Trump’s Latest Cabinet Pick Is Also Mired in a Sexual Abuse Scandal

Proximity to sexual abuse and scandal increasingly looks like a prerequisite for joining Trump’s upcoming Cabinet. President-elect Donald Trump made yet another surprising pick on Tuesday, naming former World Wrestling Entertainment CEO Linda McMahon as his intended nominee for education secretary.

McMahon, along with her husband, Vince McMahon, helped turn the WWE into the pervasive entertainment product that has become intertwined with modern North American culture. Trump was a good friend to the McMahons during this time, even getting in the ring for the “Battle of the Billionaires” in 2007.

Linda McMahon stepped down from WWE in 2009 and launched herself in conservative politics, serving on the Connecticut State Board of Education and running two unsuccessful campaigns for Senate in 2010 and 2012. She then became a Republican megadonor, and was rewarded with an administrator position at the Small Business Administration in Trump’s first-term Cabinet. On Tuesday, she was rewarded once again.

“Linda will use her decades of Leadership experience, and deep understanding of both Education and Business, to empower the next Generation of American Students and Workers, and make America Number One in Education in the World,” Trump wrote in a statement. “We will send Education BACK TO THE STATES, and Linda will spearhead that effort.”

But much like Trump Cabinet picks Pete Hegseth and Matt Gaetz, McMahon has troubling skeletons in her closet. The WWE has long been known for its highly questionable, borderline abusive work environment.

Linda McMahon and Vince McMahon—from whom she is now reportedly separated—are being sued by five anonymous plaintiffs who served as “ring boys,” essentially teenage stagehands. The ring boys allege that they were being sexually abused by WWE wrestlers Pat Patterson and Terry Garvin. The suit states that both Linda and Vince knew exactly what was happening to the ring boys but did little, if anything, to stop it. Vince faces even more damaging allegations of sexual assault, trafficking, and more. And although these are separate from Linda, almost all of these accusations date from when Linda was leading the WWE. Trump has yet to comment on the allegations.

Linda McMahon also falsely claimed in 2009 on a candidate questionnaire for the Connecticut Board of Education that she had a bachelor’s degree in education, when she only has a certificate. Per The Washington Post’s recap of the incident, she resigned from the board as soon as she heard that local journalists intended to make her error public, but claimed the timing of her resignation was merely coincidental.

If confirmed as education secretary, McMahon will be charged with carrying out Trump’s plan for the Department of Education: specifically, to kill it completely.

The state of Texas is offering the Trump administration a 1,400-acre ranch to use as a camp for mass deportations. The Texas General Land Office’s commissioner, Dawn Buckingham, sent a letter to the president-elect Tuesday making the offer, saying that the office “is fully prepared to enter into an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or the United States Border Patrol to allow a facility to be built for the processing, detention, and coordination of the largest deportation of violent criminals in the nation’s history.” 

The state bought the land, located along the southern U.S. border with Mexico in the Rio Grande Valley, in October with plans to build a border wall on it. The previous owner did not let state authorities build a wall there, and prevented law enforcement “from accessing the property,” according to the letter. 

For a state official to offer land to an administration not yet in office for the purpose of conducting questionably legal mass deportations is, to put it mildly, a big, preemptive step. Trump does seem ready to fulfill his campaign promise for mass deportations, however,  given his appointment of Tom Homan as “border czar.” Homan was the architect of the first Trump administration’s ruthless family separation policy, which resulted in nearly 2,000 children being torn from their families after being detained at the southern border. Homan appeared on CBS’s 60 Minutes last month laying out precisely what a mass deportation program might look like.

Trump plans to declare a national emergency and enlist the U.S. military for these deportations, targeting all undocumented immigrants, criminal or not. Trump’s choice for deputy chief of staff for policy, white nationalist Stephen Miller, has said that the president-elect would revoke legal protections such as birthright citizenship, DACA, and temporary protected status, resulting in legal immigrants facing deportation as well. 

Texas’s action suggests that Trump will have plenty of help at the state level to carry out his unprecedented plan. “We figured, hey, the Trump administration probably needs some deportation facilities because we’ve got a lot of these violent criminals that we need to round up and get the heck out of our country,” Buckingham told Fox News on Tuesday. “We’re happy to make this offer and hope they take us up on it.”

Even small-time investors are looking to peel out from their Truth Social shares as the stock continues to tumble in the aftermath of the election.

Stock in Trump Media & Technology Group has failed to pick up steam since its last peak at $51.51 a share near the end of October, causing some users—who had banked on a bigger postelection spike—to panic about the future of an investment irrefutably tied to Donald Trump’s personal fortune.

In the days since the last spike, TMTG has lost nearly half of its value, causing some users on a Truth Social investor board to lament, “The fact is we are in trouble.”

