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On Nov. 19, President-elect Donald Trump named former wrestling executive Linda McMahon, who led the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019, to head the Department of Education. McMahon served for a year on the Connecticut Board of Education from 2009 to 2010 and spent extended time on the Board of Trustees of Sacred Heart University between 2004 and 2017, but overall has a comparatively limited education background. That alone is likely to make her nomination controversial, although with a 53-seat majority in the Senate, Republicans may be able to steward all but the most problematic nominees through the confirmation process.

From wrestling power couple to politics

A native of New Bern, North Carolina, the 76 year-old married her high school sweetheart Vince McMahon in 1966. The McMahons founded Titan Sports, Inc. in 1980 and expanded it into a multi-billion dollar global empire, now called World Wrestling Entertainment. She and Vince McMahon, from whom she is now estranged, have been the subject of multiple sexual assault and sexual trafficking allegations. One suit, filed by former “ring boys,” alleged that the couple was aware that one of their employees was sexually assaulting them and did nothing to stop it. That lawsuit “is filled with scurrilous lies, exaggerations and misrepresentations,” said Linda McMahon’s attorney Laura Brevetti at CNN.

Before her appointment to the Small Business Administration in 2017, McMahon twice tried unsuccessfully to win a Senate seat in Connecticut, first in 2010. She subsequently outran 2012 Republican presidentIal nominee Mitt Romney by 6 points in her second race but could not overcome the state’s heavy Democratic lean. And in both campaigns, scandals and accusations regarding the McMahons’ wrestling empire were a major line of attack. “It was her greatest strength and weakness at the same time,” said Murphy advisor Scott Bates at The Connecticut Post.

McMahon spent almost $100 million of her own fortune on the Senate runs. Wealthy self-funded candidates like McMahon “typically fade from popular memory” after a defeat, said Michelle Hackman at the Yale Daily News, but instead she continued to wield her fundraising prowess and influence. After her second loss, she was “a failed candidate still engaged in the GOP,” said Simone Pathé at Roll Call.

The rise of a Trump ally

McMahon was one of Trump’s earliest backers in 2016 and has served on the 2024 Trump transition effort since August, helping to vet other potential cabinet picks. She will step into an unusual situation for a cabinet secretary, since Trump repeatedly promised to abolish the Department of Education. McMahon has been “assigned the fraught task of carrying out what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions,” said Zach Montague and Ana Swanson at The New York Times. However, the president would need Congress to pass the bill, a move that would be very difficult to accomplish given the GOP’s narrow majorities.

Trump’s Agenda 47 platform called for a broad variety of new education policies, many of them involving controversial culture war issues like trans rights. As president, Trump would “turn back the tide of left-wing indoctrination and once again respect the fundamental right of parents to control the education, healthcare, and moral formation of their children,” said the campaign in its Agenda 47 education page. The campaign called for funding to go to districts that eliminate tenure for teachers and give parents the right to elect school principals. The campaign also said it would try to force colleges and universities to eliminate their DEI programs and may threaten to ban federal loans to those that won’t comply.

McMahon has not said which aspects of the Trump campaign education agenda she would prioritize and did not address education in her speech at the 2024 Republican National Convention. She has long been a supporter of school choice and vouchers dating back to her brief stint on the Connecticut Board of Education. McMahon’s “chief goal for education is to promote vouchers, which drain resources from public schools,” said Amanda Litvinov at NEA Today.