On November 19, Donald Trump selected multi-millionaire Linda McMahon as Secretary of the Department of Education. The former CEO of the World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE), she unsuccessfully ran for the U.S. Senate in Connecticut and lost twice. She served on Trump’s cabinet once before as the head of the Small Business Administration and then resigned in 2019 to become the director of America First Action, a Trump super-PAC that kept promoting the agenda of “Make America Great Again” after he lost the 2020 election. She has received praise from bigot and Moms for Liberty co-founder Tiffany Justice.

In 2010, McMahon was caught lying to the press about possessing a bachelor’s degree in education, when instead she had one in French. Incapable of being elected to office, McMahon hitched her wagon to Trump’s racist, right-wing political career and became a key part of his campaign. Together, they worked to advance the agenda of billionaires and are poised to resume that mission now that he has returned to the White House.

Her elevation to Secretary of Education is not about strengthening the Department of Education by any means. It is the opposite. Trump and McMahon are hardcore advocates of the abolition of the department. With the erasure of the Department of Education, the following would be gone: standards for education; any enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 to investigate racist discrimination and sexual violence; the basis for need-based federal Pell Grants and student loans; funding for all public schools grades K-12; support of English for Speakers of Other Languages programs; special education programs; programs for students with disabilities, and more.

According to the website of the America First Policy Institute (AFPI), a pro-Trump right-wing Christian think tank chaired by McMahon herself, public funds would be redirected from public schools to vouchers, money that parents would have to use to pay for private schools. These schools are owned in part by the likes of McMahon, Betsy DeVos, Trump’s last Secretary of Education, and their billionaire friends. McMahon’s vision is to ruin the quality of public education, close public schools as enrollment declines, and then direct public funds to private schools, charter schools and religious schools that promote “Make America Great Again” ideals.

McMahan and her billionaire friends advocate the privatization of education because they, along with the billionaires of the U.S., will profit if families suddenly have to pay for basic education. They dream of a world where education from kindergarten through 12th grade is no longer free, and the tuition dollars go straight into their pockets.

Tuition for private schools can cost tens of thousands of dollars a year, meaning students from working-class homes, undocumented immigrant students, and Black, Chicano and Latino students may no longer be able to afford an education, and only rich, white students will. The resulting inequality is part of McMahon and Trump’s vision.

McMahon’s racism extends beyond education policy. Her thinktanks demand obedience to and increased funding for law enforcement, despite the fact that racist cops continue killing Black people, including Black kids, without losing their jobs or facing any jail time. The AFPI calls the “defund the police” movement “dangerous.” Moreover, McMahon actively spreads lies about Central American immigrants, Chinese immigrants, and communists in order to justify Trump’s anti-immigrant policies, such as his termination of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals which can leave over 800,000 immigrant youth vulnerable to deportation.

Aside from immediate financial profit, the AFPI and McMahon seek to reshape what is taught. Like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and other Trump-endorsed politicians, the AFPI characterizes the teaching of the histories of slavery, the Civil Rights movement, the women’s rights movement, gender and sexuality struggles and any social movements in the U.S. as “identity politics” and calls for them to be eradicated from the education system.

The MAGA movement doesn’t limit their hatred of social justice movements to just words. McMahon has come out in the press calling Palestinians who resist illegal settlements terrorists and stands firmly in the camp of criminalizing free speech on campus if it is used to speak out against genocide.

In the state of Florida, DeSantis banned funding for campus cultural organizations, activist groups, any LGBTQ groups, and pro-Palestine student organizations, also calling them terrorists and effectively banning groups like Students for a Democratic Society and Students for Justice in Palestine. This semester, students have faced criminal charges just for promoting events that say no to the genocide in Gaza, and experienced expulsion and even deportation.

McMahon, MAGA, and Moms for Liberty have worked hard to paint a target on the backs of LGBTQ people, particularly trans youth, and parents who love and support their queer kids. America First Action and the AFPI, her two think tanks, use the slogan “Give parents more control over the education of their children” in reaction to the growing support for open expression of gender and sexuality among students and youth. To the sound of this drumbeat, Moms for Liberty has campaigned to ban books that depict LGBTQ people or women’s rights positively in any way, and they have advocated for bills that ban trans people from using the right bathroom, ban teachers from using the right pronouns for trans students, and green-light legal action against parents who support their children’s gender expression.

Ironically, despite America First’s hardline campaigning around LGBTQ people as predators, McMahon and her husband, Vince McMahon, face multiple ongoing lawsuits for sexual abuse and trafficking of World Wrestling Entertainment employees and the sexual abuse of children. This October, a lawsuit was filed against the McMahons for covering up the sexual abuse of young boys committed by WWE announcer, Melvin Phillips, with allegations going back to the mid-1980s. Last summer, Vince McMahon was subpoenaed by federal law enforcement for million-dollar payoffs to silence five women, including former WWE employee Janel Grant, who he is said to have not only sexually assaulted, but also trafficked to business partners. The McMahons and their lawyers have denied all allegations, but these cases are not yet closed.

It is into these dirty hands that the care of students and youth in the U.S. would be going. Public schools that need to be strengthened and expanded will be ransacked. An office that should come to the defense of women, LGBTQ youth, and Black, Chicano and Latino students will be put in the hands of a former CEO who has built a career on defending rapists and racists. Instead of becoming sites for learning and political engagement, college campuses will be reduced to nothing more than storefronts for stakeholders and a recruitment ground for war criminals.

Despite their high offices, Trump and McMahon’s positions are unpopular. In April 2019, unionized public school teachers, workers, students, parents and community members in East Los Angeles, most of whom are Chicano, successfully defeated a major privatization initiative. After months of protests, including a week-long strike of over 30,000 teachers, they ended the construction of a corporate mega-charter school called KIPP Promesa Charter in Boyle Heights, East Los Angeles. KIPP is the largest charter school corporation in the United States and builds in working-class neighborhoods, often Black, Chicano or Latino-majority ones. Not only do public schools close in their wake, but other impoverishing policies often follow, such as rent hikes, evictions and displacements. The people of East Los Angeles went up against an effort led by billionaires Eli Broad, the Waltons of Wal-Mart, and the Gates Foundation, and they won.

Trump has installed incompetent, failed politicians like McMahon to carry out his racist, reactionary agenda without question. Together, they will dance to the tune of greedy billionaires who are waiting to put education up completely for sale. At the same time, their views represent the few. Millions of students, teachers, workers, parents and community members will not sit idly by as this valuable institution is destroyed.

Anyone who wants to see public education expanded, and not condemned, needs to make their demands heard, using protests and every tool at their disposal. Just like the Chicano teachers’ unions, families, and activists of Boyle Heights, if we fight, we can win.

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