Why is the WWE Infiltrating the White House?
Linda McMahon’s nomination for Secretary of Education may be funny, but it says a lot more about American society than most people are comfortable with.
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The piece below is part of our blog post series written by the Open-Air Journal team where we explore issues at Heller, current events, or whatever is on our minds.
On November 19, 2024, President-elect Donald Trump nominated former World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) CEO Linda McMahon for Secretary of Education. At once, this choice seemed totally obvious and utterly baffling. On one hand, McMahon has stuck by President Trump’s side throughout his political career. She led the Small Businesses Administration in his first cabinet, managed the America First Action Super PAC since 2019, and currently leads the transition team for his re-entry into the White House. Their relationship predates his presidency, with Trump being good friends with Linda’s husband, disgraced professional wrestling juggernaut Vince McMahon. Trump was a common guest on WWE programming, and Vince and Linda were top donors to the Donald J. Trump Foundation before its liquidation. Given how Trump is rewarding his closest celebrity allies with cabinet appointments, McMahon was an inevitable presence. Still, her selection for Secretary of Education boggles the mind. If appointing the ex-CEO of the world’s largest professional wrestling company to small business leadership seemed incongruous, leaping to the most powerful position in U.S. education policy, especially given her dubious education record, threatens to break all logic. As easy as it is to laugh off this appointment as incompetent nepotism, McMahon’s ascension in the political world should raise concern for not just the next four years of education policy, but lasting damages to civil rights and the prominence of fascism in the U.S. cultural fabric.
It is important to note how McMahon’s career shaped her political ambitions. Though she left the WWE in 2009, her subsequent career could not have happened without the capital accrual and notoriety her and her family gained from the professional wrestling industry. Her leadership in the WWE resulted in the company making inroads into Republican politics, creating SmackDown Your Vote! in the early 2000s and spearheading a company appearance at the 2000 Republican National Convention. Her husband’s creative vision reflected these ambitions, heavily lampooning Presidents Clinton and Obama, writing queerphobic and racist storylines, and incorporating strong pro-military themes into his programming. Because of these efforts, Linda McMahon saw a natural opportunity to transition into politics late in her career. She mounted two attempts to become a Republican Senator in Connecticut in 2010 and 2012. Despite extravagant campaign spending, both attempts failed against the Democrats by wide margins. While one would think these underperformances signaled the end of McMahon’s professional pivot, they only ingrained her further into the conservative political scene.
In 2021, after her stint in the Trump administration, McMahon became the chairwoman of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), founded by fellow Trump cronies Larry Kudlow and Brooke Rollins. An alternative to the Heritage Foundation, the AFPI maintains close ties with President-elect Trump and has proposed a government transition program similar to Project 2025. The AFPI’s plan emphasizes the elimination of transgender rights, national abortion bans, crackdown on all immigration, vast welfare cuts, and full reversal of climate change mitigation efforts. Admittedly, these policies stray from McMahon’s earlier positions moderately supporting abortion rights and gay marriage. However, as the institute’s chairwoman, McMahon is not some naïve nepotism hire, oblivious to the policy decisions of her peers. Her social media posts display her expertise in Trump-era rhetoric. She is a calculated opportunist who leveraged her business ties to push her far-right social agenda. One of her staunchest political positions is charter school support, pushing Trump on the agenda for “universal school choice.” With her leading national education policy, public schoolchildren under the next presidential administration are at risk of huge blows to gender expression, lessons on basic social inequality, and school lunch spending. If anything, her rise to prominence despite her political unpopularity is scarier than the seasoned politicians who have latched onto Trump. It shows how rapidly Trump’s neo-fascism has seeped into civil society.
In addition to the menacing prospect of her reforms to education policy, the shadow of another decision looms over McMahon’s appointment. As previously covered in this journal, Vince McMahon is embroiled in several federal investigations and civil lawsuits over his decades of sexual improprieties at the helm of WWE. While Vince and Trump’s friendship always made it likely, Linda’s appointment to the Trump cabinet all but confirms that the next president will pardon her husband if he is found guilty. This possibility signals the virulent anti-feminism of the modern far-right. The synergy of Vince McMahon and Donald Trump, two men who succeeded while being accused of heinous sex crimes, linking the power fantasies of themselves and their families shows the deep depravity of U.S. society. Professional wrestling, in fact, is the entertainment industry which best mirrors the contradictions of late-stage American capitalism. Especially under the McMahons’ leadership, U.S. pro wrestling narratives have been shaped by American nationalism, labor violations, predatory sexualization of women, and patriarchy. Trends ebb, flow, and reinvent themselves, but still exist in every era. As Linda McMahon’s appointment comes shortly after the revelation of another horrific lawsuit implicating her, her husband, and the WWE, the easy jokes about enshrining Hulk Hogan and the Undertaker in high school history books feel trivial. The McMahons and Trumps of the United States are not aberrations, but are now norms of our political life. These norms will not shift without militant feminist organizing and targeted demands for change in U.S. political culture.
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