Donald Trump and Education for Acquiescence

Public Goods  •  December 23, 2024  •  William Paul

In a Donald Trump administration replete with billionaire donors, hucksters, hardline right-wing contributors to the Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, warriors against the woke “Deep State,” and nominees facing sexual abuse allegations, the president-elect’s Education Secretary pick, Linda McMahon, fits in nicely.

She is the former CEO of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) which she headed with her husband, billionaire Vince McMahon. Linda McMahon was one of the highest donors to the Trump campaign’s various super-PACs, forking over $20.3-million between January 2023 and November 2024. Like her Trump administration predecessor, Betsy DeVos, she has little to no experience in public education, serving on the Connecticut Board of Education for a year in 2009 and once expressing an interest in being a teacher. She falsely claimed that year she had an education degree.

Questionable Ethics, But Loyal

Along with his bizarre and racist claims about Haitian pet-eating immigrants and despite many sexual abuse allegations and one successful suit against him, Trump smeared American teachers supporting LGBTQ+ kids, calling them child predators. Coincidentally, a lawsuit filed in Maryland this past October alleges that Linda McMahon and her husband Vince McMahon did nothing to stop ringside announcer Melvin Phillips between the 1980s and 2009 from sexually assaulting teenaged boys from disadvantaged backgrounds hired as ring boys. Phillips, who died in 2012, allegedly attacked these teens in hotel, locker, and dressing rooms and even wrestlers’ change rooms. The suit accuses the McMahons of looking the other way and fostering a culture of sexual abuse. Earlier this month, a judge in Maryland’s federal district court paused the suit while the McMahons, WWE, and its parent company challenge Maryland’s statute of limitations rules. How will this education secretary look upon sexual assault complaints made by students across the country under Title IX rules eased under the Biden administration?

Linda McMahon’s standout quality is loyalty. She served under Trump in his last go-round and didn’t, like former Secretary of State John Kelly, call him a fascist. She is co-leader of Trump’s presidential transition team and chair of the America First Policy Institute started in 2021 to prepare a smooth entry for a new Trump administration. Her ideas line up nicely too: teach practical skills, use apprenticeships to train students but don’t bog them down with Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) training, stop liberal “demagogues” from embracing “identity politics,” and like her predecessor, Betsy DeVos, channel money toward private education “choices.”

What should we watch for in Trump education under the guiding hand of Linda McMahon?

Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership

It’s hard to grasp Trump 2.0 policy on education or anything else for that matter without taking a look at Project 2025. This 922-page document is a creature of the deeply conservative Heritage Foundation and its position is clear on the current state of American polity:

“The long march of cultural Marxism through our institutions has come to pass. The federal government is a behemoth, weaponized against American citizens and conservative values, with freedom and liberty under siege as never before.”¹

During the election campaign, Trump did his best to distance himself from Project 2025 but must have had a change of mind when he named seven of its contributors to his cabinet, including Russell Vought, who advocates expanding presidential powers. Among its many plans for education, Project 25 would get rid of the Department of Education, expunge what it calls “gender ideology” and critical race theory from schools while it pushes for parental choice, like increasing charter schools. Parents, it says, should be able to take their education dollars to the private or public school of their choice. It also calls for the elimination of college loan forgiveness introduced by the Biden administration. It presses for the end of the National Education Association (NEA), America’s largest teacher organization, because of its efforts to “block school choice and advocate for additional taxpayer spending in education. They also lobbied to keep schools closed during the pandemic.”²

Aside from the long march of cultural Marxism, Project 2025 seems obsessed with the word “woke,” though it doesn’t explain what it means, preferring instead to use it as a rock to hurl at even the most moderate of liberals. “Woke” culture warriors attack Americans who must learn to muzzle “woke” propaganda. Parents need to look outside the “woke-dominated” system of public education, particularly at higher education dominated by “woke diversicrats” who hold a monopoly over it to benefit “Marxist academics.”³

This is just a taste of a document that looks like it could have been written by an angry crank in a garret somewhere. That it comes from an organization as influential and well-funded as the Heritage Foundation suggests just how sensitive these deeply reactionary and powerful people are toward any measures that smack of liberalism and potential challenge to their hegemony. “Woke” is the unnamed enemy, the latest red menace.

