Inside Linda McMahon's effort to dismantle the Dept. of Education

shapes our lives.

“How are we spending too much on other people's weddings?”

Is social media bad for your mental health? We're here for your right to be curious. One big question at a time. Follow It's Bene Minute wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air.

I'm Dave Davies. And filling out his cabinet, President Trump has tapped some colorful characters, sometimes TV hosts and talking heads whose views appeal to him. His pick for secretary of education, Linda McMahon, has television experience of a different kind, talking smack in pro wrestling rings, often with her husband, wrestling mogul Vince McMahon,

known for his showmanship and allegations of sexual abuse. Our guest writer Zach Healthant has written a profile of Linda McMahon in the New Yorker. She is no clown, he finds.

“She proved to be a savvy businesswoman as CEO of the Family Wrestling Empire, and when”

Trump tapped her to head the small business administration in his first term, Healthant

writes she was a steady and effective leader, many described her as capable, kind, and empathetic. She came to her new role with little experience in education policy, but an unwavering commitment to Trump's goal of eliminating the department altogether. While only Congress can formally abolish the cabinet level agency, Healthant writes that McMahon is systematically dismantling the department, cutting some 50% of its employees, and transferring

its functions elsewhere, with dramatic impacts on education research, student loan management, and programs for students with disabilities. He also finds that her experience with professional wrestling and her volatile husband was good preparation for her turn to maga politics. Zach Healthant became a staff writer at the New Yorker in 2025.

Previously he was an editor of the magazine's talk of the town feature, a member of its

“fact checking department, and a reporter for the Los Angeles Times.”

His new story is the executor, our professional wrestling prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's cabinet. Zach Healthant, welcome to Fresh Air. Thanks for having me. Personal wrestling is more than just battles in the ring, with pile driving and swinging

chairs. This is something that you describe well. I mean, it's also stories, right, with characters and a plot with dialogue in the ring and videos that are shown in the big screens and the arenas of live or recorded confrontations involving the characters.

You write that Vince McMahon, a Linda's husband, played a character in these conflicts that were played out in these arenas. Do you want to describe his character? Linda McMahon described wrestling as like a soap opera, basically everyone in the family played a version of themselves, a fictionalized, ostensibly version of themselves.

So Mr. McMahon was this evil billionaire character.

He played the evil owner of wrestling who was always trying to seduce the female wrestlers

he disdained the fans and this was supposed to be fiction and in many ways it was but even Vince has acknowledged that he really enjoyed playing this character because in many ways this character was true to real life. In real life he was flandering, he had many affairs, he was ruthless sometimes contractually with his wrestlers, a lot of the things that he was kind of having fun with in the ring

ended up being true to reality and a lot of that was his relationship with his wife Linda McMahon. Linda was kind of a reluctant participant in the family drama, the two adult kids Shane and Stephanie played a part in the ring before she did and they were pretty enthusiastic about it.

It didn't really want to get into the ring.

She was never interested in that, she wasn't a natural performer but eventually it became

apparent that the wife, the mother figure, was missing. So it really called for her to play a role in the ring and a lot of what went on between Vince and Linda was Vince would mistreat Linda in a lot of ways. He would cheat on her with other wrestlers in the ring. The most famous storyline came when Vince asked Linda for a divorce in the ring and

Linda suffers a nervous breakdown and goes into this kind of catatonic state and for weeks Vince would wheel her out into the ring and inflict these humiliations upon her where he would make out or grow up another female wrestler. And the denumant of all this was that at WrestleMania, the big paper view event, Vince was fighting his sunshine and was about to smash a trash can over his head when Linda who

She wakes up and kicks him in the grind. Oh boy, that's getting a crowd into it. I'm sure. Well, I have a little clip of one of these performances, not the one you described but it gives us a little bit of a sense.

“This is I think it's the year 2000 and Linda is, she's not in a con with her.”

She's standing up. She's in the ring with three big wrestlers, one of them is the rock, I believe. And her husband Vince is a few feet away with the two adult children, Stephanie and Shane. Both have microphones, so the crowd can hear them and they're in the middle of this someone going for you and we hear their exchange, we'll also hear a little bit of the broadcast

announcers professing, shocking surprise at what they're seeing.

So let's just get a sense of this, the Vince McMahon speaks first.

