How Professional Wrestling Prepared Linda McMahon for Trump’s Cabinet

When Linda McMahon was building World Wrestling Entertainment into a multibillion-dollar enterprise, a colleague remembers, she confided that there were two things she’d never do: get into the ring and go into politics. Professional wrestlers have a term for anything staged or put on. They call it a “work.” McMahon’s husband, Vince McMahon, who exercised visionary—and dictatorial—control over the company’s creative side, made it difficult to distinguish between work and reality. But Linda, who ran the business side, didn’t traffic in artifice. “She was intuitive, she was respectful, she made you feel valued, she was kind,” Donna Goldsmith, a former chief operating officer, told me. “That was very, very different than her husband.” W.W.E. personnel told me that McMahon cultivated a maternal air. She and one wrestler used to exchange letters. She signed hers “Mom.”

The W.W.E. is a soap opera staged in the ring and shown on television—like “All My Children” if all the children occasionally beat one another with metal chairs. In the late nineties, Vince built a story line around a version of himself. He played “Mr. McMahon,” a billionaire owner who disdained the fans, mistreated employees, and coerced female wrestlers into sexual situations. This was ostensibly fictional. “He’s the most reprehensible individual on the planet,” Vince once said of the character. “Uncaring, a power monger, manipulative.” He added, “It’s fun, because some of it’s true.”

Vince wrote his and Linda’s adult children, Shane and Stephanie, into the spectacle. Wrestling narratives are cheekily gonzo. There was a plot in which a wrestler named Triple H drugged Stephanie and married her inert body. (They’re now married, in reality, and ran the company together.) Vince once wanted his character to impregnate Stephanie’s. Stephanie nixed that one. (“Just a little too gross,” she has said.) Vince then asked if he could write Shane as the father in the incest plot. By 1998, as the family drama deepened, the absence of the mother character became conspicuous. “Linda didn’t want to be a TV performer,” Dave Meltzer, who has reported on the company for forty years, told me. “She had to.”

Eventually, Linda McMahon came to be “tombstoned” (held upside down and slammed on her head) by a wrestler named Kane, “stunnered” (put in a three-quarter facelock jawbreaker) by Stone Cold Steve Austin, sexually assaulted, cheated on, driven to seek a divorce, lusted over, and sedated. Vince tried to get Shane to slap her in a scene, but Shane refused. Stephanie slapped her, though, and she slapped Stephanie. McMahon’s most memorable story arc involved Vince demanding a divorce, triggering a nervous breakdown in the ring which rendered her catatonic. For months, Vince would roll out her limp body in a wheelchair and subject her to various humiliations. The wrestler Trish Stratus, who was kissed and groped by Vince in a scene in front of a vegetative McMahon, has recalled that during rehearsal Linda asked, “If I drool, would that be more effective for my character?”

The circus atmosphere, and the experience working with a creative visionary who has authoritarian leanings, has been good preparation for politics. McMahon, who is the Secretary of Education, is one of only three members of Donald Trump’s original Cabinet to survive to his second term. In the first, when Trump surrounded himself with more traditional bureaucrats, McMahon was a steady and effective leader of the Small Business Administration. This time, as Trump has assembled a Cabinet that is more openly obsequious and destructive, McMahon has played the role of a friendly grandmother wielding a hatchet.

McMahon co-chaired Trump’s transition team in 2024, and, late in the process, he called her and asked what Cabinet position she might want. “I said, ‘I think I would enjoy Commerce,’ ” she told me, during a conversation at the Department of Education headquarters. Trump wanted her to run Ed. “I said, ‘Mr. President, I don’t have any background in education.’ He said, ‘I’m not looking for an education expert.’ ” What he wanted was to kill the department. McMahon recounted, “He said, ‘The goal is that you’ll be successful when you fire yourself.’ ”

A former W.W.E. executive told me, “Her current role very much mirrors her former role—a big-personality man who believes only his opinion matters and doesn’t care about rules and wants to just steamroll, and has Linda as the implementer.” The open secret in the company was that McMahon’s in-ring marriage bore certain similarities to her real one: Vince was a serial philanderer, and has been accused of assault (which he denies). “I thought, Why is she doing this?” the executive said of McMahon’s involvement in the W.W.E. scenarios. “Isn’t this incredibly demeaning, to have this kernel of truth in your life blown up into a story in which you’re forced to participate?” McMahon likes to remind scolds that wrestling is a morality play. The cheat gets his comeuppance. Her character’s narrative culminated in 2001 at WrestleMania, the annual pay-per-view show. Vince was fighting Shane. He hauled Linda’s catatonic body into the ring, like a sort of Chekhov’s wife, to watch him pummel their child. Just as Vince was about to smash a trash can over Shane’s head, McMahon suddenly came to. The crowd went wild. She stepped forward and kicked her husband in the testicles.

McMahon attributes her ability to thrive among testosterone guzzlers to being an only child. “I was my father’s son and my mother’s daughter,” she told me. She is seventy-seven, and carries herself with a knowing authority that, together with cropped blond hair and an occasional pants suit, once put the wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage in mind of Hillary Clinton. Vince first saw her in New Bern, North Carolina, on a rare visit to church, where she sang in the choir. He was sixteen. She was thirteen. “I was the honors student and the civic leader in my hometown, and Vince was the local badass,” she has said. “There was a little bit of that bad boy aspect that I think was incredibly appealing.” Vince lived in a trailer park; his father was AWOL, and he has said that he was physically and sexually abused by family members. To Vince, Linda’s family represented “an Ozzie and Harriet life.” He explained, “There wasn’t screaming and beating. I wanted some of that stability and love.” They married when she was seventeen. She bought her prom dress and her wedding dress on the same day.

At East Carolina University, she studied French and planned to teach. They graduated together—he a year late, she a year early. The night before commencement, they learned that she was pregnant.

“Have you tried turning it off and leaving it off?”

Cartoon by Mick Stevens

Instead of teaching, she took a job in D.C., at the law firm Covington & Burling, where she became a paralegal on intellectual-property cases. She started at the firm six weeks after giving birth. On the drive to work each morning, she sobbed. Vince set out to start a career as a wrestling and stunt promoter. He often had big ideas and an inability to profitably pull them off. He booked Muhammad Ali for a disastrous wrestling bout in Tokyo. He arranged an Evel Knievel canyon jump, but Knievel’s parachute deployed early, causing him to pathetically float to the ground; Vince lost a quarter-million dollars. In the mid-seventies, Vince drove McMahon, who was pregnant with Stephanie, to a courthouse to declare bankruptcy. On the way, their car broke down. They arrived in a tow truck. Their house was auctioned off, and their car was repossessed. They owed nearly a million dollars.

