|
David Remnick
Editor, The New Yorker
|
Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education, is one of just a handful of top officials from the first Trump Administration who has managed to hang around for the second. She is certainly the only one who’s repeatedly had her limp body wheeled into a wrestling ring to be mocked and humiliated by her husband, or who’s been held upside down and slammed on her head before thousands of screaming fans.
In this week’s issue, Zach Helfand offers a deeply reported and insightful portrait of how the years that McMahon spent working with her husband, Vince, to build World Wrestling Entertainment into a multibillion-dollar enterprise laid the foundation for her current task of serving in the Trump White House. As Helfand puts it, “McMahon is familiar with organizations built around an increasingly unstable man who is a genius at spinning story lines that inflame the crowd and damage enemies and institutions but, if you think too hard about them, don’t necessarily add up to a coherent narrative.”
Linda was seventeen when she married Vince, whom she recalls as being “the local badass” of her North Carolina home town. Together, after lean beginnings that included declaring bankruptcy, they built the W.W.E. from a local New England wrestling outfit into a global brand. Linda had the head for business, and secured intellectual-property rights that eventually formed the basis for much of the company’s value. Vince, meanwhile, was a natural performer, whose wild and unsettling in-ring antics—often involving members of his family—echoed the dark allegations of sexual assault that followed him outside of it. (He denies any wrongdoing.) Vince was the pro-wrestling visionary; Linda was “the implementer,” as one former W.W.E. executive puts it. “Something about her views an unstable and monomaniacal man as a useful tool,” a biographer of Vince McMahon’s tells Helfand. “I don’t think she sees herself as submissive to these men.”
McMahon met Donald Trump through the W.W.E. She and Vince helped introduce him to wrestling fans by casting Trump as a character in the ring. McMahon twice ran for Senate from Connecticut, spending millions of her own money on losing efforts. “She wasn’t interested in the issues,” one of her Republican-primary opponents recalls. “She just appeared to be interested in the office.” During the 2016 race, she was one of Trump’s biggest donors, and, after he was elected, landed a place in his Cabinet, as the head of the U.S. Small Business Administration. After 2020, many figures from Trump 1.0 faded away, but McMahon remained close to Trump, and helped organize the America First Policy Institute, which, Helfand reports, played an outsized role in crafting executive orders that the President later unleashed in a fusillade from the Oval Office.
Today, McMahon is back in the Cabinet, this time leading the Department of Education. She has almost no background in education, but no matter. She has been given a new vision to implement: working with the school-voucher movement, taking on major American universities, and gutting the agency, with the ultimate aim of persuading Congress to abolish it altogether. McMahon has again been moving swiftly and assuredly. “She’s a friendly, sociable, normal person,” a former Administration adviser says. “We’ve got so many bad cops in this Administration that even a firm hand gets to be the good cop.” But, as Helfand details, the cuts at the agency have been as haphazard as they’ve been ruthless. “McMahon has played the role,” he writes, “of a friendly grandmother wielding a hatchet.”
|
