The WWE executive has no real background in education.
By Christopher Lewis
Deputy Research Director
Revolving Door Project
By Jacob Plaza
Research Assistant
Revolving Door Project
Amid the incoming Trump administration’s flurry of unqualified, corrupt, and/or vengeance-driven cabinet nominees, it’s been easy to overlook Linda McMahon, Trump’s pick to head the US Department of Education. McMahon is best known for her role in running World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) with her husband the longtime Trump crony Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon’s background in education is exceedingly thin; she served on the Connecticut Board of Education more than a decade ago, thanks to an appointment from another politically connected friend, then–Connecticut Governor Jodi Rell. McMahon has a teaching certificate but has never actually taught. Indeed, she was forced to resign her spot on the Connecticut board when the Hartford Courant reported that she’d lied on her résumé about having an education degree. Add in the alleged role of the WWE and its parent company in a sexual-abuse scandal involving “ring boys” for the wrestling league, and McMahon’s nomination, in any sanely administered political order, would be dead in the water. (McMahon and her husband both deny the abuse allegations in the pending WWE suit.)
Yet McMahon possesses one key credential for the next Trump administration—in addition, that is, to a proven track record to personal fealty to the president-elect, and a long string of Fox News appearances: She’s the former head of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), the policy nerve center for MAGA governance. For all the attention focused on the Heritage Foundation and its Project 2025 policy agenda, AFPI has been Trumpworld’s principal policy network, serving as a haven for former Trump appointees during the Biden years. AFPI hands assembled a detailed blueprint for Trump’s return to power, including plans to make the Trump tax cuts permanent and purge the federal workforce of civil service workers deemed insufficiently MAGA. In addition to McMahon, Trump has tapped several senior AFPI figures for cabinet posts, including EPA nominee Lee Zeldin, Agriculture nominee Brooke Rollins (the think tank’s president and CEO), and its Georgia chapter chair, Doug Collins, Trump’s pick to head the Department of Veteran’s Affairs.
As education secretary, McMahon would be charged with administering a uniquely destructive suite of policies, even by the usual standards of Trump governance. That’s because the Department of Education has been a bête noire of the American right ever since Jimmy Carter founded the agency in 1979. By creating a layer of federal oversight over locally run schools, the DOE has, in the overheated imaginings of right-wing policy mavens, arrogated deep-state sovereignty over the rights of parents to preside over the best educational options and life chances for their children. And as the Education Department has sought to clarify and standardize anti-discrimination policy for LGBTQ+ students, it’s become a pet target for anti-trans culture warriors on the right.
McMahon probably won’t heed the growing chorus of conservative calls to abolish the DOE outright, but she can be counted on to aggressively pursue other key MAGA objectives in education policy. In line with her work at AFPI, McMahon will likely continue to promote the use of privately backed charter schools to defund public education—the most fundamental plank of right-wing education policy. In addition, she’ll probably resume her predecessor Betty DeVos’s campaign to deny basic Title IX protections to LGBTQ+ students. And it’s a safe bet that she’ll also re-up plans to promote Trump’s 1776 commission—MAGA’s agitprop answer to the 1619 Project, promoting a “patriotic” national curriculum to downplay and discourage honest discussion of America’s racial history in the schools.
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