Meet The White House Social Team (We Know About)

—by Adam Bumas

Last week, over 20 government departments and offices simultaneously created Bluesky accounts, with the express goal of owning the libs, according to reporting by Wired. You might have missed it, since they were instantly shut out so universally that a day later, the official White House account became the second-most-blocked account on the entire platform, right behind Vice President JD Vance. If it’s any consolation to the vice president, at least Rare Vances are quite popular on Sora.

But I noticed something in Wired’s report on Tuesday that I hadn’t seen anywhere else. The article quoted a man named Billy McLaughlin, citing him as the “former White House director of digital content.” I hadn’t heard that McLaughlin, who reportedly ran the White House’s Instagram account as of a few months ago, had left his post. Quoting him for the article suggests he still has some kind of role in the Trump administration’s social media apparatus, but there doesn’t seem to be any public information on what that is.

Which is typical of the Trump 2.0 White House’s literal-fuck-you approach to transparency. Just a few weeks into the administration, they blocked the AP’s access to press events, and have kept them out as a court battle continues, as they grant access to influencer and Russian dark money connoisseur Tim Pool. Meanwhile, along with his totally badass new title, Secretary of War Pete Hegseth has demanded all journalists in the Pentagon follow new rules that are so restrictive even Fox News and Newsmax refused to agree. So now there are just no journalists in the Pentagon. Even when reporters do get access to White House staff, officials like Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt are now just responding to multiple questions with “your mom” jokes.

So what don’t they want the public to know? It seems like near the top of the list is who’s running their real media strategy — their now-literal shitposts and their copyright-infringing rage bait. When the White House started an official TikTok account last month (and mercifully got roasted in the comments), they declined to identify anyone operating the account. Secrecy genuinely seems to be a high priority for them, and it’s easy to see why, since these posts don’t exactly stand up well when scrutinized offline.

So here’s a little who’s who of the people in charge of social media for the Trump White House, as well as how online they are.

Steven Cheung, Communications Director

This is the closest official, publicly appointed person to the White House’s social media team, so we’ll start here. Before he joined President Donald Trump’s first campaign in 2016, Cheung was formerly in charge of press response for the Ultimate Fighting Championship — we’ve written before about how that organization is Trumpism’s guiding light. Cheung has spent years insulting critics of Trump online and offline. Highlights include calling Ron DeSantis a cuck and Joe Biden a bitch on X, but he’s used more elaborate language too, saying of Nikki Haley, "Everything she's ever achieved will be thrown into a dumpster fire that she lit herself.”

What sets Cheung apart from the rest of the people on this list is that he’s not all that online. A New Yorker profile during the election describes him as savvy, professional, and friendly when it comes to dealing with the press. In an incredibly New Yorker turn of phrase, they described him as “Janus-faced.” As for less erudite summaries, Trump calls him “my sumo wrestler,” and he once dressed up as a James Bond henchman.

Billy McLaughlin, Former Digital Communications Director

McLaughlin first got serious attention in 2019 for a Washington Post op-ed titled, “I’m gay and work for the NRA. Big deal.” He started as the group’s social media manager and stayed in their press department for years, joining the Trump administration in January after a stint with the Israel Campus Coalition. He’s now officially left the team, which seems to have happened in August — a few weeks later, another early hire, Alex Pfeiffer, also left the White House.

The Daily Beast credited McLaughlin for the White House’s first use of AI-generated memes. As mentioned above, he reportedly personally ran the White House Instagram account, and it’s a good platform for him (derogatory). Though he’s sold himself as a memelord to the mainstream press for years, writing an article about it for Fox News, McLaughlin's sensibilities seem too millennial for the front lines of the meme war. In 2025, he’s replying to Rosie O’Donnell and writing “PERIODT 💅” on X — he left before he could write about ICE attack dogs being heccing good puppers.

Kaelan Dorr, Deputy Communications Director

McLaughlin described Dorr as his replacement to Fox News, but his official position hasn’t changed since he was hired in January. Before that, Dorr worked for Gettr, a generic-brand Truth Social app whose most engaged userbase was Brazilian Bolsominions. According to researcher Samuel Sinyangwe, he runs the White House X account, but that isn’t his only gig.

The New York Post reported earlier this month that Dorr works personally on “the creative process” of meme strategy with Trump and Dan Scavino, the man who ran Trump’s Twitter account during his first term, now his deputy chief of staff. Dorr’s online sensibility seems to be more modern than McLaughlin’s, making POV jokes and using Minecraft Trump as his old X header image. He doesn’t seem very experienced with traditional press, though. One of the few interviews I can find with him is for Bitcoin Magazine, which really made me think of that old Clickhole mumbling video.

Jack “Advent” Fuetterer, TikTok Producer

Now we’re getting to the real sickos — people who clearly have some influence, but seemingly no official position. Fuetterer, a 23-year-old who now goes by Jack Advent, ran Trump’s official TikTok account during his campaign, and was the primary person responsible for producing the videos. Before the campaign, according to the Daily Mail, he worked for Logan Paul and Vivek Ramaswamy.

Trump was impressed by Fuetterer and his ability to make TikToks that actually fit with the platform’s style, nicknaming him “TikTok Jack.” The TikToks are pretty well done, as these things go, and it seems to have kept him in the administration’s good graces. No one has officially stated that he’s running the new White House TikTok account, but he spoke about it positively, recommending that Trump install his son Barron as part of the company’s change in ownership.

