About Secretary of Education-designate Linda McMahon

by Irvin Muchnick

I’ve been fielding so many queries about President-elect Trump’s nomination of Linda McMahon to be secretary of education that I decided to dedicate a post to the subject.

First of all, spare me your outrage. Trump won the recent election decisively, over my and many of your dead bodies. Now he’s proceeding to do precisely what he telegraphed. With Matt Gaetz for attorney general having been thankfully torpedoed, I suggest we move on to the meat of the matter: using whatever Madisonian leverage the Senate has attained as a result of Trump’s characteristic caprice and incompetence for the purpose of grilling McMahon in her confirmation hearings and pressuring her to pledge not to dismantle the Department of Education.

By MAGA standards, McMahon is an utterly predictable choice. Indeed – sorry – she may be the most qualified person in the freak-show cabinet lineup so far rolled out. She already served in a high position in the first Trump administration. She’s a megadonor and she led one of the most important Trump superPACs. Whom exactly did we expect him to pick for this particular post – the ghost of Robert Maynard Hutchins?

My 2009 book CHRIS & NANCY: The True Story of the Benoit Murder-Suicide and Pro Wrestling’s Cocktail of Death, first published in 2009, is in its third and  “Ultimate Historical Edition.” The book chronicles Linda McMahon’s role in the corporate smothering of the most important narratives of events surrounding Benoit. The book concludes with her nomination to serve on the Connecticut state board of education – the first move in a political mover and shaker career that saw her burn through a total of $100 million to self-fund unsuccessful campaigns for a U.S. Senate seat, in 2010 and 2012.

In both races, McMahon handily won the Republican primary against patrician establishment former GOP House of Representatives members, then just as handily lost the general elections – to, respectively, Democrats Richard Blumenthal and Chris Murphy.

In 2010, especially, CHRIS & NANCY was a big part of oppo research. The Connecticut politico site Capitol Report said her primary opponent Rob Simmons walked around with a copy of the book in his pocket. The late great sportswriter Frank Deford, a Blumenthal campaign contributor, told me he said to the then state attorney general, “Just read Muchnick’s book.”

In arrangements coordinated through me, Blumenthal flew Michael Benoit, Chris’s father, from western Canada for a Linda-bashing news conference about WWE’s disastrous talent health and safety record. Blumenthal even launched an audit of WWE’s abuse of independent contractor classifications, which both denied employees benfits and health care coverage, and cheated state tax coffers.

Mike Benoit told me that at lunch after his Connecticut event, Blumenthal looked him in the eye, shook hands with him, and pledged to pursue the reforms Mike was seeking.

After his successful campaign (during which, by the way, McMahon accurately nailed him for stolen valor in his false representations that he had served in the Vietnam war, when he actually held down a cushy stateside post in the Army Reserves), Blumental neither responded to nor even acknowledged follow-up queries from me regarding WWE health and safety. And the Connecticut attorney general’s office shut down the audit of WWE.

In 2017, when Donald Trump nominated Linda McMahon for administrator of the Small Business Administration, Senator Richard Blumenthal was pictured yukking it up with her after a confirmation hearing.

What a scumbag. In this instance, I’m referring to Blumenthal, not Trump.