transcript

Speaker 1:
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Speaker 2:
[01:20] Hey, Zach.

Speaker 3:
[01:20] Hey.

Speaker 2:
[01:22] I think it's safe to say that Linda McMahon's prior job experience as a co-founder and longtime executive at World Wrestling Entertainment didn't exactly set her up to be a very good secretary of education. But could you explain why her time at WWE actually set her up to be a very good cabinet secretary for Donald Trump?

Speaker 3:
[01:43] Linda McMahon built the WWE with her husband Vince. And Vince was this very Trumpian character in that he was brash, he was a rule breaker, he was someone who would just steamroll over people. He also had a genius for inflaming the crowd, for keeping people entertained, for spinning up these crazy storylines that made the WWE what it was. And also, as Trump runs into a lot, would act first before thinking and run into trouble. And Linda McMahon was very good at implementing all of his crazy ideas and turning them into viable business propositions, and also at cleaning up his messes. And each time Vince would misstep, even before they owned the WWE, when he was just an independent promoter, he would have these grand ideas like having evil Knievel jump over a canyon that wouldn't really work out, and when that didn't work, they weren't making enough money, they went bankrupt, she would insert herself more into the business. The same thing happened at the WWE. Vince went on trial for steroid use in the WWE, and she became the president in that process because she was like the better public face for the company. When the company had its initial public offering, when it went public, she became the CEO because she was better to talk to Wall Street rather than Vince who was like this kind of crazy off-putting from any character. So dealing with that kind of person, both knowing how to handle someone who is so volatile, and so big and larger than life as Trump is, and also knowing how to implement their ideas and how to clean up their messes and make yourself rise in their standing in the process, was the perfect apprenticeship for working under Trump.

Speaker 2:
[03:43] That's Zach Helfand, who just wrote a profile for The New Yorker about Linda McMahon, the Secretary of Education. Under McMahon's leadership, the Department of Education, like many federal agencies in Trump's second term, has undergone sweeping layoffs and downsizing. It's the fulfillment of a central promise from Trump's 2024 campaign, and a long-standing goal of the conservative movement, to dismantle the department altogether. Zach's reporting traces how the agency has been hollowed out under McMahon, as well as McMahon's unlikely path to Trump's cabinet from a decades-long run as an executive at World Wrestling Entertainment. I wanted to talk with Zach about the current state of the Department of Ed, and why it's become such a target for the Trump administration, along with McMahon's tenure at WWE. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker. Linda McMahon is interesting for so many reasons, and I can't wait to talk more about just her career at the WWE and these on-screen storylines that you were kind of gesturing to earlier, like when she kicked Vince in the groin, which is just like an all-time moment, really. But I feel like one of the things that makes her interesting, or at least distinct as a political figure, is that she is one of the few people who served in the first Trump administration and then survived, landing a cabinet-level role in the second one. She's now the secretary of education. She was leading the small business administration in Trump's first term. Did she just do the best job ever? Why is she one of those people who was able just to make it from the first administration to the second? And what was the vibe during the first administration? Because I feel like I didn't hear very much about her at all back then.

Speaker 3:
[05:29] The first administration was, they weren't expecting to win and Trump is superstitious and doesn't like really planning for transition. While he's still running a campaign, they had Chris Christie do the transition and then he got fired. And a lot of the first administration were more, as we would say now, I think at the time people didn't look at it this way, but more adults in the room, more people willing to say no, and people who had some sort of background and they were qualified to some degree to be running a lot of these cabinet agencies. Linda McMahon was that, but she ran the Small Business Administration. She ran it well. She got high marks from small business owners, from employees. They do these job satisfaction surveys among government employees, and the Small Business Administration under her rose way up in the ranks. People liked working for her. She trusted people, and she let them do their job and set targets for them, but didn't micromanage. It was also a cabinet agency that wasn't that important, at least that important to Trump. She wouldn't really have to tell him no. She embodied this competence. She was well suited to the job. She knows how to run an organization. She knows small business. She cared about it. And she also didn't have to obstruct Trump in any way. And it turned out she's very loyal to Trump. And I don't know that she would have obstructed him anyway. So I think she survived because she was good at it. And she was the first term administration-competent, normal person. But then in the second administration, is willing to be more obsequious and do what Trump wants with the Education Department.

Speaker 2:
[07:16] Yeah, so let's talk about that. I feel like Trump put her in a very weird position, which is that he put her in charge of a department that he explicitly campaigned on destroying. The goal is that you'll be successful when you fire yourself, is what he told her. That's the quote from your piece. So given that she still has a job, at least as of, you know, Tuesday afternoon when we're talking, how would you say that she's doing?