But let me tell you exactly, Linda McMahon, who you truly are and all you truly are is a metal, some goody two shoes, castrating, a true of a life, that's really who you really are. So just get the record straight. Well, Vince, before I was so rudely interrupted when you came out, I was

about to say that these three men, these fine competitors, are going to join forces as one half of a six man tag team at King of the Ring. And there it is, Vince McMahon and Linda McMahon and the ring, I don't know what the king of the ring is, but the crowd obviously did.

“Boy, they really get into this, they hate Vince, they love her, right?”

That's the setup is Vince plays the heel, the evil character, and eventually, almost

always the heel gets his come up in.

And what's really interesting about this psychodrama in the ring was wrestling is supposed to be real in a way, like this is the WWE, this is professional wrestling, this is not UFC, where they're actually fighting and it's a real competition, this is all scripted. For a long time wrestling, and they still do in many ways, plays with what's real and what's fake, and I think what you can sense from the crowd is that they hit on something

that was really, really pure entertainment. Let's talk about kind of how this all got going, tell us a little bit about how Vince and Linda met and how they got together, what their early lines were like. Vince and Linda both grew up in Newburn, North Carolina, Vince, as Linda describes him,

“was kind of the bad boy, he was getting to fight and would be a little bit dangerous and”

that appealed to her.

Linda was the church going kind of civic-minded, good student in town, Vince first saw

her, kind of in probably in church, Vince didn't go to church very often, Linda sang in the choir. Vince was a few years older, Linda was 13 at the time, and they got together and got married at 17, actually she bought her prom dress and her wedding dress on the same day. They eventually went to college together and after college, Linda became a paralegal and

Vince went into the promotion business, so he was promoting things like evil, connevaled jumps and Muhammad Ali kind of exhibition wrestling boxing crossover matches, and he had these big bold ideas and wasn't able to corral them into something that's profitable. They were really creative and as promotions interesting, but on the business side, he couldn't figure out a way to consistently make that work and Linda turned out had the mind for that.

They went bankrupt at one point, had really nothing, and then she got into the business and turned out to be good at it. You write that Linda actually caused the transformation of wrestling by changing the way it is regarded under the law from a sport to entertainment. Why was that significant?

For the longest time, wrestling would not acknowledge that it was fake, and what that meant from a business standpoint was if this is a real sport and competition, you have regulation, you have safety laws, you have taxes, you have fees that you wouldn't pay if this were just the theater. And so just from a business standpoint, Linda McMahon began lobbying state legislatures

that this is the theater, this is not sport, you don't have to regulate it as like sport, and that would save them some money. What happened from that is this really strange and compelling artistic flourishing. They turned into a new kind of art form where you are playing with what's real and what's

The other thing that was significant here was that the company that Linda and Vince owned World Wrestling Entertainment could capture the identities of their performers and their contracts gave the company the intellectual property rights to them, which allowed them to benefit from merchandising and other spin-offs.

Now as Linda's big money-making idea for the company, this is one of the most important

ideas she had for the company, she in college, she studied French and wanted to be a teacher, but she got pregnant right before they both graduated and needed to get a job quickly and so went to this law firm and she was a paralegal working on IP cases in a lot of cases

“and she learned through that how important IP can be in the intellectual property, right?”

In the intellectual property IP and so what she did with the WWE was right into the contracts of the wrestlers that we're creating this character together, the wrestler and the company are creating this character and the company has the rights to the characters, name, image likeness, all those things that you would sell, merchandising or marketing materials or whatever it might be and that ended up being one of the core parts of the business and when this business

grew into a billion dollar business, that is a large reason why, an executive who ran a

rival wrestling company, said it's an IP company just like Disney and credited Linda McMahon

for turning it into that. There were an effective team in business, what was the marriage like? One of the big past times of WWE employees of several years ago was to speculate on what kept them together. Vince, as he has acknowledged, would have many affairs, he had affairs with secretaries,

he had affairs with almost anyone he could and Linda at one point found out about an affair during a trial, Vince was on trial for steroid use in the WWE and through that trial it emerged kind of tangently that Vince was having another affair with another secretary and Linda was at the trial and could be seen crying when she found that out.

“I think this took a toll on her, but they stayed together and the employees would speculate”

why is that? A lot of people thought that there was a lot of love there that there was this long history that they had and Vince was this huge dynamic figure and that's exciting to be around.

