Tag: Linda

This is part of Hello, Trumpworld, Slate’s reluctant guide to the people who will be calling the shots now—at least for as long as they last in Washington.

Surveying all of the late-MAGA freaks and burnouts who are scheduled to join Donald Trump’s second administration (Mehmet Oz, Tulsi Gabbard, Kari Lake), you might get the idea that the once and future president intends to surround himself exclusively with people he most recently remembers from television. But that isn’t entirely the case, because Linda McMahon—professional wrestling dynast, twice-failed GOP Senate candidate, and the former head of the Small Business Administration—is back for another round. She is set to become Trump’s secretary of education, overseeing a department the man repeatedly threatened to abolish while he was on the campaign trail. There are more prestigious appointments in the Cabinet, with much more significant political leverage, but I don’t think there’s a character in Trumpworld that better illustrates the man’s chintzy tabloid-patronage philosophy. Here is Linda McMahon, responsible for the worst Stone Cold Stunner ever recorded, tapped for her second consecutive job in a Trump White House that she possesses zero qualifications for.

If there is one thing you must give McMahon credit for, it’s that she escaped her first orbit in Trumpworld pretty much scandal-free. McMahon’s perch in the highly insulated Small Business Administration never entered the headlines for any colossal graft controversies or under-explained interactions with Russian liaisons. (She left the position, of her own accord, in 2019, which is something you can’t say about most Trump Cabinet members.) But McMahon didn’t accrue nearly the same clean sheet during her tenure at World Wrestling Entertainment, which she co-founded with her husband in 1980 and where she served as a loosely defined “co-CEO” until 2009. Where do you even start?

There was that time she was sued for looking the other way during the pervasive sexual abuse of teen boys throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Or that incident in 1994 where the U.S. government charged the WWE with illegally supplying steroids to its wrestlers. Or the monstrous allegations levied against her husband, Vince McMahon, who was accused by a young paralegal at the company of forcing or coercing her into sex acts that almost defy the imagination. Oh, also, in 2009 when McMahon was being vetted to join the state board of education in Connecticut, she claimed to have a teaching degree. That wasn’t true; she majored in French.

But again, it’s hard to imagine any of that baggage slowing her down. McMahon has been here before, and given how hot the discourse has been about other figures up for nomination—Pete Hegseth, RFK Jr., take your pick—she will likely breeze through the confirmation process. As for what she intends to accomplish? Well, assuming Trump doesn’t reduce the federal government’s educational oversight abilities into acrid rubble, McMahon has spent the past four years chairing the America First Policy think tank, which has specialized in attacking all the ways the nation’s Marxist schools are brainwashing our children. So expect a lot of the lowest-common-denominator culture-war stuff, targeting the spectral vagaries that MAGA people seem to think have ravaged public schooling. (Novels that will turn your children transgender, textbooks that contain any mention whatsoever of America’s shortcomings, the New York Times’ 1619 Project, which, I swear to god, is an enduring fascination of about half a dozen D.C. lobbyists and exactly nobody else.) It’s all bad, but it’s also exactly what you expect.

This will be new territory for McMahon, who, in her dealings with both her husband and the future president, has traditionally preferred to work behind the scenes. Bringing the hammer down on gay coaches, or trans kids, or history teachers who dare cover Plessy v. Ferguson is typically the terrain of oafs like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene—who, beyond all of their rapacious civic predilections, clearly love being on television. Trump’s Department of Education is the weapon of choice to prosecute those causes, and if McMahon chooses to wield it, she will become the liberal nemesis she’s never been before in public life. Is she truly willing to take a swing?

So maybe the presence of Linda McMahon within this mess should be taken as a sign of normalcy. The gears of government keep turning no matter who is at the helm, and given McMahon’s lifelong resistance to controversy, there’s a chance she’ll retreat into the safe harbors of school vouchers and teacher tenure—issues close to the GOP cause that will nonetheless ensure her face stays far away from MSNBC. For as much as we bluster about the unprecedented nature of Trump’s ascension—and trust me, there is reason to bluster—some of the system’s tenets are impossible to subvert. A middlebrow elite earning dominion over an appendage of government for no reason other than their familiarity and adjacency to someone more powerful than them? Who must balance their political survival, personal dignity, and mandate to supply red meat for the howling masses? Some things never change.

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