Speaker 3:
[07:38] That's an interesting question. It depends on who you ask. I think liberals and a lot of people in the center would say that she's destroying the department and doing great damage to education in the country in the meantime.

Speaker 2:
[07:51] So she's killing it in Trump's book then?

Speaker 3:
[07:54] In Trump's book, I think she's doing a great job. Although, in order to actually be successful and fire herself, as Trump wants her to do, she needs congressional approval. She can't do this without 60 votes in the Senate, and she has no prospect of getting 60 votes in the Senate right now. And it probably after the midterm elections, it's not going to get any easier. It might get harder. So there's really no prospect of this happening. Now, what a lot of people I talk to on the right and the left, the hypothesis of what she's doing is that she is trying to break this apart as much as possible. The conservatives would say that she's trying to show that you can move different offices in the department to different cabinet agencies, to labor, to health and human services, to treasury, and that those offices can function properly in those different cabinet agencies and you don't need the education department. What a lot of people on the left, and this is more my observation, is that she is breaking a lot of these offices in the department. She is laying off too many people, critical functions are just not happening. You could see this happening in the Office of Civil Rights, in the Federal Student Aid Office, which administers 1.7 trillion dollars of student loans. So I think the project of what she's doing is, when I talk to some people on Congress that work on education, one of the hypotheses is that she is purposefully trying to break some of these offices to say, hey, this office isn't working, even though to a large degree, the reason why these offices aren't working is because she broke it.

Speaker 2:
[09:38] I mean, it's interesting, like this idea of moving certain things that the Department of Education does around, I feel like that on its face, if your explicit goal isn't to destroy the department, there actually is a certain amount of sense to it. Like when I hear you talk about administering $1.7 trillion in student loans, I think, hey, shouldn't that be part of what the Treasury Department does? And so maybe the actual question is just like, why do conservatives hate the Department of Education so much, and do they kind of have a point?

Speaker 3:
[10:08] Conservatives view this, like I talk to conservatives who work on education, who will say explicitly that this is about power, that they feel that too much power has been consolidated in the education department, and it's being used in kind of an activist way to push liberal policy agenda. So for example, the way that the Obama administration issued guidance on Title IX, and in particular, the way that sexual assault and harassment cases on campus should be adjudicated. The way that the Biden administration used the Office of Civil Rights to protect the rights of transgender students, which is kind of anathema to conservatives. And then also the way that the Biden administration tried to cancel student debt, they view that as kind of a giveaway to what's essentially a group of young, probably mostly liberal, potential voters. And they view that as like quasi-corruption. And so the conservative view is that the education department has consolidated too much power, has become too activist in pursuing policies that should be the purview of Congress, and that it's captured by like special interests in the education world, and that it's better to break it up, see what's essential, conserve those, move those to other cabinet departments, but just get rid of the education department. And so you're taking that locus of power and breaking it up and making it harder for special interests or for people pushing agenda to get what they want done, done.

Speaker 2:
[11:43] And is that something that Linda McMahon is interested in, just in her own right? I guess I'm trying to get a better sense of what her worldview is, and like what her political worldview is. Because in your piece, there's a part where, you know, she's talking to Trump about what her job in the second administration will be. And she suggests commerce. And then he puts her on education instead. And so I'm wondering if education was something that she had, like, any interest in at all or not.

Speaker 3:
[12:07] Yeah, she wanted commerce. She was very open about wanting commerce. She told me she wanted commerce. She's wanted commerce for years. And she was the co-chair of the transition along with Howard Lutnick. And Lutnick got commerce. And Trump asked her explicitly, hey, what do you want? She's like, I'd love commerce. And he's like, cool. Thanks for letting me know you're getting education. And she's like, I don't really have any background in education. She has a little bit of a background. Like she described it to me as like she spent like a hot sec in education.

Speaker 2:
[12:33] She like went to school or?

