The clown car of Trump Cabinet appointees has come to include a potential Education Secretary: Linda McMahon, the billionaire chief executive of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), a sports entertainment company she founded with her husband, Vince McMahon.
McMahon’s public education experience is even skimpier than that of Trump’s first Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, but that’s precisely the point. Trump’s new Cabinet picks are chosen to be disruptors, to somehow root out corruption and waste in the federal government.
McMahon has long had ties to Trump. Prior to either entering politics— McMahon sought higher office twice in the early 2000s but did not succeed—Trump appeared as a guest on WWE. McMahon donated millions to Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign; during his first term, he tapped McMahon to head the Small Business Administration.
McMahon has said she once considered teaching as a career, and briefly served on the Connecticut Board of Education in 2009. That appears to be the extent of her direct engagement with education. Now, she is being tasked with implementing Trump’s vision to dismantle the Department of Education.
This vision fits right in with the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 agenda, a guidebook of rightwing policy priorities for the second Trump Administration. The agenda was created by people with direct ties to the Trump campaign, including a handful of Cabinet nominees. Trump, ever the political chameleon, distanced himself from Project 2025 when it became a key line of attack from the Harris campaign.
McMahon also does not appear to be an ideologue so much as a very wealthy friend of Trump who shares his fondness for school choice and distaste for “woke” education policies.
In recent weeks, McMahon has purportedly been angling for the job of Commerce Secretary, which instead went to another billionaire friend of Trump’s, Howard Lutnick. The Education Secretary post might be little more than a consolation prize for McMahon, but her appointment has rattled education leaders. She is, in the estimation of National Education Association President Becky Pringle, “grossly unqualified.”
But we can safely assume McMahon’s nomination will soon be confirmed, even despite the accusations of sex trafficking leveled at her husband. (In this sea of accused sex offenders—including former Rep. Matt Gaetz, who was forced to drop out of consideration for Attorney General, and Pete Hegseth, the Fox News host-turned-Trump’s pick to head the Department of Defense—it’s hard to stand out.)
McMahon seems to lack both the bite and the religious fervor of her predecessor, DeVos. But public education advocates should not indulge in a sigh of relief. Longstanding bipartisan support for the privatization of public education has left it vulnerable in both red and blue states, and another Trump Administration might just bring about an unwelcome tipping point.
When public schools are routinely pushed to the brink of failure through overcrowding, perpetual budget crunches, and education reform policies handed down by everyone from Mark Zuckerberg to Laurene Powell Jobs, they become extremely vulnerable to Trump-style disruption—which, in this case, consists mostly of auctioning off key parts of the federal government to the highest bidder. Public schools today need an ardent defender, not another billionaire placekeeper.