They eventually emerged from debt, and McMahon inserted herself more into Vince’s business ventures. In 1979, as the author Brad Balukjian recounted in his book on wrestling, “The Six Pack,” they leased the Cape Cod Coliseum, a small arena in Massachusetts, and moved into a house nearby with purple shag carpet. They hung a painting of Linda near the entrance. At the arena, McMahon made hundreds of meatballs to serve to V.I.P.s.

By then, Vince had reconciled with his biological father, a successful wrestling promoter. In 1982, he sold the McMahons his business for a million dollars. They called their company Titan Sports. (It was renamed the World Wrestling Federation, or W.W.F., and then renamed again after a trademark dispute with the World Wildlife Fund.) McMahon initially worked as a glorified office manager. She handled travel arrangements, did the accounting, and oversaw the company magazine, writing schlocky prose under the pen name Linda Kelly. When money ran low, she stopped paying for water coolers. She had an instinct for business. Wrestlers operated as independent contractors, and this allowed the McMahons to avoid paying benefits. McMahon, who had absorbed the importance of I.P. in her legal work, recognized that there was big money in licensing rights, and wrote I.P. ownership into the wrestlers’ contracts. “It is an intellectual-property company, no different than Disney,” Eric Bischoff, who ran a rival wrestling outfit, told me. In 2023, the W.W.E. merged with U.F.C. in a deal that valued the company at nine billion dollars. “That’s largely because of the intellectual property that they own and control,” Bischoff said. “And that was Linda’s vision.”

A key insight of wrestling is that, as in politics, people like being angry among similarly angry people. Wrestling villains are called “heels.” There have been Heil Hitler-ing Nazis and aspiring flag burners, and a heel who wore a cap and gown into the ring and recited poetry. Wrestling fans sense that they are looked down on by the cultural élites, but the art has always been appreciated by those who make their living plying the popular id. Zohran Mamdani is a fan, as were Bess Truman, J. Edgar Hoover, and George H. W. Bush. In 1957, Roland Barthes got into wrestling. “What wrestling is above all meant to portray is a purely moral concept: that of justice,” he wrote. “The baser the action of the ‘bastard,’ the more delighted the public is by the blow which he justly receives.”

Linda McMahon was indirectly responsible for wrestling’s biggest transformation. Wrestlers had always operated under a code of silence, known as kayfabe, that forbade acknowledging that the entire thing was scripted. (The term is, probably incorrectly, thought to derive from a Pig Latin version of old carny slang for “be fake.”) Wrestlers were expected to stay in character in public at all times. Authorities regulated wrestling as a sport; this meant taxes, regulations, and safety laws. In the mid-eighties, McMahon broke the code by lobbying state governments to instead treat it as theatre. Its performers, she testified, were like “the circus or the Harlem Globetrotters.”

The end of kayfabe brought about a strange artistic flourishing—wrestling postmodernism. Josephine Riesman, the author of “Ringmaster,” a biography of Vince, has traced how acknowledging the pretense actually made it more difficult to distinguish truth from fiction. The filmmaker Werner Herzog stumbled upon the W.W.E. around the time of McMahon’s famous groin kick and became captivated. “I had the feeling there was a very raw form of drama emerging,” he told me. “The family saga became such a central part. I think of Vince McMahon showing up in the ring with three blondes with big breasts and taunting his wife, who is in a wheelchair, and apparently blind. And the son accusing his father not of mistreating the mother—but he wanted more money, something like this. It was phenomenal, phenomenal drama.” Artistically, Herzog compared it to early Greek tragedy. He always assumed that, as with theatre, the wife and son were “paid stooges, pretending to be the wife and son.” I told him that these were, in fact, Linda and Shane McMahon. “That makes it even more interesting!” he said. “The marketing of your family for public drama of that vulgarity, it carves into the very texture of family in a way that we have not seen before.”

A pastime of W.W.E. employees was speculating about what kept Vince and Linda together. McMahon once remarked, of her husband, “Some women say they hook their wagon to a star. I hooked mine to a rocket ship.” In the early days of the company, which was based in Connecticut, the family lived in a trailer in West Hartford. Before the first WrestleMania, in 1985, they moved into a mansion in a gated community called Conyers Farm, where they hung a giant portrait of Vince in a V-neck sweater, gazing at the horizon. Linda was the type of person to remember kids’ names and birthdays. Vince was the type to expound on his love of the word “fuck.” (“It’s not just that the word refers to my favorite thing to do.”) He carried on reckless affairs. At one point, Linda discovered that Vince was having sex with his secretary. She eventually confronted him over the cheating. He told Playboy in 2001 that he’d been reformed. “The sex was terrific, but from an emotional standpoint, I regret it,” he said. He claimed that he hadn’t strayed for six years.

There were darker allegations. In 1992, a former referee named Rita Chatterton said that Vince had forced her to perform oral sex in a limousine and then raped her. (He has denied this. Vince and Chatterton reached a settlement in 2023.) Most colleagues felt that McMahon stayed married in part because she didn’t want to risk the company. “What kept them together? She was in love with him, but they also had the business!” Goldsmith, the former C.O.O., said. “Who are we kidding?” Vince’s volatility could be both maddening and intoxicating. “Some people thought Linda was an idiot for putting up with this, and some people thought that she was just being very, very loyal,” another colleague said. “She loved him because he was a force of nature.”

The business also needed her. In the early nineties, the F.B.I. began investigating the company for widespread steroid use, and the government later brought charges against Vince. Linda shrewdly cleaned it up. Vince won the case at trial, though Linda was reportedly left in tears when an exchange in court revealed another Vince affair. The scandal raised her status. She was named company president. “They needed a softer public face,” the former executive told me. “It’s a lot harder to be brutal to Linda. She comes across as a sweet mom with a warm Southern accent. Why would you want to beat her up?”

McMahon could move in more dignified circles than her husband could. The couple threw an annual holiday party at the Conyers Farm mansion. Guests recalled mingling with Lowell Weicker, Connecticut’s longtime senator and governor. (McMahon was also on lunching terms with his eventual gubernatorial successor Jodi Rell.)