Speaker 3:
[12:36] She went to school. She wanted to be a teacher. She was planning to be a French teacher and was planning to pursue that until on the eve of graduation when she and her husband Vince were graduating. He was graduating a year late. She was a year early because she was a good student and he was not and he was a little bit older. They graduated at the same time. The night before graduation, they found out she was pregnant. So she abandoned the teaching path, went and became a receptionist at a law firm and then a paralegal and obviously went into business. Then right before she entered politics because she had these two Senate runs, she ran for Senate twice in Connecticut and lost both of those. To kind of set the path for a political career, she served on the Connecticut State Board of Education for a year. This was not extensive education experience. So she came into it with a bit of experience, but not a lot and a viewpoint on education issues that were not very well hashed out. When she ran for Senate, she was asked explicitly by someone, I think this was at a rally and a voter asked her if she would support abolishing the Education Department. And she said she wouldn't and then later clarified that she viewed that as a radical idea and she would never support that. Of course, she was running for Senate in a blue state, so she had to, you know, moderate. But she told me she doesn't view herself as a policy wonk and her career would flesh that out. Her Republican opponent in the primary, one of her opponents in the Senate primary said that she just had no interest in policy at all. So I think to the degree that this is like a conservative goal and this is not kind of an extreme position in the conservative movement to want to abolish the Education Department.

Speaker 2:
[14:24] I think a lot of Republicans support this or at the very least think that the department has become too powerful.

Speaker 3:
[14:30] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[14:30] And that there should be more happening at the state level, even if you should like maintain some form of a DOE.

Speaker 3:
[14:35] They always have. Essentially from the start, once the department was created, conservatives were saying, hey, let's get rid of this. So I think she's supportive of that, but it wasn't like she was an activist on this.

Speaker 2:
[14:46] She wasn't like, this is why I entered the Trump administration in the first place or something like that.

Speaker 3:
[14:49] Not at all. No. She wanted commerce.

Speaker 2:
[14:52] So you mentioned that during Trump's first term, McMahon developed this reputation for efficiency, competence, and yet it does seem like even if she's kind of successfully chipped away at the department or started to destroy it, that this has happened in a very haphazard, sort of chaotic way, just thinking about what you write about in terms of, she lays off the department, but then people are told that their layoff was rescinded and actually they come back, and then they're laid off again. So can you talk a little bit about how this is all actually worked out in practice and just this idea that McMahon is very efficiently able to go in and get business done, maybe she's having a little bit more trouble the second time around?

Speaker 3:
[15:33] Yeah, this is a big question in Washington, I think, is how much of the chaos is intentional and how much of it is, oops, we broke it a little bit more than we had intended to. I think a good example of this question you can see in the Office of Civil Rights. So the Office of Civil Rights, they call it OCR, is the body that investigates allegations of discrimination at schools. So a lot of the discrimination is access for students with disability. So just access problems, like we're supposed to-

Speaker 2:
[16:08] Like there isn't like a wheelchair ramp.

Speaker 3:
[16:10] A wheelchair ramp, it could be like, we're supposed to have this in our learning plan, like we are legally entitled to this, we're not getting this resource, things like that. Then there's also what's become thornier issues recently on campus. So like sexual harassment and assault, transgender rights, things like that.

Speaker 2:
[16:27] And what anti-Semitism, is that part of this?

Speaker 3:
[16:29] Anti-Semitism is part of this. And that is kind of what I got into in the piece, is how anti-Semitism claims were handled previously and how they're handled now. So when Linda McMahon took over, she made huge, like really, really deep sweeping layoffs at the Office of Civil Rights and closed that. There's, I think there's about seven regional offices, closed down five of them. And those five offices among them were like some of the most experienced and fervent investigators of anti-Semitism complaints. And that created this huge void. There's just not enough people there to investigate claims. And into that void has stepped what's called the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism, which is this big task force that Trump announced early in his tenure. This has been the group that initiates these big investigations that you hear about in the news all the time. Harvard, Brown, Columbia. These investigations initiated from the Joint Task Force to Combat Anti-Semitism. Usually, these would initiate from complaints that the Office of Civil Rights received, and they would investigate them, and then they would reach some sort of settlement with the university to basically make sure that this stops and that it doesn't happen again, and then it would be monitored by the Office of Civil Rights. In the last year of the Biden administration, there were about two dozen of these settlements. Under the Trump administration so far, there have been three settlements. These settlements made big news, but the amount of anti-Semitism claims that are being investigated and settled have just fallen off a cliff. And the investigators who were laid off will tell you that they're not this caricature of people that the right has kind of drawn in the office, that the right kind of views them as people who don't care about anti-Semitism, or that they're not credulous that there's anti-Semitism on campus. These investigators would say, like, I believe that there's anti-Semitism on campus, and I've investigated horrible instances of anti-Semitism on campus. And the way that the Trump administration is handling this, because of these layoffs that Linda McMahon initiated, these just aren't being followed up upon. And they think they're doing a big disservice to Jews on campus. Linda McMahon is part of the anti-Semitism task force, but the actions of the task force, I think, raise the question of how much of this is just theater. Like I think a lot of people in the administration really care about anti-Semitism, but it's being used to push an agenda that they want to go after universities, and they're kind of using anti-Semitism as the reason to go after them, while at the same time, the actual solutions for anti-Semitism on campus are not being used. They are not actually attacking the problem that they claim that they are attacking.