The company, which was conceptualized after Trump was banned from traditional social media outlets over his followers rioting through Congress on January 6, has plainly struggled to generate revenue. A financial statement from Trump Media released on Election Day shared bleak ratios: The company had lost $363 million during the first three-quarters of the year and generated just $2.6 million in revenue. That was down 23 percent from last year, reported The Washington Post.

Earlier this month, Trump Media & Technology Group director Eric Swider sold all the stock he owned directly in the company, offloading 136,183 shares at $28.23 per share, a total value of more than $3.8 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Swider still holds a little more than 18,000 shares in TMTG via an LLC, Zach Everson reported last week in his 1100 Pennsylvania newsletter.

Swider had been the CEO of Digital World Acquisition Corporation, which merged with TMTG in March when the media company was on the verge of running out of cash. The deal was seen as a major win for Trump, infusing $300 million into the company and keeping Truth Social up and running. The merger also helped the media entity make a particularly strong debut on the stock market with a valuation of nearly $8 billion, sending the worth of Trump’s personal stake in the company skyrocketing to upward of $3 billion at a time when he was facing nearly $500 million in legal expenses.

And Swider wasn’t the only one to offload his Trumpian assets. Also on November 8, TMTG’s chief financial officer, Phillip Juhan, dumped 320,000 shares at a price of $30.65 apiece and, after the weekend, sold another 64,000 shares at a price of $32.97 each, leaving him with just over 265,000 shares in the social media endeavor. General Counsel and Secretary Scott Glabe also dropped shares, though significantly fewer—15,917 shares at $32.19 each.

Trump—who owns roughly 57 percent of the company with 115 million shares—has insisted for months that he has no intention of selling off his stock.

Donald Trump’s transition team has begun quietly assembling a list of alternatives to Pete Hegseth, Vanity Fair reported Wednesday.

The Fox & Friends host has been the subject of immense scrutiny since he was nominated last week to head the Department of Defense, after allegations surfaced that Hegseth had sexually assaulted a woman at a Republican event in Monterey, California, in 2017.

Hegseth’s lawyer said the claims had already been investigated and nothing had come of it, but soon after, it was reported that Hegseth had agreed to a settlement with the accuser in return for her signing a nondisclosure agreement.

Two Republicans close to Trump told Vanity Fair that they were preparing a contingency plan in case Hegseth’s nomination fell apart.

“It’s becoming a real possibility,” one of the sources told the magazine.

“People are upset about the distraction,” the second source said. “The general feeling is Pete hasn’t been honest.”

A MAGA insider insisted that although Hegseth had been vetted, the allegation hadn’t come up. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, was briefed on the allegations the day after Hegseth’s nomination was announced. The claims were so serious that Wiles and a lawyer for Trump’s team approached Hegseth about them the following day.

Hegseth’s nomination has also garnered backlash over his misogynist and anti-Muslim statements, as well as his reported ties to extremist Christian nationalist figures and tattoos featuring slogans used by white nationalist groups.

Representatives Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy Mace are bringing out the rhetorical big guns to knock down Representative-elect Sarah McBride.

Over the course of the week, Greene has accused McBride—the first openly transgender person to be elected to Congress—of being mentally ill and partaking in a “war on women.” Now Greene is claiming that a trans woman’s mere presence in a bathroom is tantamount to assault.

“I’m not kidding you,” Greene said Tuesday on Steve Bannon’s War Room. “It is like a physical assault for a man to come in, charging into our private places, bathrooms, locker rooms, our gyms, places that are designated specifically for women only.”

A 2018 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that bathroom-related nondiscrimination laws pose practically no risk to women and that claims to the contrary are little more than myths that are “not empirically grounded.”

Mace also elevated the assault claims, arguing Tuesday night on Fox News that “the idea of a man walking into a locker room where I’m changing, is actually—it feels like assault.”

Greene and Mace’s purported support for women’s safety abruptly ends with their fizzling fears over transgender rights, however. The pair of MAGA acolytes are vehement supporters of Donald Trump, who famously said that he could grab women “by the pussy” and is a judge-determined rapist, convicted adulterer, Jeffrey Epstein confidant, and proud abortion rights destroyer.

On Tuesday, Mace introduced a resolution that would ban trans women from using the restroom that corresponds with their gender identity in the U.S. Capitol. The attention-seeking South Carolina representative openly acknowledged that the stunt was a direct attack on McBride—again, who will be the lone transgender woman in Congress—telling reporters on Monday that it was “that and more.”

“Sarah McBride doesn’t get a say. I mean, this is a biological man,” Mace said, adding that the newly elected Delaware congresswoman “does not belong in women’s spaces, women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, changing rooms, period, full stop.”

McBride had her own response to the resolution, describing it in a statement as a “blatant attempt from far right-wing extremists to distract from the fact that they have no real solutions to what Americans are facing.”

“We should be focused on bringing down the cost of housing, health care, and child care, not manufacturing culture wars,” McBride said. “Delawareans sent me here to make the American dream more affordable and accessible and that’s what I’m focused on.”