Vince still exerted autocratic control. Employees avoided even sneezing in his presence. (He hated sneezes. “He doesn’t like anything he can’t control,” Stephanie said.) Some recall him cutting down McMahon at board meetings. But it could be difficult to tell who was dominating whom. “Their relationship was much closer to mother and child,” Riesman, the “Ringmaster” author, told me. “He was the idiot savant. She could be harsh but could forgive him and take him back.” In 1997, McMahon was named C.E.O. The company was planning to go public, and she was better suited to deal with Wall Street. She could embody seriousness and maturity, even while discussing the wrestling nonsense. On earnings calls, she fielded questions on such topics as the potential negative business effects of “the necrophilia story line.”

Vince’s psychosexual writing tendencies only intensified. He oversaw a story line in which Eric Bischoff—the rival executive, who later joined the W.W.E.—breaks into the family home and violently kisses Linda. “Vince wanted it to look very forceful,” Bischoff has said. The scene was shot at the mansion. Vince watched on a monitor, grinning. Bischoff found the whole situation bizarre. “Vince was fucking crazy,” he told me. “I couldn’t take it, honestly, and I’d spent many years working with crazy people.” He said he imagined that McMahon must have been thinking, “ ‘Wow, this guy’s in my house, and my husband wants him to basically assault me.’ But Linda just immediately made you feel at home. They were making lunch when I showed up, and she asked if I wanted a sandwich. You felt like you were part of the family.”

For most of Tom Cole’s adolescence, he worked for the W.W.E. as a ring boy, setting up and taking down the wrestling rings. He began when he was eleven or twelve, having been recruited by an announcer and supervisor named Mel Phillips. “My mother was an alcoholic and my father was never around,” Cole recalled, years later. “Mel was like a father figure.” Cole said that Phillips kept a black book containing the names of ring boys across the country. “Mostly it was kids with broken homes,” he explained.

In 1992, Cole, then twenty-one years old, and another ring boy told the San Diego Union-Tribune that Phillips had molested them. They said that he groped their feet for hours at a time. (Phillips would lock the kids into wrestling holds.) Sometimes he rubbed their feet on his penis. (Later, other ring boys alleged that Phillips had forced them into oral sex, ejaculated on them, and attempted to have penetrative sex with them; the McMahons have denied knowledge of the actions.) Cole later accused a W.W.E. executive named Pat Patterson of groping his butt, and an executive named Terry Garvin of turning on pornography and asking to perform oral sex on Cole during a work conversation.

When the story broke, the three men left the company. According to one account, the McMahons let Patterson go personally, at the mansion, and both Vince and Linda cried. (Patterson was reinstated soon afterward.) Vince held a series of damage-control phone calls with Phil Mushnick, a sports writer with the New York Post. Mushnick later testified in a deposition that Vince told him, “We had known for some time that Mel had a peculiar and unnatural interest and attachment to children.” Vince said that they’d fired Phillips before, years earlier, but had subsequently rehired him “out of the goodness of our hearts.” He framed this as a joint decision: “We brought him back with the caveat that he steer clear of children.”

Cole threatened to sue the company. At a meeting with the McMahons in New York to discuss a settlement, Cole’s attorney left the room several times, leaving him alone with the McMahons. Cole recollected that Linda seemed compassionate. “I thought having her present and a mother’s instincts were invaluable,” the company’s longtime lawyer, Jerry McDevitt, later said. Cole said she told him that she believed him, and that she wanted to help. He remembered her saying, “I consider you in a sense like a son. I want to look at it that way. I want you to come to me with your problems.” Cole opened up. At a later meeting at W.W.E. headquarters, according to Cole, the McMahons sought the names of other potential accusers with whom he, along with his brother Lee, was communicating. At the McMahons’ coaxing, he gave them access to his brother’s answering machine. (Vince denies this.) His lawyer had sought a monetary settlement, but Cole, who’d left the company, said that he just wanted his job back. The McMahons agreed, and also gave him fifty thousand dollars in back pay. Linda McMahon and Cole also made a separate agreement: he’d be paid as an employee but would return to school, as McMahon wanted. “I talked to this young man as I would my son, and told him how supportive of him we would be,” she later recounted. He signed a document that she’d prepared, agreeing that his employment was contingent on his academics.

As the journalist David Bixenspan, who has reported on the ring-boy allegations, has detailed, Cole enrolled at a community college. McMahon corresponded with his professors. Cole found that he was still traumatized by the abuse and had a hard time concentrating. He asked McMahon if he could drop out and resume working for the company. She told him to stick with it. Cole stopped attending class. He failed. His transcript was sent to McMahon. “I was very disappointed in your performance,” she wrote to him. “At this point we believe that we have done everything we can. Therefore, this letter is to advise you of your termination with Titan Sports, effective immediately.” She concluded, “The opportunity of a lifetime is a terrible thing to waste.”

Cartoon by Roz Chast

McMahon subsequently told a reporter that she didn’t believe Cole had been sexually abused: “I think Tom is a very confused young man.” She said that Phillips did have a foot fetish but that she considered it an overblown joke. Cole was left deeply conflicted. He later said, of the McMahons, “There are so many people’s lives that they destroyed or they had a fundamental part in destroying.” He went on, “Linda McMahon, I wish I could say she was a nice person. Sometimes she gave me that feeling and sometimes she didn’t. I don’t even think there’s a word, how I feel. I don’t know what I feel about Linda McMahon. Disappointed.” After he was fired, Cole applied for unemployment. He said that McMahon turned up at the courthouse personally to contest it.

Cole later found a good job. He got married and had three daughters. In 2010, McMahon was running for Senate. Maggie Haberman and Ben Smith, reporting for Politico, contacted Cole, but he hung up on them. The next day, McDevitt, the W.W.E. lawyer, issued a statement on Cole’s behalf: “I can truly say without hesitation I’m thankful for how Linda handled my situation. . . . I’m sending a check to Linda’s campaign fund this evening.” According to Tom’s brother Lee, Cole just wanted the situation over. He had pulled his life together and didn’t want to be part of a media frenzy. In 2021, Cole died by suicide. A week before, he’d texted Lee, “You need to tell my story.”

When Donald Trump was a kid, his favorite wrestler was Antonino Rocca, though Trump called him Rocky Antonino, and when classmates tried to correct him he insisted that he was right. One can see why wrestling appealed to him—the crowd is everything, the rules mean nothing, and the referees are so feckless that they often get knocked out and everyone laughs. In the late eighties, Trump hosted WrestleMania IV and V at the Trump Plaza in Atlantic City. The shows bombed, but Trump enjoyed himself. The wrestler Bret Hart remembered Trump almost falling out of his chair when Hart appeared to crack his face on a metal turnbuckle. “He believed it,” Hart told me. “He couldn’t believe I didn’t get killed.”