But I think also it can't be discounted that they were running this multi-billion dollar

business together and staying together, they knew was best for the business. So there came a point when they stopped living together, they were not divorced, they're still not divorced. And although they say they're separated now, but for years they were running the business together but they weren't living together.

We should also note that some women accused Vince later on of sexual abuse and rape in one case and he made payments in the millions of dollars which became an issue. Vince as early as I believe the early '90s was accused by a female referee of rape and more recently was accused by a woman that he hired for the WWE of just horrible, horrible sexual abuses over months.

And there were payments that the company made to these women that essentially was hush money that they were paying them to not talk about these allegations, which I should mention Vince has denied all of these allegations. And a lot of these payments came when Linda McMahon was the CEO of the company. Donald Trump had a long relationship with Vince and Linda McMahon.

He liked wrestling.

“They eventually made him a character in the world wrestling entertainment shows, right?”

He played as they did a version of himself. He played Donald Trump. He played the nice billionaire to Vince McMahon's evil billionaire and they called their battle the battle of the billionaires. Although it was unclear at the time if either one of them were billionaires.

This is around the time when Trump who had long claimed he was a billionaire was actually becoming a billionaire through the apprentice and other ventures. They played up to the fact that they were both really rich and they made a wager in the ring where each stake to wrestler and the winner would shave the head of the loser. So Trump appeared at WrestleMania and his wrestler won.

He actually got in on the action and he punched or pretended to punch in the WWE of Vince McMahon a bit outside the ring and his wrestler won and he shaved Vince's head in the middle of the ring. He was a wrestling fan for a long time. Growing up he was a wrestling fan.

He liked a wrestler named Antonino Roca. Although he called him Rocky Antonino and when his friends in school would tell him he was wrong, he would insist that no, that's his name. He followed wrestling for years.

He had this very funny stance to wrestling where he really understood it.

“I think they share the wrestling and Trump share sensibility on a really primal level and”

they appealed to the crowd and the theater and the fictionalized version of yourself. But he also seemed to not totally understand what was real and fake himself. There was a storyline in which Vince on air gets into a limo, which drives off and explodes. It's very clearly fake. This is staged.

This is kind of part of the wrestling storyline, falseness. But Trump called into the WWE offices after that, just to make sure that Vince was okay. Just to make sure that, hey, that was fake, right? So he had this, I think, really interesting relationship with the WWE where he's both like a fan where he's imbibing it, like a fan would and thinking, is this real as this

fake and then he also is a character and he knows what to play up and how to play to the crowd.

Well, little McMahon, you know, she said at one point you note, one thing she would never

do is get into politics and then she did in 2010 and again in 2012, ran for the United

“States Senate as a Republican, what's your sense of why she decided to do that?”

She also said she would never get into the ring. The two things she said she would never do would be getting to the ring and getting to politics and she got into the ring first and then after that she got into politics. But the way she describes it is that she saw problems in the country and in the state and she could address them.

But I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that she had gained more and more power and authority within the WWE and she saw that she was good at running the organization and I think she also saw that she enjoyed running a big organization and the next step for

someone like that when you're one of the most powerful people in the state with this huge

corporation is to get into politics. She ran as a Republican but not as a far right Republican in any sense. She was a moderate blue state Republican and she was actually asked during one of the runs whether she would support the elimination of departments such as the education department and she said she wouldn't, she called the idea radical, she was a moderate Republican.

She did spend nearly 50 million dollars of her own money or her family money on the races even though she lost and that got her the attention of Republican leaders across

“the country and then when Trump ran for a president she was on board with him, right?”

Linda McMahon was spending money and to such a scale on a Senate race at a time when that was not at all the norm. She's at records for the amount that she spent on Senate races.

