Linda McMahon: The Professional Wrestling CEO Nominated to Bodyslam LGBTQ+ Rights and the Department of Education

In Her Own (or AFPI’s) Words:

“Biden’s DEI mandates on employers fail American workers”

• Linda McMahon, Fox News opinion piece, March 25, 2024

“The stakes are high. Radical gender ideology is anathema to the family and religion, vital building blocks of Western Civilization and the American constitutional republic. By teaching children to reject the foundational truths that biological sex differences are real and that the complementary union of a man and a woman is the strongest basis for a successful family unit, transgender activists are perpetuating beliefs that will make it harder for young people to find meaning and happiness in our political community (and harder for our political system of ordered liberty to endure).”

-America First Policy Institute, March 7, 2023

“Actions speak louder than words, and the answer has become increasingly clear with the rise of race-based policies in schools. Many children are being taught to see white supremacy everywhere, indoctrinated to believe America’s foundation was built on racism, talked to about sex and gender identity in developmentally inappropriate ways, and presented with other questionable curriculum. Much of this is happening intentionally without parental knowledge or consent.”

-America First Policy Institute, America First Agenda, Pillar IV: Give Parents More Control Over the Education of Their Children

“America’s excessive reliance on chain migration—a policy that enables one immigrant to bring his or her extended family, who then can bring their families, and so on—undermines the interests of U.S. citizens. It does so by encouraging high levels of low-skilled immigration that puts downward pressure on the wages of the most vulnerable Americans and strains public services. The U.S. should discontinue chain migration and the visa lottery that randomly awards green cards to people with little education or skills and no ties to our country.”

-America First Policy Institute, America First Agenda, Pillar V: Secure the Border, End Human Trafficking, and Defeat the Drug Cartels

Red Flags

In what appears to be her limited experience in education besides a degree in French and her position on the board of trustees for Sacred Heart University in Connecticut , McMahon was appointed to the Connecticut State Board of Education in January 2009. The State Senate approved her nomination with some opponents expressing concerns that the nature of her WWE activities would send the wrong message. State Rep. Bruce Morris claimed she lacked “depth of knowledge regarding education,” but Rep. John Hetherington said it “would be good to have someone outside the establishment on the board.”

In 2010, she resigned from the board. Days after her resignation, the Hartford Courant reported that McMahon had falsely filled out a questionnaire from the governor’s office on which she claimed to have received a bachelor’s degree in education from East Carolina University, but her degree was actually in French. McMahon resigned from the board days before the report was made public. At the time, she claimed she thought her degree was in education because she had completed a semester of student teaching.

McMahon is a longtime Trump supporter. In Trump’s first administration, McMahon served as the head of the Small Business Administration (SBA). She was appointed to that position even though leaked documents from her 2017 vetting process noted a long list of “red flags” from her years as an executive at the wrestling entertainment outfit, WWE, involving deplorable conditions for workers, racist, sexist, and other bigoted performances by wrestlers, and a culture of sexual assault in the workplace. 

While she herself was not a participant in the January 6 insurrection, an organization McMahon then chaired, America First Policies, financially supported Women for America First, which helped put on the pro-Trump rally in Washington, D.C., that preceded the storming of the Capitol. The group received $25,000 and staffers connected with the group were subpoenaed by the House Select Committee on the January 6 Attack in September 2021. 

Since leaving her role at the SBA, McMahon has remained loyal to Trump, and been active in institutions pushing the MAGA agenda. She chairs the board of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a key actor in developing Trump’s current agenda and staffing the administration. 

America First Policy Institute: A “White House in Waiting”

In 2021, McMahon took the position of board chair of the pro-Trump think tank America First Policy Institute (AFPI), described by Politico as a “White House in waiting.” Founded in 2021 following Trump’s electoral defeat to Joe Biden, AFPI has served as an institution almost exclusively to promote the political agenda of Trump and his movement. Trump’s former acting director of the United States Domestic Policy Council Brooke Rollins originally founded the organization, while Larry Kudlow, who previously worked as the Director of the National Economic Council, serves as the vice-chair. 