Eliminate the Department of Education

During the 2024 election campaign, Trump pledged to get rid of the Department of Education which he claims pushes a “woke ideology” down the throats of American children. He promised to return education to the states, though it always was and still is their responsibility. The department came about during the Eisenhower administration in an effort to improve overall education, particularly after the Soviet Union beat the US into space with the Sputnik satellite in 1957. Ronald Reagan promised to dispose of it, but instead introduced that cryptic term “choice” to a system that would promote privatization through tuition tax credits, vouchers, and educational savings accounts. Under the Trump administration 1.0, Education Secretary Betsy Devos wanted to abolish the department but used it to keep schools open during the COVID 19 pandemic, then further cut public school funding while pushing for more money to go toward privatization through school vouchers.

The department is supposed to provide some funding equity through federal grants like the $18.4-billion for high poverty K-12 schools and the $15.5-billion that helps to cover education for students with disabilities. It also manages and sets rules for the $1.6-trillion federal student loan programme for colleges. Trump plans to drop the Biden administration plan to forgive student debt to millions of young people, though his transition team is grappling with how he might do that. The trillion-dollar question is what happens to minimal funding equity if Trump manages to dump the Department of Education?

Freedom to Lose

States vary widely in what they spend on funding public education – anywhere from 5 percent of GDP (Vermont) to 2.06 percent (Arizona). While most states top up funds for high-poverty school districts, according to a report by the Education Law Centre, it’s not enough to bridge the gaps between them and wealthier districts; the gaps overall are huge. To make matters worse, America is about to welcome a regime that believes public funding for private schooling is a great idea. Vouchers for example, divert money from public schools to help parents buy space in a private school. They increase costs to the public purse by between 11 and 33 percent. Education Savings Accounts (ESA) enable parents to withdraw state funds from their accounts to put toward private tutoring, online learning and private schools. Tax-credit scholarships provide tax credits to both individuals and businesses donating to non-profit groups that offer private school scholarship.

In Trump and McMahon, freedom of choice proponents have powerful allies, as the president-elect noted in his platform, to “send their children to the public, private, or religious school that best suits their needs, their goals, and their values.” Trump 1.0 Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, was the flag-bearer for privatizing education, standing firm for vouchers as well as charter schools, which don’t charge tuition. Trump preferred vouchers. In his last budget in 2020, he cut funds for charter schools. This was part of a $5.6-billion cut to Department of Education – the fourth cut in four years. Trump still supported the voucher program with $5-billion in tax credits for people who can afford choice in education.

Gender Indoctrination and Critical Race Theory

Trump declared that he would cut federal funding for schools that are “pushing critical race theory or gender ideology on our children.” This is right out of Project 2025, which bizarrely aligns such a response to affirming civil rights.⁴ Trump spent millions of dollars during his presidential campaign to use transgender issues to slam public schools, repeating this outright lie: “No transgender, no operations — you know, they take your kid — there are some places, your boy leaves for school, comes back a girl. Okay? Without parental consent.” Excluding trans children and youth is a big issue across states in the US with 26 of them banning trans kids from participating in sports consistent with their gender identity. Trump has promised to keep boys out of girls’ sports and has said he would ask Congress to pass a bill stating that there are only two genders.

Title IX is an important part of this story. Originally introduced in 1972, it stated that no one should suffer discrimination over the benefits of education because of their sex. Trump 1.0 Education Secretary Betsy DeVos eased grievance rules for issues of sexual misconduct making it harder to report to sexual assault as definitions of it and violence in general became more restrictive. Joe Biden recently rolled back these changes and added sexual orientation and gender identity to the list falling under the definition of “sex.” Outraged, Project 25 demands that sex be defined as “biological sex recognized at birth.”⁵ Trump plans to get right on it.