Speaker 2:
[19:29] So before we get into Linda McMahon's previous career, running one of the greatest theatrical enterprises of all time, I just like one last question about the Department of Education. What's left of it at this point? Like how many people work there and what do they focus on?

Speaker 3:
[19:46] It fluctuates because there have been legal challenges to the layoffs. So people are on leave, people are fired, but then they're reinstated. Judges issue these injunctions that say you can't actually fire these people yet. In the first year, the Education Department spent about $30 million paying people not to work. These people were on administrative leave, they were getting paychecks, but they weren't working. A lot of the offices have been gutted. The Office of Civil Rights is one, the Institute of Education Services, which does research, supports research, does what's called the Nation's Report Card, which is like when you hear that the reading scores and the math scores for fourth graders or eighth graders have risen or fallen, that comes from these assessments. That office was slashed by Doge, actually. This was an Elon Musk thing by 90 percent. Some offices are just completely gone. Some people are working there frantically to try to keep the lights on and make sure that money goes out the door and people receive these services. Some offices are basically like ghost towns. The Office of Civil Rights, last year, they had zero settlements for sexual harassment on campus. Like essentially, like nothing is happening in that realm. They're still keeping the lights on a little bit with the access problems for students with disabilities. But in a lot of instances, just offices are completely gone and money goes out the door, but some money doesn't and some money is delayed. And it's been chaotic for a lot of administrators and school districts nationwide.

Speaker 2:
[21:21] Let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we're going to get into the fun part, which is Linda McMahon's time at the WWE. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker.

Speaker 4:
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Speaker 2:
[22:35] So before we get into Linda McMahon's tenure as its head, can you tell us a little bit about the WWE and what it started as and what it ultimately turned into, just for the very few listeners who aren't well acquainted with it?

Speaker 3:
[22:49] That didn't watch WrestleMania over the weekend? Professional wrestling is the fake one. I think we should be clear about that, because I've been asked a lot about that. This is not UFC. UFC is real, as far as we know.

Speaker 2:
[23:01] It's hard because Trump is aligned with both. And so, yeah, it's easy to conflate the two.

Speaker 3:
[23:05] Trump loves combat sports, it turns out. Professional wrestling is the campier combat sport. It's entertainment, it's theater, it is these big burly men, usually men, but a lot of women now, putting on a character and then feuding with other wrestlers and then enacting these skits that further the feud in the ring or behind the scenes in video clips, and then settling those feuds in the ring by body slamming each other, hitting each other over the head.

Speaker 2:
[23:36] And it's like predetermined who's going to win that fight?

Speaker 3:
[23:39] It's all scripted, yes. And for a long time, there was this kind of omerta. You don't talk about wrestling being scripted. This is called kayfabe.

Speaker 2:
[23:52] Are we going to get killed by having this conversation?

Speaker 3:
[23:54] We might.

Speaker 2:
[23:54] Or is it okay to talk now about how it's being scripted?

Speaker 3:
[23:56] It's okay now because of Linda McMahon. Nobody was allowed to acknowledge that this was scripted until Linda McMahon, when she was with Vince McMahon running the WWE, realized that because we're claiming that this is a sport, even though it's not, we have to pay lots of taxes and fees on this not sport. There are things, you have to have doctors and there's safety regulations when there's a sport, and there's taxes in a lot of cases. So she quietly began lobbying state legislatures to regulate them as theater, as like the Harlem Globetrotters, or like the opera. She says wrestling is like a soap opera. And that allowed them to avoid some of these fees, and they didn't have to pay it, and it proved the bottom line. But what it did artistically was push wrestling into this kind of like postmodern period that was really, really interesting. Vince McMahon started playing a version of himself that he called Mr. McMahon. And he was able to do this because of like the flexibility and the ambiguity that you got from like acknowledging that this is fake, and that this is all kind of like over the top and gonzo and we're just kind of having fun here. And allowed him to do things like he would play this character who was this evil billionaire, who would, he was philandering, he was cheating on his wife, he was mistreating his employees, he was, you know, disdaining the fans all the time. And he can do that because like, wink, wink, this is all fake. But it turned out that Mr. McMahon and Vince McMahon, the character, the person who was playing the character, shared quite a lot in common. Vince was a serial philanderer. He was constantly cheating on his wife, which he has acknowledged. He has been accused of rape, of some horrible, horrible sexual abuse over the years, which he has denied. He did become a billionaire. He was kind of a megalomaniac.