Trump courted the McMahons. He invited them to a Rolling Stones concert, saying, as Linda has recalled, that he “wanted a chance to be with the greatest promoter in the world.” For someone seeking power, as Trump was, Vince was a role model. The former executive told me a company joke about two particularly fawning, incompetent staffers: Vince kept one around “because if Vince said, ‘Here’s a gun, I want you to shoot that guy,’ he’d do it,” and the other “because if Vince gave him a gun and said, ‘Go shoot yourself,’ he’d do it.” Lowery Woodall, a professor at Millersville University who studies wrestling, told me, “It’s hard for someone who’s used to any other business model to understand the power that Vince had. Trump could look at him and say, ‘This is a man who has the level of power and control that I admire or aspire to.’ ” Vince fascinated Trump. “He’s a fantastic guy—one of the best ever,” Trump reflected recently. Once, there was a wrestling scene in which Vince’s limousine exploded on the air. It was obviously staged, but Trump reportedly called the office to check that Vince was O.K.

In 2007, Vince cast Trump as a recurring character. Like the McMahons, he played a version of himself. Vince laid on the flattery. He wrote the Trump character as Mr. McMahon’s foil: the defender of the fans, who was even richer than Vince. Their ongoing feud was called the Battle of the Billionaires, even though it’s unclear if there was even one billionaire between them at the time. Each man staked a wrestler, and the winner would shave the loser’s hair. Trump was supposed to be the good guy, but, even after the W.W.E. arranged for money to fall from the rafters when he appeared, the fans were slow to take to him.

The Battle of the Billionaires concluded at that year’s WrestleMania and got great ratings. (Trump won, and sheared Vince.) The night netted the men five million dollars. Each pledged his share to charity. Neither gave details on the donations, but the McMahons made contributions totalling five million dollars to one charitable organization: the Donald J. Trump Foundation. In 2013, the McMahons inducted Trump into the W.W.E.’s hall of fame. In a speech, Vince said, “When you think about it, second only to me, Donald might very well be a great President.”

Other politicians have courted the wrestling vote. The W.W.E. has aired promos from Hillary Clinton (“When it comes to standing up for the American people . . . I am ready to rumble”) and Barack Obama (“Do you smell what Barack is cooking?”). But Trump actually appreciated the form. “He fully understood the story-line development,” McMahon told me. “He found incredibly intriguing the interaction with the audience. The audience knew exactly when to boo the bad guy, when to cheer for the good guy.” Sam Nunberg, an early campaign aide, met Trump at a wrestling match. “He loved the sensationalism, the drama, the fantasy,” Nunberg has recalled. “I would say to him, ‘We’re going to be the W.W.E. of the primary.’ ”

By the time Trump ran for President, in 2016, Linda McMahon was a powerful conservative donor. She had run for Senate twice, in 2010 and 2012, as a moderate blue-state Republican. (She had opposed the elimination of the Department of Education—an idea that she called radical.) She was a tireless retail campaigner. “She went to the towns with ten people,” the manager of an opposing campaign told me. “There’s a political animal in her that loves this stuff.” Chris Shays, who lost to her in the 2012 Republican primary, was less impressed by her grasp of policy. “She was just as ignorant as in the first campaign,” he told me. “She hadn’t learned, and she hadn’t cared to learn. She wasn’t interested in the issues. She just appeared to be interested in the office.”

McMahon spent almost fifty million dollars on each campaign—a record at the time. She was still married to Vince, and they kept up appearances as a couple, but they were no longer living together. On the eve of the 2010 Senate election, Vince ran a W.W.E. scene that opened with him in a coma. When a doctor at his bedside mentioned McMahon’s campaign spending, Vince suddenly awoke: “Fifty million dollars on what?” She lost both races by twelve points. A person who helped manage an opposing campaign told me that in some ways McMahon’s investment paid off. Spending that much on identical double-digit losses signalled a commitment to the G.O.P. cause and an abundance of capital. “What would a hundred million be for us? Like a thousand dollars?” the person said. “Afterward, she was highly sought by Republicans.” In 2016, McMahon criticized certain Trump campaign tactics. “Some of the comments that have been made, I think, are quite deplorable,” she said. But she knew a rocket ship when she saw one. “Something about her views an unstable and monomaniacal man as a useful tool,” Riesman, the Vince McMahon biographer, told me. “I don’t think she sees herself as submissive to these men.” By the election, she’d become one of Trump’s biggest donors.

As McMahon ascended in Washington, Vince remained in Connecticut. In 2024, a former W.W.E. employee named Janel Grant sued him, claiming that he had pressured her into a three-year sexual relationship. At various points, she alleged, he injured her with dildos that he named after male W.W.E. wrestlers and sent her messages including “I will rape U.” In one instance, she said, she was coerced into having sex with Vince and another executive, while Vince defecated on her. In another instance, she begged the men to stop assaulting her, but Vince told her, “No means yes.” According to Grant, Vince distanced himself from her only when Linda McMahon found out about the relationship; Vince told Grant that, if it became public, McMahon would divorce him. (Both Vince and the other executive have denied the accusations. A lawyer for Vince said, “Janel Grant’s claims may be designed to grab headlines but they are factually unfounded and legally deficient.”) The Wall Street Journal found that Vince paid at least twelve million dollars in hush money to women over a sixteen-year period, including when Linda McMahon was the C.E.O. In 2024, Vince left the company, and McMahon, through her attorney, said for the first time that she and Vince were separated, though they have not officially divorced.

Max Stier, who runs the nonpartisan Partnership for Public Service, said that during Trump’s first term people sometimes asked him if Trump had a single good Cabinet secretary. He’d point to McMahon. At the S.B.A., she earned a reputation as a skilled manager of talent. Robb Wong, who worked at the agency under six administrators, told me, “We made bigger, better strides under her than under any other leadership. She was the greatest boss I’ve ever had.”

When it became clear that Trump had lost the 2020 election, McMahon, along with two high-ranking White House staffers, Brooke Rollins and Larry Kudlow, arranged an Oval Office meeting with him. They wanted his blessing to start a think tank to carry on his agenda, but they were vague on what it should accomplish. “I’m not even sure there were specifics,” Kudlow told me. Other efforts to intellectualize the Trump movement have run into problems, in part because one of Trump’s political skills is a certain strategic flexibility. But McMahon was not interested in publishing white papers. “I’m not a policy wonk,” she told me. She considers herself an executor. She told Rollins that their idea couldn’t be just a think tank. “It had to be a ‘do’ tank,” she said. They called it the America First Policy Institute.