She spent 50 million dollars of her own money on each race and that's normal now but

15 years ago that was very much an aberration and it was such a part of the campaign and such a large amount of money that Vince McMahon actually in the WWE had a skit before her first election night and he appears in the skit in a coma and one of the doctors mentioned that his wife has spent 50 million dollars on the campaign and Vince in the skit suddenly wakes up when he hears that and he says 50 million dollars on what but what that did for her

she lost by 12 points in both elections, their identical losses and they were not particularly close but she spent all of this money on these two losses and what that signal to the Republican establishment was that this is a person who has a lot of money and who is willing to spend it for the Republican cause and so that turned her into a sought after donor and so in 2016 when Trump came around she initially didn't support him explicitly she was a Christy

supporter she wanted Christy to win the nomination and when when Trump was making a lot of his comments about women that were people viewed as very offensive, Linda McMahon came out and criticized those comments but pretty quickly after he won the nomination she recognized that this is a person that you can attach yourself to this is much like Vince this is someone who's volatile who has a genius for inflaiming the crowds in many ways and this is someone who I think

she knew how to handle and so she basically from that point onward was a staunch supporter of his and one of his biggest donors when Trump won in 2016 he appointed Linda McMahon head of the small business administration you say that she was a steady and effective leader, Linda McMahon was a very good administrator and she knew how to run an organization and so when there was a lot of circus kind of atmosphere within the administration within that first administration she was someone

who was competent who had no scandals and who people genuinely liked as as the leader of the

people and she kind of set clear expectations and trusted people to get them done and she did and

she got high marks from employees the jobs had a faction among small business administration employees actually went up significantly during her tenure there some of the outcomes with with getting loans at the door and the comments you would hear from small business owners who it deal with her were pretty positive across the board. We need to take another break here let me reintroduce you we are speaking with Zach Healthhand he's a staff writer at the New Yorker

his new article is titled the executor how professional wrestling prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's cabinet he'll be back to talk more after this short break I'm Dave Davies and this is fresh air when Trump lost the election in 2020 do you know if she joined in his claims that the

“election was stolen to Jim Brace that she didn't talk about it at all um this is I think one of”

her skills is she surrounds herself by often very bombastic people and knows you know when when called upon how to be bombastic herself in the ring or if she's negotiating with universities but she also knows when to keep quiet and so when all this was going on she was mum she she didn't talk about the election but it's interesting you write that after the election she had an overlaw thus meeting this is in 2020 with a couple of other high ranking White House staffers and

talked about forming a think tank to continue Donald Trump's policy agenda they formed the

America first policy institute which was kind of less well known than project 2025 which was

drawn by the Heritage Foundation which was actually in some ways more influential wasn't it? It was or it it turned out to be when Trump lost the election and when it was clear that he had lost he was politically toxic at that point and she made a bet that he either would make a return or his politics would make a return so she and Brooke Rollins who's now the agricultural secretary and Larry Cudlow who's now a Fox News host they created the America

first policy institute this think tank and a lot of attention during the campaign was paid to heritage the heritage foundation and to project 2025 which was their blueprint for how to staff and how to run and what policies should be implemented in a second Trump administration and that also became this toxic political force in the campaign to to such a point where Trump had a distance himself from project 2025 during the campaign because it was hurting him at the polls

and what AFPI did instead of being very vocal about their project like project 2025 was AFPI was very quiet about it and so policy wise there was not a lot of daylight between project 2025 and Heritage and AFPI but what they were competing over was who were going to get these

very limited number of very powerful jobs in the administration who was going to staff the administration

“and AFPI positioned himself very I think smartly and savvily by being the quiet ones and so”

when it became time to staff the administration sure there were a lot of people from Heritage they went into the administration and a lot of the policies got enacted because they they shared a lot of the policies but the people implementing the policies more often were those from AFPI AFPI sent about half of its staff into the administration it's staff to think seven of the original cabinet secretaries including Linda McMahon and were the ones that ultimately grabbed more power

so the second term starts when Trump wins reelection in 2024 what do you know about Trump's conversations with the little big man about what role she would have so Linda McMahon was one of his biggest donors she ran his transition with Howard Lutnic they co-chair the transition together and Trump talked to her and he said what position would

“you want and she said Mr. President I would love to be the commerce secretary that's what she”

had her eye on for years and what she says that Trump told her was great thank you for that I'm actually going to make you the secretary of education and she described to me that she tells the president that Mr. President I don't have much of a background in education and he said that's okay what I want you to do is kill the department he said that you will be successful as the secretary of education when you put yourself out of a job well not not many

cabinet appointments go that way but she took it on let's talk a little about the Department of Education you know since the 1980s conservatives have talked about eliminating it um Ronald Reagan did of course that didn't happen and I think the image among conservatives

correct edicts about what kids should learn what does the Department of Education actually do most of what the Department of Education does is distribute funding that's been appropriated by