Speaker 2:
[25:59] Which he acknowledges.

Speaker 3:
[26:01] Which he also acknowledges. The billionaire part, certainly. And so, there was this blurring of the line between fact and fiction that was fascinating to watch, and which Linda McMahon became a part of.

Speaker 2:
[26:12] And can you talk more about how Linda, and I guess I'll just use Linda by her first name, which feels weirdly familiar, but since we're talking about Linda and Vince, I feel like I have to specify what her role... It's like she had a behind-the-scenes role, obviously, because by the end of this she was leading the organization and, of course, she co-founded it, but also how she was written into the storylines themselves, because that's really, really fascinating.

Speaker 3:
[26:35] She was running the business and liked being behind the scenes. She said early on that there were two things that she would never do. She would never get into the ring and she would never get into politics. And she ended up doing both. The reason she got into the ring was because this family drama got more and more complicated and it got deeper and deeper.

Speaker 2:
[26:58] So Mr. McMahon had a wife and children.

Speaker 3:
[27:00] Mr. McMahon had a wife and children. And his two adult children, Shane and Stephanie, were eager performers and they were pretty good at it. And they would become wrestlers. They would be on stage, in the ring, acting out these wrestling characters and part of the family drama. And they would be playing kind of a version of themselves. They all used their real names. And the mother character was absent and it became kind of conspicuous that the mother or the wife character wasn't part of this. So she eventually got roped into the in the ring world. And she played Linda McMahon, a version of herself, who would at times get horribly mistreated by Mr. McMahon. Mr. McMahon was the bad guy. So you want to set him up doing horrible things. So he at one point, the most famous storyline was at one point, he demanded a divorce in the ring. And Linda has a nervous breakdown because of this and falls into this catatonic state for weeks. And Mr. McMahon would wheel her out in a wheelchair and inflict all of these humiliations upon her. So he would like kiss and grop another female wrestler in front of her and taunt her. And this happened and escalated for weeks until WrestleMania, which is like the big pay-per-view event. He, you know, kind of hauls her body into the ring and sets her up in a chair as he's fighting Shane, their son. And he's about to crack Shane over the head with a trash can. And the Linda character wakes up and goes up to Vince and kicks him in the groin. And that's kind of the comeuppance for this evil billionaire character. But the mistreatment in the ring happened for years. It happened over a long time. And the fascinating thing was that she was dealing with a lot of these things, like the flandering and all of that in real life.

Speaker 2:
[28:54] I mean, how many of these controversies, when you talk about the things that Vince McMahon has been accused of, you know, which are things he denies, how many of those are controversies that also have to do with like the work that both Vince and Linda were doing at the WWE and accusations that were lodged against them by their employees or whether a lot of the people who are upset with Vince McMahon also think that she is to blame.

Speaker 3:
[29:19] Most people separate Vince and Linda, and I think a lot of that has to do with their personalities. Vince was domineering, he was chaotic, he could be mean. He was magnetic, but he was a big, volatile, often unpleasant personality. And Linda McMahon's reputation in the wrestling world was thoughtful. She would remember people's, you know, kids' names and their birthdays. She was warm and friendly. And she liked to cultivate this sense of herself as like the mom. She would write letters to one wrestler and she would sign them mom. In a lot of these instances of harassment or assault that he's been accused of, she's kind of like an ancillary victim where she seems to be unaware of what's going on or finds out about it after the fact. And is in some instances explicitly hurt by this. She finds out that he is or that he had been having an affair with one of his secretaries. That came out during the steroid trial when Vince McMahon was on trial for steroid use at the company. And she cried in the courtroom. She was seen crying. In a few instances when she was CEO, Vince McMahon, the company later found, paid out these more essentially effectively hush money payments to women who had accused them of abuse. And he paid them not to speak as part of the settlement. And she was the CEO at the time. And he used company funds to do that. So it seems likely that she knew or should have known about those settlements. There was also an episode, a scandal called known as the Ring Boys Scandal. That involved accusations of molestation by a number of miners who were called Ring Boys. They were paid to set up and take down the rings. And the person who was accused of this was named Mel Phillips, who worked for the WWE for years. And Vince McMahon told a reporter, the reporter has testified to this in a deposition, that Vince McMahon said that they knew about this man's unnatural fascination with children for years. And he was still at the company while they knew that. So it depends on the incident.

