoming administration under presumptive GOP nominee Trump.
McEntee, who served as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office during the Trump administration, plays “a vital role supporting the personnel pillar of Project 2025,” the Heritage Foundation said through a statement celebrating his appointment. “Embracing the motto that ‘personnel is policy,’ Project 2025 is launching the database to collect résumés and vet thousands of potential applicants in advance of Jan. 20, 2025, when the next president takes office.”
McEntee boasted that the Project 2025 Presidential Personnel Database “will be of extraordinary value for the 47th president” because the group is “doing a lot of the incoming administration’s most important work ahead of time.” He vowed to “bring thousands of vetted, trained conservatives from across the country to Washington.”
McEntee was fired from his first White House position in 2018, after it was revealed that he was under investigation by the Department of Homeland Security for serious financial crimes, CNN reported at the time.
Before his firing, McEntee was one of Trump’s closest associates and “one of a select group of staffers who were often summoned by the President to the White House residence,” CNN reported, adding that during the 2016 campaign, McEntee served as Trump’s “body man,” which meant he was “nearly constantly at the President’s side.”
McEntee was rehired as director of the White House Presidential Personnel Office in January 2020. He became extremely close to Trump — who calls him “Johnny” — in the last year of his presidency, including the period leading up to the Jan. 6 insurrection, leading The Atlantic to dub MacEntee “The Man Who Made January 6 Possible.”