She was head of the Small Business Administration in Trump's first go-round, has a failed Senate campaign behind her (2010), and has previously headed up the America First Policy Institute, a right wing thinky tank for Trump/MAGA policy to percolate while its members waited for the day that has now arrived. They were, of course, part of the Project 2025 team.
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| Yeah, she looks nice |
She was supposed to be a leading contender for the top Department of Commerce spot, but she didn't get that one, so here she is leading the Department of Education.
Course, since few had her on their cabinet bingo cards for education, we're now all scrambling to figure out what this might mean. Here are some quick initial thoughts.
Unlike former secretary Betsy DeVos or some of the contenders like Tiffany Justice and Erika Donalds, McMahon has not spent most of her adult life trying to devise and implement ways to dismantle and privatize public education. (And at age 76, she is a decade older than DeVos--one more aging boomer in this administration). I'm not saying that won't be part of her policy objectives. It's just that she won't enter office with a whole suitcase of explosives already packed.
However, that doesn't change the fact that she is completely and utterly unqualified to run the department. She may actually have an edge on DeVos, who had never worked at an actual job, led a large organization, or sold an idea with any technique other than throwing money at people. She spent some time on the Connecticut State Board of Education, so she knows a bit about the bureaucratic ins and outs.
She may represent a hint about which way Trump will jump when it comes to choosing between his goals. He can pursue either 1) the culture panic goal of using federal funds as leverage to force schools to follow culture war edicts or 2) dismantling the department and sending the federal funds out to states as no-strings block grants. Well, #2 was always the less likely (it requires Congress to go along), and McMahon seems like a better fit for #1, though of course her long-time minimal interest in education may mean it's easier for her to walk away from the ruins of the department.
The fact that Trump gave her this position as a sort of consolation prize suggests that, as with his first go-round, he's not all the interested in education nor is it on the top of his to-do list. So McMahon may signal a sort of ill-intentioned neglect, like a toxin in the bloodstream that will get around to fatally poisoning you sometime soon, just as soon as it wraps up a few other things.
No, I don't see any way that this is not terrible. If you squint real hard through your rose colored glasses you might convince yourself that this isn't going to be quite as terrible as some of the alternate realities we can contemplate-- but it's still terrible. Like the rest of his cabinet picks, she will be there to make sure that her department of the government doesn't work and collapses into some configuration of smoking rubble.
Though unlike other cabinet picks, she does not have an actual criminal background [Update--okay, maybe not actual criminal conviction, but some very shady and abusey stuff], an observation that reminds us that Trump has not just lowered the bar to the floor, but has dug a deep hole so that the bar can be buried. It also means she should have a less strenuous confirmation hearing than some of her fellow picks.
Now brace for a few days of wild speculation and bad professional wrestling gags.
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