Speaker 2:
[31:45] So at what point did Trump come into the picture? Like because as we mentioned earlier, he's become almost synonymous with the WWE. Like I feel like in my mind at least, he's been a character in that world for like as long as I can remember. But when exactly did he enter the ring? Like literally?

Speaker 3:
[32:02] He was a wrestling fan since he was a kid. Growing up, he had a favorite wrestler who was called Antonino Roca, but Trump insisted to his school friends that his name was Rocky Antonino. And when they told him he was wrong, he said, no, you're wrong. He hosted a couple of the early WrestleMania's, one of the very early WrestleMania's when Vince and Linda were still growing the company into what it is. But it was about 15, 20 years ago when he was already on The Apprentice that he actually appeared in the ring. He and Vince had this story line that they called the Battle of the Billionaires, where Vince was playing this evil billionaire character and Trump was kind of like the defender of the fans. They set him up as the fan favorite. Although there were two things that were interesting about that, he was supposed to be the fan favorite billionaire, though at the time it wasn't clear if either of them were billionaires yet. Certainly, they both became billionaires.

Speaker 2:
[32:59] Or fan favorites, right?

Speaker 3:
[33:00] Well, and Trump wasn't a fan favorite when he first appeared. They had to like rain money down on the fans, like real money, when he would come out, like walk to the ring.

Speaker 2:
[33:09] So it would be like a Pavlovian response.

Speaker 3:
[33:11] Exactly, yes. They bought the fan's loyalty. So they had this ongoing feud and they each backed a wrestler and the winner would shave the loser's hair. So this also culminated at WrestleMania. Trump actually got in the action a little bit. He like, you know, pretended to punch Vince McMahon during the show. He wasn't a very good actor, but he really understood like the mechanics and the emotional appeal of wrestling. He just wasn't very good at like the punching. It didn't look real, but his wrestler won and so he got to shave Vince McMahon's hair like live in the ring.

Speaker 2:
[33:53] So I assume at this point Trump became friends with Vince and Linda. I mean, what do you know about their relationship outside the ring? And I guess like, are there clues as to why Trump would eventually pick Linda to be in his administration, just based on like the relationship that they developed over time?

Speaker 3:
[34:12] They were friends. They were friends for years. They went to a Rolling Stones concert together. You know, they would hang out. He was more friendly with Vince.

Speaker 2:
[34:22] But Vince just wasn't a viable cabinet secretary.

Speaker 3:
[34:24] Vince was not a viable cabinet secretary. They inducted Trump into the wrestling, the WWE Hall of Fame, and Vince gave the induction speech and said, you know, I think Trump would be the second best option for president after me, of course. But he wasn't a viable political candidate for a number of reasons. But he and Trump shared that same connection with the crowd. He knew how to inflame the crowds. And it didn't want to credit Trump's rise to the WWE. It's not like he learned from them and use this to rise to power. I think he rose to power for the same reason the McMahons were able to grow the WWE into this juggernaut. They shared the same sensibility. They both had the same raw, visceral, very masculine appeal. They both valued domination, humiliation. So I think Trump used a lot of that in the same way that the WWE used it. I also, there was this like sub-storyline where Trump would, it was unclear like how much he got that everything was staged. Like there was one point when Vince McMahon's limo blows up as part of a storyline on air. And it was obvious that this was fake. It's wrestling. It's all fake. But he and Vince were friends. So he called up the office and just wanted to make sure that Vince was okay, that he didn't actually die in this televised limo explosion. But I think when it became time to pick a cabinet, Linda was an obvious choice because they had been friends for a long time.

Speaker 2:
[36:02] And at that point, she was like long gone from the WWE, right? Like what, I guess, like what led to her leaving that organization? And then was it right after that that she then ran for Senate?

Speaker 3:
[36:11] Yes, so she left.

Speaker 2:
[36:12] It's an interesting pivot.

Speaker 3:
[36:14] Basically, so she could run for Senate. She was this really well known figure in Connecticut, where the WWE is headquartered. She would travel the state and people would treat her kind of like a celebrity because she was on their TVs every day. So she ran for Senate. She lost in 2010 and 2012. And she spent $50 million of her own money on each campaign. But to spend $100 million in total on doomed campaigns signaled to a lot of people actually, this is someone who has a lot of money and was clearly dedicated to the Republican cause. And so we can hit her up for money. So she became this sought after donor. And she was throughout Trump's political career, starting in 2016, she was a big donor to him. So when it came time to pick a cabinet, she was someone who we trusted, who was a friend, who we knew could run a big organization, who was involved in politics, and also was like a loyal donor of his.

