Trump’s efforts to body slam the Department of Education
As part of a campaign promise to abolish the federal government’s Department of Education, President-elect Donald Trump is nominating Linda McMahon to lead the department in his second administration and already she is serving as co-chair of the transition.
For decades, McMahon, who was an executive with World Wide Wrestling Entertainment and a major donor to Trump, served as the head of the Small Business Administration from 2017 to 2019. She then took a position in a Trump Political Action Committee to support his next run and soon after served as the chair of the board of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump think tank.
Her husband, pro-wrestling mogul Vince McMahon stepped down as the executive chair of the WWE’s parent company TKO Holdings earlier this year after a lawsuit came out naming him in relation to accusations of sexual assault and sex trafficking, all of which are spelled out in detail in this piece by Axios. Linda McMahon is also listed as a defendant in the lawsuit. Quite a power couple, some might say.
You just can’t make this stuff up. Someone from the world of pro wrestling is likely to head up the Department of Education all as part of an effort to body slam the entire civic enterprise because of Trump’s unsubstantiated perception that it has been infiltrated by the extreme left.
The wise elders of the tribe of journalism have rightfully suggested that for the next four years, journalism will need to stay focused on the issues, to try to look past the circus aspects of the new administration and to see them like a script straight out of the fictional drama of professional wrestling.
That will mean making sure we focus on covering the substantive issues in education across America where distressed communities face profound challenges in educating the next generation. That will mean looking at the inequities in a system where wealthy communities have fully functioning, elite public school systems while poorer communities struggle to provide even the most basic necessities.
I truly believe the only way we can stay vigilant will be through on-the-ground reporting on these issues by reporters who are there to serve local communities. This is the work of our Report for America program, which is already fielding two dozen education reporters in local communities from the Mississippi Delta to rural Alaska. And, as GroundTruth just announced this week, we will be expanding our program to more than 100 newsroom partners across the country. This work will be sustained in the years ahead through our $20 million grant from the Knight Foundation to Report for America, an incredible gift that embraces GroundTruth’s overall mission to restore trusted community reporting at a time when the crisis in local journalism has become a crisis for our democracy.
“Today’s news marks an exciting expansion of our proven model,” said Kim Kleman, executive director of Report for America. “Not only are we recruiting and placing exceptional journalists in communities that need them most, but we’re significantly increasing our efforts to help newsrooms become more financially stable.”
Many of these new opportunities for emerging journalists to serve local communities will focus on covering education, which will now be more important than ever as each school district has its own unique challenges and stories. One example of this expansion of our work will come through a partnership with the Arizona Media Association which will allow Report for America to sustain several education beats in Arizona newsrooms. The details will be announced in January.