The battle over critical race theory -incredibly- flips civil rights on its head; those who subscribe to the idea are themselves racist, proclaims Project 25 writers.⁶ Such people accordingly “…believe that racism (in this case, treating individuals differently based on race) is appropriate—necessary, even …” So, you could rightly argue that treating students based solely on their merits isn’t enough to overcome racism. Or you could reasonably posit that racial privilege and the power that goes with it becomes entrenched and hard to recognize by those who have that power. These include commonly accepted concepts concerning racism like unconscious bias, social construction of race, racial inequity, intersection of identities of people who experience racism, and structural racism. To take these views, you are supporting issues that clearly unhinge conservatives who happen to hold those reins of power. The very idea that racism calls for a deeper understanding of race relations than being fair according the rules of those who hold power is anathema to the framers of Project 2025 and other conservatives now in power.

Trump was stirring hysteria back in 2022 when he told an audience in South Carolina that “getting critical race theory out of our schools is not just a matter of values, but a matter of national survival.” It’s conceivable that his education secretary could use civil rights enforcement to reduce woke Diversity, Equity and Inclusion efforts: “…the D-E-I-ification of school practice.” Critical thinking is at odds with acquiescence, that fundamental requirement of the incoming Trump administration and its authoritarian supporters. And it is grotesque – morally and intellectually bankrupt – to claim that accurate history, better understanding of cultural differences and backgrounds, or helping young people affirm their sexual identity is somehow a strike against values.

Anti-History

As a counterpoint to rationalism in teaching, Trump set up the “1776 Commission” just before he was defeated in November 2020. Joe Biden abandoned it once he was elected, but Trump says he will bring this patriotic bit of anti-history back. It is propaganda – a glorification of some concocted MAGA America. It skips lightly over slavery, noting that we need to see it in a broader perspective and that, besides, it’s been around throughout history. Progressivism, rising out of a need to counter the worst effects of industrial capitalism gets a nod but led to government by managers operating without checks and balances, that “deep state” Trump rails against. Among the 1776 Commission’s many claims: the Civil Rights movement immediately turned to ideas contrary to those of the white people who founded America resulting in “identity politics” that “values people by characteristics like race, sex, and sexual orientation and holds that new times demand new rights to replace the old.” To this end, teachers across America, especially those in universities who hypothetically influence students to disdain their country, need to teach a prescribed version of history describing how permanent principles of America’s founding have been challenged and preserved since 1776. This illustrates a key element of fascism: reworking history, decrying accuracy, and glorifying an imagined past to build a patriotism defined by the ruling class fighting to preserve its cultural mythology.

Trump has always been a fan of the big lie. He used it to question Barrack Obama’s born-in-America eligibility to be President, worked it to deny that he lost the 2020 election and carried it throughout the disgraceful 2024 election. The plans he and his acolytes have for American education are perverse. As education critic, Henry Giroux wrote recently truth, and language have been degraded to the point that concepts like good and evil, justice and injustice have become increasingly difficult to distinguish.

Giroux calls for a critical pedagogy that asks students “…to recognize the ethical responsibility to care for others, to affirm historical memory, to challenge and dismantle the structures of domination that persist in our societies. It is a pedagogy that invites students to become subjects of history, not its passive objects – agents of their own fate, rather than recipients of a fate imposed upon them by those in power.”⁷

That is not how education under the current Trump regime will proceed. What has that to do with Canada? Part two of this article will deal with similar conditions in what Donald Trump uncharmingly likes to joke is the “fifty-first” state. •

This article first published on the School Magazine website.

1. Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise. Washington DC, 2023 p. ix.
2. Ibid p. 342
3. Ibid Project 2025 references “woke” 32 times throughout the document.
4. Ibid p 322.
5. Ibid p 332.
6. Ibid p 342.
7. Henry Giroux, Neoliberalism’s Plague: The Erosion of Conscience in Education, The Bullet, December 12, 2024.