Congress so Congress says we're spending you know X billion dollars on these educational programs

and it's up the Department of Education to distribute that to states and to make sure that those are being implemented in line with the law and on top of that there are other programs that they run and other functions that they have that have really become the target of

“conservative iron and I think the biggest example of that is the office of civil rights any time”

there's a civil rights complaint the office of civil rights is in charge of investigating that and reaching a settlement with the school district or the University or the college to make sure that this interaction stops and doesn't happen again so that would be a complaint of someone who says you haven't provided proper educational instruction for my child with the disabilities or there's an example of prejudice anti-Semitism or racism that kind of thing

exactly a lot of these have to do with with disability access but there are sexual harassment there's racial discrimination things like that and this for a long time was not very controversial Clarence Thomas once led the Education Department's Office of Civil Rights but recently there were a couple of policies that OCR was in charge of the Office of Civil Rights was in

charge of that conservative really hated and the first was under Obama there were was guidance

“issued to universities and schools about how to adjudicate sexual harassment claims and they said that”

the standard of proof in those claims needs to be what's called the preponderance of evidence standard which means if someone is accused of sexual harassment they are held liable or responsible for that if it's found that it's more likely than not that they committed that infraction or they committed harassment or assault or whatever it might be instead of using a standard like in the criminal justice system like beyond a reasonable doubt so conservatives viewed that as unfair

and as an overreach and then also there was this push during the Biden administration more fervently to protect transgender rights which conservatives viewed as an overstep they viewed this as a bureaucracy that's unelected that is kind of grabbing power and pushing social changes that conservatives disagree with and this and then also the second thing that really inflamed conservatives was the attempt to cancel student debt which they viewed as basically a give away to

young mostly liberal voters and those two things can bind took this movement to dismantle the department from kind of something that was just rhetorical and talked about to something that they wanted to actually implement we need to take another break here let me reintroduce you we are speaking with Zach health and he is a staff writer at the New Yorker his new article is the executor how professional wrestling prepared lindemic man for Trump's cabinet will continue our

conversation in just a moment this is fresh air so lindemic man becomes head of the department of education has she has 4,000 employees and all of these different programs does she take some time to to tour it learn about what it does is she took about three hours before talking about how she wanted to make this the final mission of the department of course she had the transition process to think about how she might want to implement the dismantling of the department and then within the

week of her confirmation she issued these sweeping layoffs that hit the department doge you know Elon Musk's department of government efficiency had already taken a big swing with the act department of education between those two efforts what kind of differs did it make to the department in just in terms of employment it made a huge difference giving a of actual figure it has been difficult because it's fluctuated because a lot of this was it courts have said this was not carried out

legally some of these layoffs and so people have kind of been in limbo they're on administrative leave sometimes they're brought back by courts sometimes they're brought back by the department

because they've found that they are having trouble meeting these crucial functions they just don't

“have the manpower but they laid off about you know if you want to give a ballpark about half”

of the staff has been out of work and some of the staff are being paid not to work because they haven't been able to fire them so over the first year they spent about thirty million dollars or so paying some of the employees just not to come to work and that's because they have civil service protection and there needs to be a cost to fire them and that's in dispute so they're not working with their being paid exactly courts have said that you're not allowed to fire them either you're

not allowed to fire them in the way that you did or we're going to issue a kind of an injunction you have to leave them employed while we educate this you know one of the things that the

they track things by state do a lot of regular reports on it there's a national report card I think they do and this is through the Institute of Educational Sciences what was the impact of the cuts on those efforts this was a doge cut so this happened before Linda McMahon to go over and