Speaker 2:
[37:13] Yeah, deep pockets.

Speaker 3:
[37:14] Yes.

Speaker 2:
[37:15] So in a minute, I want to talk more about what Linda McMahon did in between the two Trump administrations and just more about Trump and his relationship with the wrestling world and UFC, even though that's the real one, not the fake one.

Speaker 3:
[37:28] As far as we know, to prove another one.

Speaker 2:
[37:31] I'm going to bring some real news on this podcast today. This is The Political Scene from The New Yorker. So one of the questions that I had, and I think a lot of people had, when Trump returned to office, and he immediately signs a bunch of executive orders, and it's very clear that he knows exactly what it is that he wants to do, and it just felt like he was so much more organized the second time around. The question was sort of like, who is this guy, how is he so prepared, who was helping him? And I feel like your piece finally offered an answer to that question, or at least offered one answer to that question. So can you talk a little bit about what Linda McMahon did in between the first and second Trump administrations?

Speaker 3:
[38:26] What Linda McMahon was really good at at the WWE was every time Vince would misstep, she would clean it up and she would use that as an opportunity to rise, having proved herself and also having the leverage of being able to clean up that situation. So when Trump lost the election in 2020, and became politically toxic, like he was a political loser and lots of people abandoned him at that point. She along with Brooke Rollins, who's now the Agriculture Secretary and Larry Kudlow, who's now at Fox News, approached Trump about starting a think tank that would carry on his policies. In the intervening years, they grew this think tank into this big conservative organization. They would say they're non-partisan, but everything they put out is conservative and is America First Policies.

Speaker 2:
[39:23] And it's called, this is the America First Policy Institute.

Speaker 3:
[39:25] It was called the America First Policy Institute. And Linda McMahon was the chair. And what they did was put together a staff that ultimately became kind of like a shadow administration. Brooke Rollins was the CEO, she was in charge of policy. Linda McMahon was the chair, she was in charge of operationalizing and fundraising a lot of that. During the campaign, a lot of attention was paid to the Heritage Foundation, which had Project 2025. You heard so much about Project 2025, in part because they put out this huge book with all of the policies that would become part of a second Trump administration, which proved to be very unpopular with voters because a lot of the policies were very far out there. And Project 2025 made itself a story. They were putting themselves out there, and they made themselves politically toxic, to the point where Trump had publicly distanced himself from Project 2025 during the campaign. The America First Policy Institute had basically the same policy goals. They just were much quieter about this.

Speaker 2:
[40:39] It's like our 2025 project. Yeah.

Speaker 3:
[40:42] There was not a lot of daylight between the two. And I think that Linda McMahon knows the power of bombast. Like she's seen what it's done for Vince and what it's done for Trump, but she also knows the value of not being bombastic at times. And AFPI thought that it's better to be quiet and fly under the radar. So AFPI and Project 2025 and Heritage were like rivals in many ways. Not because of policy, they had basically the same goals in that realm. But they're all competing to get these limited number of jobs in the Trump administration. So when it came time to staff the second Trump administration, Project 2025 wasn't who they initially first turned to because it was still this politically toxic thing. And AFPI offered itself as, hey, here we are, we're good conservatives, we've been trying to carry on your agenda over the past four years, we can staff your administration. So, I think it was seven cabinet secretaries came from AFPI. AFPI had, I think, 200 staff members at the time. More than 80 staffers went into the administration. Linda McMahon was one of them. She was one of the cabinet secretaries that came from AFPI. And they had also used that time to draft hundreds of policies and executive orders that Trump could sign immediately. So a lot of what you saw in Project 2025 ended up getting implemented in some sense by the administration. But the people doing the implementing were in many cases AFPI people.

Speaker 2:
[42:15] I mean, I was surprised by like just the number of people who are now like household names who kind of came out of AFPI. Like you mentioned that some of the more major alums are Cash Patel and Pam Bondi, who both obviously went on to take on high level roles in the Trump administration. But is it right to say that despite, you know, just the fact that Linda McMahon like came from the world of WWE, and there were just all these kind of like sorted things that were happening around the organization even if she wasn't necessarily like playing a major role in those things. Like does it seem as though despite that past, she is still like one of the more level headed and uncontroversial people currently in Trump's cabinet?