The A.F.P.I. laid the groundwork for a second Trump Administration. McMahon and Rollins hired more than a hundred and fifty staffers. They drafted hundreds of executive orders for Trump to sign should he regain office. Quietly, they challenged the influential Heritage Foundation when it came to maneuvering to staff a second Trump Administration. The groups pushed similar policy. Heritage had Project 2025; the A.F.P.I. had a similar, though less specific, blueprint. “The efforts were really complementary,” one person who worked at the A.F.P.I. told me. But the A.F.P.I. played a savvier political game. Heritage’s leader, Kevin Roberts, made himself a central part of the Presidential campaign, and Project 2025 became electorally toxic. Trump was forced to denounce it. McMahon had a career’s worth of lessons in the virtues of bombast, and also in the dangers of it. “We didn’t think publicity would help arrive at a better project,” the A.F.P.I. veteran told me.

Trump believes that working on a transition before an election is bad luck. When he won, the A.F.P.I. had already assembled an Administration-in-waiting, one that didn’t have Project 2025’s baggage. In Trump’s first year, Heritage and Project 2025 still exerted a major influence, but the implementers tended to be alumni from the A.F.P.I.: Kash Patel, Kevin Hassett, Pam Bondi. Seven Cabinet secretaries came from the think tank. More than eighty A.F.P.I. staffers, about half the organization, went into the Administration. (Last year, RealClearPolitics found that, of a hundred and ninety-six policies drafted by the A.F.P.I., more than a hundred and fifty were advanced or enacted in Trump’s first hundred days.)

At the institute, McMahon ceded policy to others. Before launching the group, she and Rollins visited Texas to enlist the billionaire oilman Tim Dunn as a founder. Dunn isn’t well known nationally, but he is the most powerful man in Texas; in 2023, ProPublica reported, two-thirds of all campaign donations to the state Republican Party came from his political organizations. Dunn has expressed the view that Christians should dominate society. Texas’s first Jewish Speaker of the House has said that, in a private meeting, Dunn told him that only Christians should hold leadership positions. (Dunn has denied this.) For years, his main political project was legislation that siphoned public-education funds to private schools via vouchers. “I call him a theo-oligarch,” Glenn Rogers, a former Republican state representative, told me. Rogers is deeply conservative, but, like many rural Republicans, he was a public-education supporter. Dunn targeted him, and in 2024 he lost his seat. “He desires to eliminate public education and replace it with a private-education system that uses his version of the Christian religion,” Rogers said. (Dunn did not respond to a request for comment.)

Dunn wielded his influence through a think tank called the Texas Public Policy Foundation. For years, its president was Rollins. Kel Seliger, a Republican legislator who represented Dunn’s district, told me that Dunn was using the A.F.P.I. to duplicate the model nationally. “It is a right-wing political organization designed to fulfill the goals of certain very wealthy people,” Seliger told me. “That doesn’t make it a think tank. When the thinking can be fairly extreme and only in one direction, that’s not a lot of thinking.”

“There’s nothing to be scared of—your mom and I are right down the hall in separate rooms and I might actually be going to a bar.”

Cartoon by Zachary Kanin

When McMahon took over the Department of Education, she staffed it with A.F.P.I. people. “A.F.P.I. dominates education policy in the federal government,” Jim Blew, a founder of the Defense of Freedom Institute, who helped prepare McMahon for her confirmation hearing last February, told me. The think tank had successfully operationalized a second Trump Presidency; it’s unclear what will happen to it when he leaves office. “A very open question is if they’re even around in three years,” Blew said. “It may be that it continues, but I don’t know.”

The Department of Education exists, to a large extent, to distribute education funds authorized by Congress. Conservatives, who prefer that the money flow directly to states, have always hated it. “Eliminating it has been a conservative goal since it was created,” Lindsey Burke, the author of Project 2025’s chapter on education, told me. For Republican Presidents, this has mostly been rhetoric. Ronald Reagan campaigned on killing the department, but he left it intact. Blew, who was an Assistant Secretary at Ed under Betsy DeVos, said that two recent moves, by Obama and Joe Biden, changed the calculus. The first was Ed’s reinterpretation of Title IX rules, which mandated that universities hold students accused of sexual assault as culpable if it was more likely than not they’d committed the act, and broadened the definition of gender-based discrimination to include transgender students. The second was the cancellation of student debt, which was seen as a giveaway to young liberals. Blew said that there has always been an argument for eliminating the department on efficiency grounds: “Why do we need so many people working in this department when all they’re doing is sending money?” Now, he told me, there’s a more important objective. “I don’t know how to articulate this, but a lot more of it is about power,” he said.

During McMahon’s confirmation hearing, she found herself in the odd position of persuading senators to approve her to lead a department that she pledged to destroy, while assuring them that the authority to do so was not hers but theirs. “The whole hearing right now feels kind of surreal to me—it’s almost like we’re being subjected to a very elegant gaslighting,” Senator Maggie Hassan said at the time. When McMahon was asked whether schools that taught Black-history classes were in violation of an anti-D.E.I. executive order, she responded, “I’m not quite certain.” At the hearing, she was flanked by her kids and by two parents’-rights activists. One of them, Tiffany Justice, a founder of Moms for Liberty, was recently asked by ProPublica how many children she imagined attending public school in the future; she responded, “I hope zero.” McMahon watched her confirmation vote from the Ed building, in the Secretary’s office. Three hours and one minute later, she sent an e-mail to the whole staff with the subject line “Our Department’s Final Mission.” She wrote, “This is our opportunity to perform one final, unforgettable public service to future generations of students.” Less than a week later, half the department had received layoff notices.

McMahon told me that, a few weeks into Trump’s second term, he called her to complain about the latest national reading and math scores. The test results, part of an assessment called the Nation’s Report Card, have stagnated since the pandemic. “It’s embarrassing,” Trump told her. He tasked her with finding out why. The slump could have a variety of causes, including smartphones in classrooms and COVID. But McMahon and Trump both immediately cited the low scores as the reason the department needs to go. It may be difficult to determine, using their own metric, if their overhaul succeeds. In February, the department’s Institute of Education Sciences, which administers the assessments, was gutted by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE cut the I.E.S. staff by ninety per cent.

Education veterans told me that the department certainly has bloat and inefficiencies. Many complained about time-wasting technology platforms. The department maintains a library that gets no visitors most weeks. A personal trainer was reportedly paid a quarter-million dollars a year. But some conservatives were dismayed by the wanton destruction of I.E.S., which has a budget of less than a billion dollars. “The cuts were so ham-handed and so blunt,” Frederick Hess, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, told me. “The Nation’s Report Card is hugely cost-effective. You save almost nothing by cutting these kinds of statistical enterprises, and you threaten to do a lot of collateral damage.”

