Linda McMahon, the co-chair of President-elect Donald Trump’s transition team who spent much of her career as a pro-wrestling executive, is the incoming president’s choice to serve as secretary of education, the transition team announced Tuesday.
McMahon, 76, is a longtime friend and early supporter of Trump’s who served as head of the Small Business Administration during the Republican’s first term. She stepped down from the SBA in 2019 to lead the America First Action PAC in support of Trump’s reelection. She was reportedly in the running to serve as commerce secretary before Trump chose McMahon’s fellow transition co-chair, Howard Lutnick, for that post.
“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump said in a statement announcing her selection. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”
CNN reported McMahon’s expected selection first.
While she has executive branch experience, McMahon will be tackling education policy at the highest level after only scattered experience with it in the past. Still, McMahon has proven herself to be an ideological ally to Trump with her long-standing interest in school choice.
In the announcement, Trump said McMahon will “fight tirelessly to expand ‘Choice’ to every State in America, and empower parents to make the best Education decisions for their families.”
The decision drew immediate backlash from the nation’s largest teachers’ union, which called for the Senate to reject her nomination.
Linda McMahon has some experience in K-12 policy
She studied in college to be a French teacher but went on to work alongside her husband as a co-founder and CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment, where she grew the brand for years into a multibillion-dollar enterprise.
McMahon was appointed to the Connecticut board of education in 2009 by a Republican governor. State lawmakers there confirmed her for the post, but questioned her knowledge of education and and whether having a WWE executive serve in the post would send the right message, the CTNewsJunkie reported at the time.
She resigned from the state board a year later to make the first of two unsuccessful bids to represent Connecticut in the U.S. Senate. In the first campaign, which she lost to Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal, McMahon called for more “choice and competition” through the expansion of charter schools, Education Week reported at the time.
McMahon said previously she was involved with Teach For America and charter schools. She was complimentary of teaching and the profession in an interview with Leaders Magazine in 2014, saying that she watched “masterful teachers” help students gain ground. She said the country had a “very good system with public and private schools,” while also saying she was a proponent of charter schools.
Ahead of the 2016 presidential election, she wrote in a newspaper op-ed about the importance of education policy at the federal level. “One of the issues most important to me is the question of school choice,” she wrote.
“I don’t believe charter schools take anything away from traditional public schools; rather, I think they can be centers for innovation and models for best practices,” she wrote in the August 2015 essay.
She also serves on the board of Connecticut’s Sacred Heart University, a Catholic university.
While McMahon is light on experience in education policy, she’s proven herself a Trump loyalist—and Trump historically has favored supporters.
Trump appeared in WWE programs over the years, and she donated to his first campaign, the Associated Press reported. After serving in his administration, she resigned from her role to lead a main super PAC supporting his reelection and raised millions. She also serves as chair of the board for the America First Policy Institute, an organization formed after Trump’s 2020 loss that seeks to advance the former president’s public policy agenda.
As education secretary, McMahon would be tasked with dismantling the department she leads if Trump follows through with his campaign promise. He’s also pledged to cut federal funding to schools “pushing critical race theory” and “transgender insanity.” (During her time leading the SBA, the agency was criticized for the removal of resources for LGBTQ+ business owners; the webpage was later restored, the Washington Post reported.)
Education advocates call for protecting public schools after nomination
The decision is teeing up clashes to come with public education advocates and the Trump administration.
National Education Association President Becky Pringle called on the Senate to reject McMahon’s nomination, calling Trump’s proposed education policies “harmful, outlandish, and insulting.”
“By selecting Linda McMahon, Donald Trump is showing that he could not care less about our students’ futures,” Pringle said.
National Parents Union President Keri Rodrigues said the group was “optimistic” that McMahon would stay out of the political fray and instead focus on literacy and persistent learning loss from the pandemic.
Rodrigues emphasized the importance of a Department of Education that “safeguards the rights of students, addresses systemic inequities, and lays the foundation for achieving measurable academic results.” She pressed for McMahon to ensure “every child has great public school options, districts are held accountable for student outcomes, and the rights and funding for children with special needs are protected and prioritized.”
Education observers anticipate Trump, in his second term, will double down on efforts from the first. This time, with internal skeptics mostly out of the way and Democrats losing control of the Senate, there will be fewer guardrails.
In his first term, Trump repeatedly sought deep cuts to the Department of Education’s bottom line, including to popular programs that help districts offer after-school programs and hire and train teachers. He also came into office with a big focus on private school choice and rolled back Obama-era protections for transgender students.
Trump’s 1776 Commission sought to generate momentum around teaching “patriotic” U.S. history. President Joe Biden ended it immediately upon taking office, but it’s credited with breathing life into a wave of state laws restricting how teachers can discuss race, racism, and gender identity in classrooms.
Unless Trump makes a recess appointment, McMahon will have to clear a Senate vote to serve as education secretary. She’s been through a Senate confirmation vote before, however, winning confirmation as SBA administrator in 2017 in an 81-19 vote.
This time around, Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., who is the incoming chairman of the Senate’s health, education, labor, and pensions committee, will be responsible for steering the nomination.
McMahon’s tenure as a WWE executive came under fire recently in a lawsuit that alleged the organization’s leaders were aware of and didn’t stop a longtime ringside announcer from sexually abusing young boys who helped the ring crew, The Hill reported last month. The lawsuit named McMahon and her husband Vince, whose attorney called the claims “absurd, defamatory and utterly meritless,” according to USA Today.