“doge came in and cut about I think it was ninety percent of the Institute of Education Sciences”

staff the Institute of Education Sciences has what's called the nation's report card so when you hear about falling grades in math or reading among fourth graders or eighth graders or whatever it might be that comes from the nation's report card they're assessing how well we're doing at teaching kids and this was actually kind of the stated reason why Trump and Linda McMahon want to

got the education department they cite these falling test scores test scores have fallen basically

since the pandemic and they have said that this is the fault of the education department that we're spending all this money and they're not properly educating the nation's kids and this has been falling since the pandemic and it probably has a lot to do with the pandemic itself could have to do with cell phones I think you'd probably want to dig in more to the causes but they have cited the falling test scores as the reason what they want to get rid of the department

and then doge comes along and guts ninety percent of the Institute that's that's responsible for the nation's report card and makes a lot more difficult for them to continue doing these assessments another function of the department is managing federal student aid I don't know exactly what it does

but that's been transferred to the Treasury Department yes so the federal student aid office

is in charge of administering student loans they have a portfolio at this point of one point seven trillion dollars of outstanding loans that they administer so this is a huge part of the economy and I think this illustrates how difficult the the process of moving one office from one department to another cabinet department are it's not as easy as just kind of moving personnel it's systems it's processes it's legal privileges that also have to be ironed out so the federal

student aid office for example has been working with these really antiquated systems for a long time and people who have worked in the office argue that this is one of the reasons why people think that this department is inefficient in some ways they argue in a lot of cases because they're working just on really old platforms so for example the federal student aid office they have a lot of their records millions and millions of records of these loans that are kept on microfish in Nebraska

in a bunker and so the people who have worked in the office told me that moving it from education

“to Treasury is not so simple it's just kind of clicking a button it's you have to figure out”

how to work with these old antiquated records there there are a lot of these very granular very technical difficulties that come from moving offices you know I covered government for a lot

of years at the local level and I always found that whenever I would look into an agency that is

the subject of a lot of criticism you'd often find yeah there's valid criticisms but there's also a legitimate function you know a need that it meets for some people and some dedicated people you know working to try and help the mission did you get any sense that Linda McMahon ever came to see the value of what the Department of Education staff did I have talked to a lot of people who've worked in the education department or are still working in the education department and have said that

their level of contact with the secretary under McMan's leadership is as low as it's ever been even under Betsy Devos they would hear from her she would interact with them and Linda McMahon hasn't had the same level of communication with everyone this was very different from how she ran this small business administration but it seemed like to people who worked there that she came in with this goal of dismantling the department and so they're the coming in and acclimating

herself there was not really a period of that before she started making these big wholesale cuts and you write that maybe because she really hasn't learned so much about it she at times sounds less than coherent and discussing it you want to give us an example or two of that so she's an intelligent

“person and she's an eager student and she I think has tried to ramp herself up as quick as possible”

but this is a big complicated department with lots and lots of different offices that do lots of different things and there's just enough time to fully get up to speed so she's had clubs where she's forgotten the name of the law that protects students with disabilities that's the idea act she forgot what it stood for in an interview and the most famous club that she had was at a conference she was talking about how she wanted students to have

a one education she thought a one education was really important people didn't know what she was

calling it a one education like the steak sauce she misread she simply misread the term

“right uh we need to take another break here let me reintroduce you we are speaking with Zach”

Hellfand he is a staff writer at the New Yorker his new article is the executor how professional wrestling prepared lindemic man for Trump's cabinet will continue our conversation in just a moment this is fresh air one of the things you write about is the departments assault on elite universities this is an interesting episode there was a joint task force to combat anti-symmatism that was not part of the education department but it was sort of a vehicle for this tell us about how that

worked on how lindemic man was involved lindemic man is on the joint task force to combat anti-symmatism

usually the way the government deals with anti-symatism at schools is through the education

department's office of civil rights the education department's office of civil rights was one of these offices that received pretty devastating staff cuts offices that dealt most often and had the most expertise at dealing with anti-symatism investigations were among the offices that were just guided by the layoffs and so what you would normally see the pace of these investigations and settlements that you would see underpass administrations like the Biden administration just fell off

and one of the things that filled that void was this joint task force to combat anti-symatism the task force was where a lot of these investigations that you would see in the news originated

from so that's like the Columbia investigation in settlement brown those universities

so a lot of this came out of the campus protests after the October 7 attack and the Israeli initiative in Gaza right that's right and this is one of the things that really inflamed the right was they viewed universities as this hotbed for what they view as radical liberal activism that is hostile to conservatives and was also foaming this environment of anti-symatism on campuses and so that's where this task force sprung out of extensively was to try to combat that.