Originally organized to plan for a second Trump administration after his loss in 2020, the group issued a plan in 2021 called “Vision 2025.” AFPI and Rollins quietly organized a “shadow transition operation” for Trump that would rival Heritage’s Project 2025, an authoritarian and extremist plan for a second Trump administration put together by over 100 conservative groups. AFPI’s operation, called the “American Leadership Initiative,” identified positions to cut or fill for the next administration. By July 2022, the organization had grown to more than 150 staff, including 17 former senior White House staffers and cabinet members from the Trump administration, with an operating budget of around $25 million. Trump’s choice of McMahon for the Secretary of Education demonstrates the AFPI’s influence on the incoming administration and the direction that it is likely to take. 

AFPI’s main policy priorities are focused on economic issues, such as imposing tariffs on imported goods, lowering corporate taxes, increasing domestic gas and oil production, and imposing work requirements on Medicaid recipients. 

While not as transparent as Heritage’s Project 2025 plan, the AFPI has concerned itself with positions on cultural issues typical of the MAGA movement: opposing the rights of trans people, reducing immigration, finishing the border wall, and ending legal immigration policies such as family-based immigration and the visa lottery.

AFPI also seeks to reverse the expanded Title IX protections put in place by the Biden administration that prohibit discrimination based on sex in educational programs that receive federal funds, and advocates for the right of businesses and institutions to discriminate against LGBTQ+ people due to religious beliefs, primarily those of Christian evangelicals through Christian Nationalism.

On immigration, AFPI seeks to reverse “catch and release” practices, finish the border wall, and “vigorously enforce the law,” tying immigration from the southern border to terrorism and the fentanyl epidemic. 

AFPI is also one of the organizations attempting to make it more difficult to vote. In July 2024, AFPI, along with other far-right think tanks, sued the Biden administration over Executive Order 14019, which according to Democracy Docket, “promotes access to voting nationwide through a variety of initiatives, including allowing federal agencies to share data with states that want to establish automatic voter registration efforts and making federal workers and resources available to help at polling places.”

Radical Views on Education

AFPI claims that students in U.S. schools are taught “anti-American ideologies” regarding the history and founding of the United States, a reference to learning about America’s history of slavery and segregation. AFPI calls for teaching “the truth” about America’s history, which apparently is not what actually happened.  

It specifically criticizes “critical race theory,” a university-level study of racial inequalities that is not taught in K-12 public schools, and the 1619 Project, which aims to teach students the realities of slavery and racism in U.S. history. AFPI calls for cutting federal education funding and refusing to approve credits toward educator certifications for programs that promote “revisionist history.” Their plan is influenced by the incredibly biased Hillsdale 1776 Curriculum, put out by far-right Hillsdale College, and the works of Christopher Rufo, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute for Policy Research and far-right activist against “wokeness” in universities (for more on Rufo and Hillsdale College see the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism’s (GPAHE) previous reporting here)

McMahon is personally interested in promoting private schools by transferring public funds to them through voucher programs, which would remove resources from public education. This would allow families to take the money appropriated for public schools and use it to pay for an education in a private institution, particularly those that are centered around a curriculum based on Christianity. 

Assault on LGBTQ+ Rights

AFPI has been one of the main organizations pushing back on trans rights in the United States. AFPI refers to the increase in people identifying as trans in recent years as a “social contagion,” and claims that the “broader social and political consequences of the explosion of trans-identification among young people are transforming American society.” 

They produced a report recommending against the “permissive laws and aggressive practices” for gender-affirming care in the United States, and another that refers to the “significant competitive advantages” that female trans athletes have in sports. Notably, the “reviews of the literature” on these subjects are all incredibly one-sided, with the report on women’s sports citing the fringe anti-LGBTQ+ group American College of Pediatricians as an authority. They have also submitted a public comment to the Department of Education against the Biden administration’s revision of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 to include mention of “gender identity.” 

Like many on the far right, AFPI fearmongers about teachers “deceiving parents” about children’s mental health, and fearmonger about curriculum developed by “gender theory activists” that “range from obscene to outright pornographic.” They claim that trans people using women’s bathrooms and locker rooms are tied to sexual assaults, which are covered up by school administrators, citing a single anecdotal case reported on in the far-right National Review. AFPI also laments state laws that prohibit “conversion therapy,” a practice to change someone’s sexual orientation or identity that amounts to “torture” according to the United Nations, and which has been banned in several countries and for minors in several states in the U.S. 

AFPI employees have written op-eds against the appearance of Pride flags during pride month, claiming major “woke” corporations were “putting the pro-American messaging on the back burner,” apparently concluding the LGBTQ+ rights are anti-American. They write: “Companies like Target, North Face, and Anheuser-Busch bowed a knee to the pride community, and instead of seeing the red, white, and blue that accompanies this holiday, we are seeing the rainbow flags that are preparing for pride month, as if they skipped this holiday altogether.”