Speaker 3:
[42:58] It's all relative, but I would say yes. She has been a fairly hardline negotiator on, for example, the settlements with the universities, like with Columbia, for example. When I talked to Maye Mailman, who ran the White House's approach to higher education last year, she was a deputy for Stephen Miller, she told me that there's such out there characters in the administration and people who, for example, would say, we want to destroy Columbia, we want to just get rid of these institutions. Because she's not saying that, she is seen as almost like the good cop. I think it's just the putting things in the perspective of this second administration, she does seem like a more level-headed leader. She's gone way farther, for example, than Betsy DeVos did in the first term. Betsy DeVos was one of the most divisive political figures in that first Trump administration. And she wasn't saying, I want to shut down the department. I think she would have liked to, but she didn't go there. And McMahon is going way further than that. But I think because she is this warm, personally, usually well-liked figure, and I think mostly because the rest of the administration has gone so far, there hasn't been that much energy or attention paid to the education department. And I guess that's because things like when there's chaos in Minnesota, or when there's war in Iran, or the Justice Department is getting ripped up, people are just triaging and the Education Department is lower on the list. But she has been able to be one of the more stable, level-headed, and less divisive, polarizing figures in the cabinet.

Speaker 2:
[44:48] I thought it was interesting in your piece how, in your conversations with McMahon, she expressed complete confidence in her ability to shut down the Department of Education, even though that is something that would take congressional approval. I think she said, I fully do expect this to be successful. So where do you think that confidence is coming from? Or does she just have to talk like that?

Speaker 3:
[45:09] I think she has to talk like that. I don't know what she actually believes.

Speaker 2:
[45:12] Because you're saying that she's level-headed or at least relatively level-headed, but then it seems like she does have this goal that is almost impossible.

Speaker 3:
[45:20] Yeah, I think she is able to bluster with a straight face. I think she learned that from the WWE. She wasn't a great performer, but she got better at it and she knows how to play a part and deliver a line. I don't know if she actually believes that she will shut down the department. I just know that she is an intelligent, reasonable person and knows that there's not a chance she's going to get even a single democratic vote on this and she needs even a single democratic vote to shut down the department. Whether she thinks it's going to be successful, like her tenure there is going to be successful, I think she truly believes, but I can't imagine that she actually thinks that she's going to convince enough senators to shut down the department.

Speaker 2:
[46:03] Just to conclude, I feel like it's worth going back to Trump and his love of wrestling, just because I think like, you know, his relationship with wrestling and with UFC, it's something that like people kind of laugh about because it's just so absurd, even though it seems like the alignment with like UFC in particular, like might have kind of helped him win the election, just thinking about the alliance with Joe Rogan and Dana White. And so when we read about how Trump is planning to stage a UFC fight on the White House lawn in June in celebration of the country's 250th anniversary, I guess I'm wondering if somewhere in here is like the key to understanding Trump and his psychology. And it shouldn't just be something that we like laugh at or think like that it's like a weird anomaly.

Speaker 3:
[46:47] I think it's helpful for understanding his psychology. I also think that we shouldn't write off the WWE as just this nonsense form of trash entertainment. I talked to Werner Herzog of all people who became fascinated by this. And he compared it to like a raw form of early Greek drama. Like when that art form is just first emerging, it was just this like raw, raw drama. And I think with Trump and his psychology, Trump's main motivation in any situation is this kind of like power play. It's all about dominance and humiliation. And that's what wrestling is about. It's all about who's going to be humiliated for their misdeeds and who's going to get revenge for their own humiliation. And so much of Trump's tenure from, you know, the Obama comedy roast of Trump that may or may not have launched his political career is all about this sense of getting revenge for being humiliated and then showing his dominance over other people through humiliating them. And that's what the drama of the WWE is. And I think the UFC is similar. It's not as stylized. It's not as big. It is kind of sweeter in a way where these people aren't trying to, like, humiliate the other person in many instances. But at its core, it's like, who's going to be the physically dominant person in the ring? And I think that appeals to Trump on such a deep, visceral level.

Speaker 2:
[48:36] Oh, Zach, this is definitely the most fun I'll have all year. So thank you so much for your time. I really enjoyed this conversation.

Speaker 3:
[48:44] Thanks for having me.

Speaker 2:
[48:48] Zach Kelfand is a staff writer for The New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon for Trump's Cabinet, at newyorker.com. This has been The Political Scene from The New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggatt. This episode was produced by John LeMay, with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Stephen Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Leighton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday.

Speaker 1:
[49:26] From PRX.