Right you're right that Linda McMahon and pursuing this had an ability to bluster transparently while keeping a straight face kind of something that she learned and the world wrestling entertainment that this was useful in negotiations so I talked to Mei Malman who was deputy under Stephen Miller and oversaw the White House's negotiations with universities and what she told me very transparently was that there's a lot of people in the administration who will

just say we want to destroy these universities we want to get rid of them if possible and what she said is is Linda McMahon doesn't necessarily believe that that she values higher education but she is willing to hold this line with places like Columbia that if you don't fall in in line

“if you don't do what we say then I'm willing to destroy a university if that's what it takes to”

to get reforms through and so I think what she learned from wrestling is to kind of say all this with a straight face I think it would be very damaging if you just kind of ended a number of the countries most prestigious Ivy League universities but she was able to kind of say this and then also use her interpersonal skills and warmth to deal more directly with university presidents and actually have like real substantive conversations one of her strengths Mei Malman told me was that she's

just a normal person and there's a lot of people in the White House who are hardliners who are very fervent and Linda McMahon is more normal so she even though she can stake out this pretty hard line negotiating stance she's able to place something like a good cop within the satmosphere do you have a sense of how her staff feel about this commitment to abolishing the department

“would be demoralizing for a lot of people I think your goal is to shut me down it depends on which”

part of the staff you're talking about and the political appointees are thrilled one of her deputy chief of staff is Lindsay Burke who was the author of the education chapter of project 2025 which outlined a lot of these steps that you can take to dismantle the department a staff members like that are thrilled I think the rank and file staff feel insulted there's been a lot of rhetoric about how they're lazy or they are somehow gaming the system and I think a lot of them

feel like they've devoted a large chunk of their life to serving students and they feel like they're being disrespected they are being laid off in large numbers they've had their lives

what's your sense of how comfortable she is being the hatchet woman here she happy worrying

“I think she is I think she believes in the mission and I believe she is okay with being ruthless”

when necessary I think she likes being this warm friendly person but when necessary she's fine kind of wielding a hatchet and she has tumblers in her office that are unscribed with I believe it says shut it down or something along those lines she truly believes in this in this mission or or at least is projecting the image of such Donald Trump and Linda McMahon cannot eliminate the Department of Education only Congress can do that they know that they don't have the

votes to do it and how it requires 60 votes in in Congress what's your sense of the relationship

between these steps to you know reduce the Department to strip it down and it's ultimate goal

so what Linda McMahon says this is kind of a proof of concept that if they can move all of these offices to different Department agencies and show that it works then they can convince Congress to shut down the Department I don't think they're ever going to convince enough Democrats to shut down the Department at least in the way that the Senate is currently

“constructed so I talked to people about what this project actually is and I think part of it”

is one hypothesis is that if you can hamper the functioning of enough offices within the department then you can point at the federal student aid office for example and say that this isn't working and I talked with some staffers in Congress who say you know offices like that were working and you know you're expecting to point at that and say now it's not working because we all these staff cuts and expect Congress to say okay we're going to shut it down but that's one hypothesis

and another is that this really is about power and they view the education department as having accumulated too much power and doing things that conservatives hate so if you can just hamstring the Department enough you can make it really difficult for a future Democratic administration to enact

“these sorts of policies that Republicans have hated and then also I think she's in favor of”

school privatization one person she invited to sit right behind her at the confirmation I said that she doesn't want any students in public school I think hampering the department opens more doors this is what Miguel Cardona who is Biden's education secretary told me that hampering the department opens the door toward more privatization as well she invents have two adult children Stephanie and Shane does she have any relationship

she or her children with world wrestling entertainment which I guess is what the company was they still have a stake in the company which has gone through sales since Linda and Vince were running it Shane was kind of held up as by Vincent times or hinted at as his successor as his

heir to running the company ultimately Stephanie that the daughter was the one who took over running

you know the functioning of the company she and her husband he was a wrestler he went by triple they ran the company together so it remained for a long time a family affair well Zach Hellfand thank you so much for speaking with us thanks for having me on Zach Hellfand is a staff writer at the New Yorker his new article is titled the executor how professional wrestling prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's cabinet

on tomorrow show historian Stephen J. Ross describes the racist and anti-Semitic groups that formed in the US after World War II to carry on Hitler's work American style he also writes about groups that sent people undercover to infiltrate and expose the hate mongers his book is the secret war against hate I hope you can join us to keep up with what's on the show and get highlights of our interviews follow us on Instagram at npr fresh air

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