Alex Bruesewitz, Strategic Consultant and PAC Adviser

This one is the most online, the least official — and, arguably, the most influential. We mentioned Bruesewitz back in August, as one of the people who single-handedly set the agenda for the “woke Cracker Barrel” furor on X. Posting has been the backbone of his entire career, since he was first noticed after Trump retweeted him in 2015. Since then, he made a big name for himself as a fiercely pro-Trump influencer, who’s gotten disinvited from Republican events for criticizing members of Congress who he calls “disloyal.”

Bruesewitz reportedly runs multiple rapid response X accounts for the Trump team. Beyond that, he seems to be a genuinely insightful analyst. He’s credited with organizing the Trump campaign’s big podcast press tour, including personally liaising between Trump and Adin Ross.

Officially, he works for a pro-Trump PAC and runs X Strategies, a consulting firm that’s been grooming influencers into potential political candidates. He apparently helped Marjorie Taylor Greene and Anna Paulina Luna get elected, and a local Wisconsin newspaper mentioned he’s a “potential candidate for Congress” himself.

A Regrettable Tattoo

Platner’s Cooked

What started as a story about Graham Platner’s idiotic, but sadly textbook edgy Reddit history has quickly morphed into a scandal that will surely end his campaign. Well, maybe, we’ll get to that in a sec.

Platner went on Pod Save America yesterday to address his Reddit posts and decided it was also the right venue to try and explain away his Totenkopf, or death’s head, tattoo. According to him, he was drunk on leave in Croatia, where he randomly picked a scary looking skull design that just so happened to be a Nazi insignia. It appears his team was trying to get ahead of a story from Jewish Insider about Platner’s past of jokingly bragging about his Nazi tattoo to folks in DC.

Platner’s political director Genevieve McDonald resigned after the Reddit posts surfaced and screenshots of a private Facebook post from McDonald, written after the tattoo news broke, are circulating on X, where she wrote that “Graham has an anti-Semitic tattoo on his chest. He’s not an idiot, he’s a military history buff.” Oh, also, Platner reportedly isn’t providing his staff with healthcare.

For disappointed leftists out there, I think Defector’s David Roth had the most concise take on all of this, writing on Bluesky, “You have to be willing to walk away from these guys if they let you down, just as a matter of basic self respect. It's not a fandom. You're hiring them to do a job or not.” Of course, there are plenty who are not ready to let Platner go and if you want to see a bunch of infighting about it, feel free to search “Platner” on Bluesky. Hey, at least Platner Fetterman’d before he got elected, right?

So will this sink Platner’s campaign? It could be the end, sure. There’s also nine months to go until Maine’s election and the media environment is a lot different than it was even just a few years ago. It’s hard to hold news stories in our heads now and it’s possible Platner’s team think they can weather the storm. The main question though is why did Platner run as a Democrat? An vaguely economic populist redditor with a Nazi tattoo would have done great as a Republican candidate.

ICE Appears To Be Coordinating With TPUSA

Immigration and Customs Enforcement raided New York City’s Canal Street this week, arresting 13 people. The raid came only a few days after Turning Point USA’s Savanah Hernandez visited the neighborhood, tagging the official ICE X account in her post.

This is the best glimpse we’ve seen yet of how coordinated the official organs of the Trump administration are with the MAGA cyber army. They’re not just amplifying and remixing propaganda from the White House, they’re also leading it. It’s a tight loop that has seemingly replaced the role that Fox News held in the first Trump administration. A sign of the times, I suppose.

OpenAI Did Another Boring Thing That A Company That Is Capable Of Building AGI Probably Wouldn’t Waste Time On

OpenAI, a company that wants you to believe they’re still super serious about inventing artificial general intelligence, a very real thing that is possible, has launched another thing that every other tech company has tried before. They have a new browser called Atlas, which is basically just Chrome with a ChatGPT window attached to it, monitoring everything you do. You’re absolutely killing it right now, visiting Pornhub five days a day is not a weakness — it’s a strength.

I downloaded it to give it a whirl and immediately remembered how annoying it is to set up a new browser and also got progressively creeped out signing into all my apps with ChatGPT watching. So I don’t see myself going back to it ever again. If you do decide to use this browser, just watch out for prompt injections!

Let’s Check In On Men

Seems like Graham Platner is not the hero of reformed toxic masculinity he claimed he was, but let’s see how other kinds of men are doing this week.

Paul Ingrassia, an attorney that was nominated by President Donald Trump to head up the Office of Special Counsel, stepped down this week after Politico published texts from Ingrassia where he called Martin Luther King Jr the “1960s George Floyd” and admitted he has a “Nazi streak.” Hmm, not great. What about other kinds of men?

Less bad for sure, but still concerning, a guy on X said he bought $250,000 worth of nickels because he’s betting “that metal scarcity and inflation will continue to erode the dollar” and make the raw materials of nickels worth more over time. Also, a whole bunch of other guys on X are mad that the Amazon Web Services outage this week turned their smart beds into, uh, normal beds? OK, well what about younger men? How are they doing?

The pop star Sombr, who, again, is not Finn Wolfhard from Stranger Things somehow, is beefing with a woman on TikTok who said that his concert was awful, telling her that 25-year-olds are too old to go to his shows. You can watch the back and forth on X. And if you’re still not concerned about Gen Z boys, here’s a wildly distressing video of young guys swarming a woman reporter and disrupting her live news hit, shrieking “6-7” at the camera.

Is This The Song Of The Fall???

Some Stray Links

P.S. here’s a good TikTok screenshot.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***