DOGE did McMahon the favor of swinging the first sledgehammer. “Betsy DeVos, rhetorically, was more ardent about blowing up the department,” Hess said. “But suddenly DOGE took a wrench and just started breaking a whole lot of stuff, and it created an entirely different environment for McMahon to operate in.” The Education Department is the smallest Cabinet agency by number of staff. When Trump’s term began, the agency employed about four thousand people, a tenth of a per cent of the civil workforce. McMahon’s layoffs eliminated entire offices. Dozens of employees were fired for attending a 2017 diversity training that had been approved by DeVos. The department has encountered legal challenges to the firings. It has also asked some employees to return from administrative leave, seemingly after it was unable to perform critical functions. One employee I talked to had been laid off and brought back twice. After the second time, the employee received a letter in the mail saying that the original layoff had been rescinded: “And then forty-eight hours after that they sent us an e-mail saying, basically, ‘Just kidding, we’re rescinding the recision.’ ” The employee was on paid leave for most of the past year. In 2025, the department spent about thirty million dollars paying people not to work.

Alongside the lack of personnel, some vital functions have slowed to a crawl. “The cuts are devastating in a way that’s hard to fully encapsulate,” Rachel Gittleman, the president of the union representing the department’s employees, told me. “We were already operating on a shoestring budget.” Layoffs slashed offices that dealt with English-language acquisition and those that worked with poor, minority, and rural districts. “Part of the reason why there’s such a big target on our backs is who we serve, and who we serve are the people and locations that have historically been left out of mainstream education,” Gittleman said. The agency has reportedly cancelled or delayed more than a billion dollars of grants for programs like school desegregation and disability services. Miguel Cardona, the Education Secretary under Biden, told me, “They’re hurting the students who relied most on this Administration to improve things. The rural communities and the red states are being impacted more so than even the blue states.” But many people on the right were giddy. “I don’t even know that we anticipated it would go as fast as it has,” Erika Donalds, who runs education policy for the A.F.P.I., said. “I mean, less than a week after Linda McMahon was confirmed, half the department was gone. She doesn’t play around, obviously.”

One of the hardest-hit arms of Ed was the Federal Student Aid office, which administers $1.7 trillion of loans. In the last quarter of 2025, a million people defaulted on their student loans. Colleges have reported issues accessing essential loan-servicing platforms and getting in touch with the F.S.A. Some people with student debt have been unable to make qualifying payments, because of technical problems. An attorney told me that she’s had clients who have permanent disabilities, and are entitled to have their loans cancelled with proper medical documentation. “You send in a doctor’s note, they don’t look at it, and then it gets voided because they waited too long and your doctor’s note is out of date,” the attorney said. “It’s either nefarious bad-faith practices or just complete idiocy.”

Max Stier, of the Partnership for Public Service, has been struck by McMahon’s metamorphosis. “The Linda McMahon of 2017, at least as I personally heard her, would not have bought into the idea that the way you improve the situation is you destroy your own workforce,” he told me. “Any competent leader would see that as insane.” He credited the flip to Trump’s changing priorities. “In Trump One, they didn’t understand the processes of government,” he said. “In Trump Two, they have disdained and destroyed those processes.” McMahon is one of only a few who have thrived in both Administrations—likely because of her ability to execute on both visions.

Of course, with Trump, the priority is often theatre. McMahon is familiar with organizations built around an increasingly unstable man who is a genius at spinning story lines that inflame the crowd and damage enemies and institutions but, if you think too hard about them, don’t necessarily add up to a coherent narrative. Trump has issued an executive order calling on McMahon to kill the Education Department, but doing so requires sixty votes in the Senate—for now, an impossibility. Observers have put forth several explanations for her approach. One is that she is a loyal soldier; another is that she’s just an optimist. Inside her office, she displays a glass tumbler inscribed with the words “Shut It Down.” Lindsey Burke, the Project 2025 author, who is now McMahon’s deputy chief of staff, told me, “If you’re ever in a meeting with her and you say, ‘If we shut down the department,’ she’ll interrupt and say, ‘Not if—when.’ She believes it.” (When I expressed skepticism, McMahon told me, “I fully do expect this to be successful.”) Cardona said that harming public education could open the door to increased privatization; McMahon successfully pushed to pass a federal tax credit, similar to the voucher system in Texas. Others have noted that, if McMahon can’t kill the department, vandalizing it would still be useful. A congressional aide who works on education told me, “It’s like she’s orchestrating a crisis so that they can say, ‘Look, we have to get rid of the financial-aid office. It’s broken. It doesn’t work.’ Well, they broke it. It worked.” Hess, of the American Enterprise Institute, thinks that McMahon hopes to neuter the department for any future Democratic President. “It’s like bombing the Iranian nuclear program last summer,” he told me in January. “It sets them back three years, four years. The next Democratic Administration would have to spend significant time and energy rebuilding.”

McMahon acknowledges that she was never an education expert, and those who work with her say that she’s an eager student. Still, it’s difficult not to attribute at least some of Ed’s chaos to a Secretary deciding to dismantle a department before she fully understands how it functions. At times, she comes across as a skilled administrator whose subject-specific knowledge is cobbled together or incoherent. “She doesn’t know anything about things like student loans, so she flubs a lot,” a former F.S.A. staffer said. On Fox News, she once forgot the name of the law for students with disabilities. In April, at a summit on educational innovation, she repeatedly referred to A.I.—as in artificial intelligence—as “A1.” (“A school system that’s going to start making sure that first graders, or even pre-Ks, have A1 teaching in every year, that’s a wonderful thing!”) In September, while attempting to explain how a federal ban on D.E.I. programs squared with her view that curricula should be set locally, she swerved into a discussion of combatting racism. “We do that so well on a local level without it being mandated and ruled,” she said.

In late 2024, Max Eden, a former member of the Trump White House, proposed a higher-education agenda for McMahon. The Gaza protests had been galvanizing for Republicans, who, even before October 7th, had viewed universities as captured by radical thinking on race and politics, rife with grade inflation, and intolerant of conservatives. “To scare universities straight, McMahon should start by taking a prize scalp,” Eden wrote. “She should simply destroy Columbia University.” Eden outlined how, by crippling universities over charges of antisemitism, McMahon could also achieve larger goals. “If you can’t get the Republican votes to shut down the department, make the Democrats resent it so much they want to shut it down, too,” he explained later.

