Who is Linda McMahon? The WWE co-founder is Trump’s education secretary pick

Linda McMahon, the former head of the Small Business Administration and co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment, has been nominated by President-elect Donald Trump to run the Education Department, an agency he has threatened to do away with.

“We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead the effort,” Trump said in the announcement.

“I first met Donald Trump when I was the CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment. For fun, he became part of some of the most compelling and highest rated storylines in the company’s history,” McMahon said in a speech at the Republican National Convention this year.

The 76-year-old, who has donated tens of millions of dollars to Trump’s campaigns, currently co-chairs his transition team.

Here’s what to know about her.

She co-founded WWE

Before her career in politics, McMahon founded the global wrestling juggernaut now known as World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband Vince McMahon. She led the company as its chief executive between 1997 and 2009, and served as its president from 1993 to 2000.

[Vince McMahon steps down from TKO, parent of WWE and UFC, amid sexual assault claims]

Under her leadership, WWE grew from “a 13-person regional operation to a publicly traded global enterprise with more than 800 employees,” according to her biography at the Small Business Administration.

On WWE’s wildly popular programs, she has slapped her daughter and kicked her husband in the crotch during appearances in several family showdown storylines. Linda and Vince are separated, according to her attorney, Laura Brevetti.

The couple donated $5 million to a now-defunct charity run by Trump between 2007 and 2009. Trump once famously shaved Vince’s head during an appearance on WrestleMania’s “Battle of the Billionaires.”

McMahon stepped down from her role at WWE in 2009 to run twice for one of the two U.S. Senate seats representing Connecticut. Both bids were unsuccessful.

She ran the Small Business Administration

McMahon was selected by Trump to head the Small Business Administration, an agency that serves to empower small businesses, during his first presidency. She was one of the few female members to serve in his 2016 Cabinet.

“As an entrepreneur myself, I feel tremendous responsibility to America’s small businesses,” she had said during her tenure.

She resigned from the job in 2019. “I knew she was good but I didn’t know she was that good,” Trump said at the time of her departure.

She is not known for her work on education

In his announcement, Trump cited McMahon’s stint on the Connecticut Board of Education during 2009 and 2010. It also mentioned her time on the board of trustees at Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.

But she is not widely recognized for her expertise in the field. One person active in conservative education policy circles expressed concern that she may have been offered the role because she was owed a senior position, The Washington Post reported. Her name had been under consideration for the position of commerce secretary, which ultimately went to investor Howard Lutnick.

Most recently, McMahon has served as the chair of the board of the conservative think tank America First Policy Institute, which lists education policy as one of its agendas. The group advocates more parental control over what is taught to children and targets academics for their embrace of what it describes as “identity politics.”

“Instead of dividing our country by teaching an alternative version of our country’s story, our Nation’s schools should affirm and celebrate America,” the group says.

She is named in a lawsuit by former ‘ring boys’

Linda and Vince McMahon are named in a civil suit filed in October by five anonymous plaintiffs who worked decades ago as “ring boys,” a term for teenagers involved in setting up WWE events. The suit alleges that the two were aware of sexual abuse faced by the plaintiffs by high-ranking WWE employees but failed to take adequate steps to protect them.

Brevetti dismissed the lawsuit as “baseless.”