Friday, 29 November 2024
Friday, 29 November 2024
Appointees to the State Board of Education usually sail through the confirmation process in Connecticut’s House of Representatives, but a 2009 choice, Linda McMahon, drew intense pushback.
Andrew Fleischmann, who then chaired the House Education Committee, remembers being offended by her selection and leading the opposition.
“She had no involvement whatsoever in education,” Fleischmann, a Democrat, said in a recent interview. “She’s made tens or hundreds of millions of dollars pushing violence and sexualization of young women. She was a real force for doing ill to kids in our country.”
McMahon’s company, World Wrestling Entertainment, was criticized for promoting violence, steroid use and sexualized content. In the early 2000s, McMahon would go so far as to engage in the WWE’s theatrics herself. She kicked her husband, Vince McMahon, the company’s co-founder, in the groin in one routine. In another, she appeared to slap her daughter, Stephanie, and knock her to the floor.
After a contentious floor debate, the House confirmed Linda McMahon by a vote of 96-45, an unusual split for a minor appointment in Connecticut.
McMahon may soon face another confirmation, this time as President-elect Donald Trump’s nominee for Secretary of Education.
Some things have changed in the last two decades. The year before McMahon was nominated to serve on the state’s education board, WWE announced that it was toning down its content so it could become PG-rated. That decision came after criticism and scientific studies that found watching wrestling was correlated with violent behavior among children.
Other things have not changed. The billionaire McMahon couple, now separated and no longer involved in running the business, have been controversial figures for decades. Allegations surrounding the company under their management included promoting steroids, a culture of rampant sexual harassment, intimidation and assault. There have been several out-of-court settlements involving the company or Vince McMahon personally.
Most recently, a lawsuit filed in October accused the McMahons of willfully ignoring the sexual abuse of young boys by a WWE ringside announcer, echoing claims made years ago.
Through their lawyers, the McMahons have denied all accusations of wrongdoing.
Linda McMahon has yet to gain very much experience in education. She quit the Connecticut school board after about a year to run for elective office, personally spending nearly $100 million on two failed efforts to capture a U.S. Senate seat.
Her main schools experience has been serving for 16 years on the board of trustees at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut, where fellow board members described her as a smart businessperson whose style was more practical than ideological. (With Trump pledging to dismantle the Department of Education, experts in the field have suggested that if she is confirmed, her primary task may be to fire people.)
“I don’t think anyone saw this one coming,” Michael J. Petrilli, president of the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, a center-right education policy group, said of her nomination. “I’m very much surprised and a little disappointed, as somebody who thinks education matters.”
Petrilli, who was an official in the Department of Education during the George W. Bush administration, said business expertise would be useful in the department, which oversees billions of dollars in student lending and has been plagued by problems with its FAFSA student aid applications.
But he added, “She is not going to be a thought leader on education.”
McMahon also has experience that is prized by her would-be boss: She is steeped in Trump World.
Their friendship dates back decades, to Trump’s own participation in WWE events, including a show in 2007 when Trump jumped on Vince McMahon and began punching him. Since then, Linda McMahon has given tens of millions to aid Trump’s election efforts.
Trump has expressed admiration for her business acumen. “She helped grow WWE from a modest 13-person operation to a publicly traded global enterprise with more than 800 employees in offices worldwide,” he said in 2016.
He has called her a “superstar.”
McMahon did not respond to a request for an interview.
McMahon, 76, grew up Linda Edwards in New Bern, North Carolina, a small city on the coast. She married Vince McMahon, also a North Carolinian, shortly after high school, and graduated from East Carolina University in 1969.
In documents filed in connection with her appointment to the Connecticut board, she claimed that her degree was in education. She later corrected that her major was actually in French.
She obtained a teaching certificate, but never worked in a classroom. Instead, after the couple moved to Washington, D.C., Linda McMahon worked as a paralegal.
The couple found their niche in wrestling promotion. In 1982, they purchased the business that would become the WWE from Vince McMahon’s father. After they took over, they branched out into broadcasting, publications, action figures and films. (Last year, WWE merged with Ultimate Fighting Championship, the mixed martial arts company, and formed TKO Group Holdings.)
In a questionnaire filed when she was nominated for the Connecticut board, Linda McMahon outlined a number of legal entanglements the couple had contended with over the years, including an IRS fraud investigation that resulted in no charges.