The main driver of the Administration’s battle with universities has been the new Joint Task Force to Combat Antisemitism. It has had Cabinet-level members, including Bondi, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and McMahon. Early on, the task force met every week. It has focussed most zealously on Ivy League schools. In April, the Times reported, Trump raised the idea of cancelling Harvard’s federal grants, which add up to about nine billion dollars. “What if we never pay them?” Trump said. “Wouldn’t that be cool?”

McMahon has an ability to bluster transparently while keeping a straight face, and this has been useful during negotiations. In May, she wrote a letter to Harvard that had such distinctive locutions (a math program was “embarrassing,” a plagiarism accusation “humiliating”) and unorthodox capitalization (“why is there so much HATE?”) that there was widespread speculation it had been written specifically for, or perhaps by, Trump. But McMahon can also speak reasonably with college presidents. A member of the task force told me that McMahon comes in when negotiations reach an impasse. May Mailman, who last year coördinated the White House’s higher-education policy as a deputy for Stephen Miller, told me that McMahon made a different impression from other, more fervent Administration figures. “She’s a friendly, sociable, normal person,” Mailman said. “We’ve got so many bad cops in this Administration that even a firm hand gets to be the good cop.”

Mailman said that McMahon valued higher education. “She doesn’t want to necessarily destroy institutions,” Mailman said. “There are probably people in this Administration who would just straight up say we’re interested in shutting down Columbia. I don’t think Secretary McMahon is saying she’s not in favor of that. It’s more ‘Choose your own adventure, Columbia.’ ”

McMahon’s approach to antisemitism differed sharply from those of past Administrations. Traditionally, discrimination investigations have been the purview of Ed’s Office for Civil Rights. The O.C.R. was not always unpopular on the right; it was once led by Clarence Thomas. But many conservatives saw an overreach in the Title IX changes of the Obama and Biden eras. McMahon’s cuts decimated the O.C.R. Of its five hundred and seventy-five employees, only sixty did not receive layoff notices; most are either gone or are on leave. Seven of twelve regional offices were shut down. “It seemed designed to do maximum damage,” a high-ranking former O.C.R. official told me. “They went after some of the largest, most productive offices with the most expertise on antisemitism.” When the Chicago office, which had about fifty lawyers, was closed, all of its cases, totalling in the thousands, were assigned to a single lawyer in Denver. The office already had a backlog, which has now grown to about twenty-five thousand cases. Many involve access problems for, or harassment of, students with disabilities. Ninety per cent of the seven thousand cases that the O.C.R. “resolved” between March and September of last year were dismissed, an increase from an average of seventy or eighty per cent under Biden.

A few varieties of cases have seen an uptick in resolutions: there have been thirty-one settlements for anti-white and anti-Asian discrimination, and four for allowing transgender athletes to compete in sports. Meanwhile, McMahon’s department has resolved no cases of sexual harassment or assault. “It would be noteworthy if a single office didn’t resolve one in a year, much less the entire agency,” the high-ranking former O.C.R. official said. Beth Gellman-Beer, who ran the Philadelphia office, told me, “You have, what, nine transgender athletes countrywide?” (The N.C.A.A.’s president said a year ago that there were fewer than ten.) “And the Administration says the reason they’re focussing on this issue is the safety of women. But if they’re really concerned about women’s safety, why are they not processing sexual-harassment cases?”

The O.C.R. layoffs cleared out many of the most experienced investigators of antisemitism. The void was filled by the antisemitism task force. In its major settlements with universities, the Administration has shortened the investigation stage and pushed for broad, often unrelated remedies. The task force overrode a settlement that the O.C.R. had reached with Brown University over alleged incidents of antisemitism, and instead withheld federal funding until Brown agreed to increase teaching and research about Israel—“The remedies are constantly conflating Israel and Judaism,” the former O.C.R. official said—and pay fifty million dollars to workforce-development organizations. “That’s perfectly great and admirable, but it’s got nothing on God’s green earth to do with antisemitism,” the official said. Gellman-Beer said that the skeleton staff at O.C.R. likely wouldn’t have the capacity to monitor whether universities are complying with existing settlements. “Some of those were the worst cases I’d ever seen in my career,” Gellman-Beer told me. “In antisemitism cases where we found horrendous violations, we suspect that nobody’s monitoring it.”

“I just said hi to be polite, Ethan.”

Cartoon by Carolita Johnson

The antisemitism task force has had headline wins. It has initiated three antisemitism settlements, with Northwestern, Brown, and Columbia. But the O.C.R. has settled none. (In Biden’s final year, there were some two dozen settlements.) At times, it can appear that the task force is most interested in other issues. Its leader, Leo Terrell, a Baptist civil-rights lawyer—who once shared a post on Twitter from a former leader of a white-supremacist group asserting Trump’s ability to revoke Senator Chuck Schumer’s “Jew card”—has promised, “We’re gonna bankrupt these universities.” The task force has about twenty people. The White House has released the names of only about half the members, and just one is Jewish. When I asked the member if there were other Jews on the task force, the person could not say for sure. “Honestly, I just don’t know the religion of every member,” the person said. Gellman-Beer told me, “It feels like ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ You pull back the curtain and nothing’s there. It’s all bluster. And I don’t disagree with the Administration when they say antisemitism on campus is a problem. I think it’s a huge problem. I just think they’re doing a huge disservice to Jewish students.”

One of McMahon’s deputies said that the legal challenges to the layoffs had frozen the O.C.R. for longer than anticipated. McMahon told me, “We do need to hire and bring back some lawyers.” She envisioned that, after the final mission, the Department of Justice could potentially handle school-discrimination cases. “I have no worries about that whatsoever,” she said. But the former high-ranking O.C.R. official said that this shows a misunderstanding of how the two agencies work. “The D.O.J. decides which case is going to advance the law or set precedent,” the official said. “They litigate a handful of cases in the civil-rights education section.” The O.C.R. is required by law to address every complaint it receives. “There’s no picking and choosing. Every desperate mother who comes to us gets help. So it’s really apples and oranges, even though it seems on its face to make sense. It’s just that Linda McMahon has no idea what she’s talking about.” (Asked for comment, Madi Biedermann, a department spokesperson, said that my general characterization of McMahon was “built on anonymous smears and recycled secondhand gossip.”)