AFPI recently employed the celebrity anti-trans activist Riley Gaines, who tied with a trans person in the NCAA swimming championships in 2022, which led to her anti-trans activism. Gaines works in AFPI’s “Center for 1776” as the vice-chair of the America First Athletes coalition, where she has authored several anti-trans articles.

WWE’s culture of Bigotry and Alleged Sexual Assault

Far from serving in a role related to education or politics, Linda McMahon had her start in entertainment sports. In 1980, Linda and her husband Vince McMahon (separated in 2024) founded the sports entertainment company Titan Sports, Inc., later to become World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). Starting in 1980, Linda McMahon served as its president, and later, from 1997 to 2009, as the WWE’s CEO. According to leaked documents from her 2017 vetting process before being nominated to direct Trump’s Small Business Administration, a background check noted a long list of “red flags” from her time at the WWE involving deplorable conditions for workers, racist, sexist, and other bigoted performances by wrestlers, and a culture of sexual assault in the workplace. 

During this time, the WWE had a habit of using ugly stereotypes to portray characters from minority backgrounds, such as depicting “Arabs as terrorists, Latinos as job-stealing, illegal immigrants and Black wrestlers as exotic, uneducated savages.” Some of these performances included:

• A Mexican tag-team dressed as landscapers and driving lawnmowers.
• A terrorist named “Muhammad Hassan” who could summon masked henchmen by praying. 
• The Iranian “Iron Sheik” portrayed with an Iranian flag and keffiyeh headdress, often on a desert background with camels. 
• The “Ugandan,” Kamala the Giant, who came from the jungle and couldn’t speak any English.
• Female characters who participated in “bra and panties” with other female characters.
• A 2004 performance where a wrestler dressed in drag was “savagely beaten” while the attacker yelled homophobic slurs at them.
• A 2005 performance where two Arab American wrestlers were referred to as “sand people” by other wrestlers. 

In 2009, McMahon left her position at the WWE to run for the United States Senate in Connecticut in the 2010 and 2012 elections, losing both times. 

A lawsuit was filed on behalf of five men against WWE and the McMahons in October 2024 alleging that, during Linda McMahon’s tenure as a WWE executive, employee Melvin Phillips, who died in 2012, targeted young men from disadvantaged backgrounds who were hired to work as “ring boys,” who prepared the rings for the wrestling matches. They allege that Phillips assaulted them on multiple occasions over several years from the 1970s to the early 1990s in hotel rooms, hotels, and locker rooms. Phillips was fired in 1988 but rehired six weeks later with the stipulation that he stop abusing children at work, according to Business Insider. “Vince and Linda returned Phillips to the organization with the caveat that Mel steer clear of underaged boys, stop hanging around kids, and stop chasing after kids,” said a witness in a 1992 defamation suit related to the incident. He was finally fired for good in 1990 after more alleged incidents of abuse came to light. Because of his death, Phillips is not named in the lawsuit as a defendant, however, Vince and Linda McMahon are named due to the fact that they allegedly knew about Phillips’ conduct and did nothing to stop him.

One of Phillips’s alleged victims who went public in the early 1990s claimed an executive at WWE had also propositioned him when he was 16. Business Insider reports that he received a small settlement and was given an opportunity to become a ring announcer but was fired in 1993 by Linda when he failed to live up to his part of his promise to get good grades in a community-college program the McMahons paid for. 

Alleged cases of sexual abuse perpetrated by Vince McMahon include a July 1986 instance where McMahon allegedly raped the first female referee hired by the WWE in his limousine in New York after saying she needed to satisfy him to earn a $500,000 contract. Former WWE wrestler Ashley Massaro claimed that McMahon preyed on her during her time at the WWE from 2005 and 2008, and intentionally retaliated against her by writing scripts that were intended to damage her reputation when she refused his advances. In 2022, the WWE board found McMahon had paid $12 million to four women to remain quiet about his alleged misconduct and harassment, leading to his retirement as CEO. Vince McMahon, Linda McMahon’s husband from whom she separated in 2024, currently faces a lawsuit with serious accusations of sexual misconduct and human trafficking and a federal criminal investigation into his actions, that of WWE and WWE’s ex-head of Talent Relations John Laurinaitis.