The most prominent of the legal problems was Vince McMahon’s 1993 indictment accusing him of providing steroids to wrestlers. Both he and the company were acquitted. Among the witnesses for the prosecution was wrestler Hulk Hogan. Linda McMahon was not named as a defendant in that case.
Still, in a spectacle where bulkier and stronger is usually better, the taint of illicit steroid use would not go away. In 2007, after wrestler Chris Benoit killed his wife and son, and then himself, WWE became the subject of a congressional inquiry. At the time, WWE said it had suspended 10 wrestlers over steroid use.
Steroids and the WWE came up during Linda McMahon’s Connecticut confirmation hearing. One lawmaker, state Rep. Shawn Johnston, described how he became embarrassed while attending a WWE event with his wife and two sons.
“It had an incredible sexual overtone, with incredibly scantily clad women doing what I can say is basically selling pure sexuality,” he said during the February 2009 hearing. After that outing, Johnston said, the couple forbade their sons from watching wrestling.
Lawmakers supporting Linda McMahon pointed to the good works of her company. Among other public service programs, WWE encouraged young people to register to vote as part of a Rock the Vote initiative in the 2000s. It also held a WrestleMania reading challenge.
Beth Yoke, then an official of the National Library Association’s young adult division, said she contacted WWE because of its popularity among teens. Under the challenge, students who read 10 books and reported on them won a chance to attend a WWE event.
When Linda McMahon resigned from the state school board to run for the U.S. Senate, she expressed concern that her candidacy might violate a state prohibition on political activities by board members. She lost the 2010 race to Richard Blumenthal, and lost again in 2012 to Christopher Murphy, despite outspending each of them by wide margins. During the campaigns, she cast herself as a social moderate, voicing support for abortion rights and charter schools.
By 2016, she had given up running for office herself and attached her political ambitions to Trump, donating a total of more than $7 million to two super political action committees backing his presidential campaign. He rewarded her munificence, tapping her to lead the Small Business Administration during his first term in office. She sailed through the confirmation process, with endorsements from both her state’s senators, Blumenthal and Murphy.
She went on to help lead the American First Policy Institute, a little-known right-wing organization formed in 2021. She also increased her support for Trump, providing more than $21 million to various Trump-related campaign entities in the 2023-24 election cycle.
After he won on Nov. 5, McMahon was hired to steer Trump’s transition, and the policy organization is believed to be wielding enormous influence in planning for the fledging Trump administration.
The group’s education agenda would steer schools decidedly to the right, by promoting increased spending for charter and private schools, reducing the influence of teachers’ unions, and expanding “parental rights” by giving parents more direct control over many aspects of public education, including curriculum and school library books.
In higher education, the group has opposed permitting transgender players in women’s sports; demanded the elimination of diversity, equity and inclusion programs; and argued in favor of eliminating college degree requirements for some public-sector jobs.
Still, the education post was viewed as something of a consolation prize for McMahon. She was rumored to be Trump’s choice for commerce secretary, but the other co-chair of the transition team, Howard Lutnick, was picked for that post instead. Trump cited McMahon’s experience on the Connecticut board and her “deep understanding” of both education and business as reasons for his decision.
McMahon’s tenure on the Connecticut board offers little insight into how she might run the Department of Education. Most of the votes during her year on the board involved routine matters. Records show that McMahon visited two Stamford charter schools on the board’s behalf.
One idea she has favored is expansion of career and technical education. Patricia A. Ciccone, a former superintendent of Connecticut’s technical high school system, said in an interview that McMahon’s interest in technical schools dated back to her involvement on a board panel overseeing them.
Michael P. Meotti, the state’s Commissioner of Higher Education at the time, said in an email that he had no recollection of McMahon’s board service. But he added that Gov. M. Jodi Rell, the moderate Republican who appointed her, had a vastly different education agenda than Trump’s.
McMahon remains involved at Sacred Heart University, where she is now the board treasurer. Patrick G. Maggitti, the provost at Villanova University and a former Sacred Heart board member, said he remembered how prepared she was for meetings and the savvy guidance she gave as the university undertook building projects and other expansions.
“As a business person, she is someone who you would want to have in the room if you were making tough decisions, or any decisions,” he said. As for what she would do as education secretary, he hoped for the best.
“She seemed to be dedicated to higher education, at least at Sacred Heart,” he said. “It seemed important to her.”
The New York Times News Service