In September, McMahon convened an all-staff meeting to begin implementing the department’s dissolution. Her strategy involved a series of what are called I.A.A.s, or interagency agreements—deals to move entire offices to other Cabinet departments. “It’s really operating like a merger,” McMahon told me. “It’s not just ramming something somewhere. It’s very thoughtful.” The moves are technically provisional; only Congress can make them permanent. “We’re doing it piecemeal and as a proof of concept,” she said.

During the meeting, McMahon announced some of the offices that were moving, and where they were headed. “Interspersed were these rambling stories,” someone who attended told me. Elementary education would move to the Department of Labor, she said, and she talked about visiting an elementary school where a class used virtual-reality goggles to climb an A.I. Mt. Everest. “The pinnacle of the story was one of the students falling off of Mt. Everest and dying,” the attendee said. “I guess the takeaway was that technology in schools is good.”

The I.A.A. strategy was laid out at length in Project 2025. “It’s the highlight of my career to work on this,” Burke, the author and deputy chief of staff, told me. She said that she was motivated by bureaucratic waste, liberal overreach, and poor test results. “We’ve spent three trillion dollars since the department became operational, and, to quote Karoline Leavitt, kids can’t read or do math,” she said. The department claims that forty-seven cents of every federal dollar given to states is wasted on regulatory compliance, and Burke and McMahon plan to release more federal money as direct block grants to states, rather than filtering it through Ed. But Balkanizing the department won’t eliminate much red tape. Margaret Spellings, the Secretary of Education under George W. Bush, has said that it would “make it much more complicated for states.” Federal education funds, by law, come with mandates and restrictions. A central idea for the department is that it’s more efficient for one agency to insure compliance than to foist the responsibility on fifty states individually. Cardona explained, “Sending it back to the states sounds nice, until it costs more taxpayer money at the local level to do what the federal level could have done.”

McMahon said she hopes the I.A.A.s will convince Congress that the department’s breakup is feasible. She said that she was “very closely in touch” with the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee about the implementation. But McMahon has not responded to calls from members of the committee to testify about the moves.

So far, the department has announced ten interagency agreements. Each has its own challenges. The staffer who worked in Federal Student Aid, which is being moved to Treasury, told me, “The data is such a hot mess, and it’s such a privacy disaster. How do you move forty million subprime loans with records quite literally in bunkers in Nebraska on microfiche?” The agency has floated the idea of transitioning special-education services to Health and Human Services—the department, McMahon pointed out, that oversaw special education before Ed existed. Nicole Neily, the founder of Parents Defending Education, who sat with McMahon’s family at her confirmation hearing, told me, “We are hearing concerns from families who have special-needs children: Will their needs be met? Will this be more complicated?”

The first office transfers were to the Department of Labor. Burke told me that the moves have been effective. “Money has gone out the door on time,” she said. But at least one grant program has been delayed, in part because of problems with Labor’s technology systems. Staffers have described their days as a dark bureaucratic comedy. Colleagues who work together at Labor are now spread across five different areas. There are dead mice on the floor. Initially, many couldn’t access Labor’s network. They had to pester colleagues whenever they needed something printed. One person told me about staffers at one Labor office asking “if there’s any benefit to their working conditions, to their jobs, to their work streams, any benefit at all. Literally, all they could come up with was the cafeteria.” Education couldn’t secure parking for all staffers at Labor, so the department paid for a special shuttle to ferry them across the National Mall. Burke told me, “There are things like that where we are coming up with solutions where there are—I wouldn’t even say problems, but where there are day-to-day changes. We are only about a half a mile from the Department of Labor, so it’s pretty close!” The shuttle started out as a standard bus, but hardly anyone used it. The department replaced it with a light-blue Mustang.

McMahon often speaks about her legacy. She reminds staffers that hers will be the department’s closure. She told me that another part of her legacy will be touring the country to leave behind a “tool kit of best practices for states,” a kind of goodbye gift from Ed. On another occasion, she has spoken about her legacy being literacy; she has promoted programs of science-based reading that have produced surprising turnarounds in states like Mississippi. But her goals sometimes come into conflict. Much of the research behind science-based literacy was coördinated by I.E.S., the office that was gutted last year.

McMahon told me that another priority is patriotic education. She was distressed by polls showing that a majority of young people say they don’t love their country. She favors telling America’s history “warts and all,” but said that kids should come away feeling proud to be American. “Are we perfect yet? No,” she said. “Are we the best in the world? Yes.” She has been travelling across the country on what she called the “History Rocks!” tour to promote patriotic curricula. I recently accompanied her on a visit to the Chicago Hope Academy, a Christian private school.

She sat in on a class learning about Ida B. Wells and Jacob Riis, and brought a wall-size replica of the Declaration of Independence for the students to sign. In the hallway, a few kids whispered to her that they’ve been watching wrestling their whole lives. McMahon is no longer involved with W.W.E. Though Shane was once seen as the heir apparent, Vince ultimately designated Stephanie and her husband, Paul Levesque, the wrestler known as Triple H, as his successors. Vince has retreated from the public. He is occasionally rumored to plot a comeback, or a new wrestling venture with Saudi backing. Last year, he was involved in a police chase that ended when he crashed his Bentley into another car at a hundred miles an hour. (He was cited for reckless driving and entered a pretrial diversion program.) A couple of months later, he threw himself an eightieth-birthday party at Gotham Hall, in midtown Manhattan. Attendees were required to surrender their phones. As a party favor, he gave everyone a bust of his own head.

After touring the school, McMahon led an assembly centered on American-history trivia. (Q: What treaty ended the French and Indian War and transferred control of Illinois to Britain? A: The 1763 Treaty of Paris.) It was strange to think that a future history lesson might include some W.W.E. factoids: Trump, McMahon, Jesse (the Body) Ventura. The Rock is always rumored as a Presidential aspirant, and Kane, who “tombstoned” McMahon, is now the mayor of Knox County, Tennessee. McMahon has pointed out that America’s wrestling fascination isn’t new—Abraham Lincoln was an accomplished free-for-all wrestler. The students, who were mostly Black and brown, many from poor families, all seemed excited to have her there. As propaganda goes, the patriotic programming was benign. It would not have seemed abnormal had it been led by another Education Secretary and not the purported final one.

After a couple of hours, McMahon got ready to leave to visit another Chicago school, this time with Erika Kirk. Before she left, I asked her if she saw any contradiction between the event and what she called Ed’s final mission. Did using the weight of the department to push a project she cared about make an argument for the utility of the department? “I don’t think so,” she said. “You would have another agency secretary who might come do it. There are always other dignitaries.” ♦

An earlier version of this article misstated the year of Donald Trump’s first Presidential campaign.