Linda Marie McMahon, born Linda Marie Edwards on October 4, 1948, in New Bern, North Carolina, is an American business executive and public official who serves as the thirteenth United States Secretary of Education. She was sworn in on March 3, 2025, after the Senate confirmed her nomination by a vote of 51 to 45. Before entering federal office she spent nearly three decades building World Wrestling Entertainment with her husband, Vince McMahon, later ran twice for the U.S. Senate from Connecticut, and served from 2017 to 2019 as administrator of the Small Business Administration.
She was the only child of Evelyn and Henry Edwards. Her parents worked on a nearby military base. Raised in a conservative Baptist household, she later converted to Roman Catholicism. As a teenager she met Vincent Kennedy McMahon, the son of a regional wrestling promoter. They married on August 26, 1966, shortly after she graduated from New Bern High School; she was seventeen and he was twenty-one. She enrolled at East Carolina University, majored in French, earned a teaching certificate, and completed her bachelor’s degree in 1969, finishing in three years so that she could graduate with her husband. She has said she originally hoped to teach, but she never entered a classroom as a full-time teacher.
After college she worked as a paralegal while Vince moved through a series of jobs. The couple had two children, Shane in 1970 and Stephanie in 1976. Financial strain led them to file for bankruptcy in 1976. In 1980 they founded Titan Sports, Inc. Two years later they purchased Capitol Wrestling Corporation from Vince’s father, Vincent J. McMahon, and began expanding what had been a northeastern territorial promotion into a national enterprise. Linda handled much of the company’s business administration, contracts, and corporate structure while Vince concentrated on creative direction and talent. Employees often described her as a co-chief executive long before she held that formal title.
The company, later renamed World Wrestling Federation and then World Wrestling Entertainment, grew rapidly in the 1980s through cable television, pay-per-view events, merchandising, and the national expansion associated with the rock-and-wrestling era. Linda became president in 1993 and chief executive officer in 1997, holding the CEO role until 2009. Under that leadership WWE became a publicly traded company and a global sports-entertainment brand. She oversaw operations, licensing, and corporate governance during years when the firm moved from a regional business into a multibillion-dollar enterprise that employed thousands. Critics of professional wrestling have long questioned the industry’s treatment of performers, its scripted violence, and its marketing to younger audiences; supporters credit the McMahons with professionalizing a previously fragmented business and creating a durable media company. Linda left day-to-day management in 2009 to enter politics.
That same year Connecticut Governor M. Jodi Rell appointed her to the State Board of Education. She resigned after about a year to campaign for the U.S. Senate. In 2010 she won the Republican nomination but lost the general election to Democrat Richard Blumenthal. In 2012 she again secured the Republican nomination and lost to Democrat Chris Murphy. Both races were expensive and drew attention to her WWE record, her personal wealth, and her relative lack of prior elected experience. She remained active in Republican politics, serving as a Connecticut delegate to the 2016 Republican National Convention and on the convention’s rules committee. She also co-founded Women’s Leadership LIVE, a professional-development organization, and served for years on the board of trustees of Sacred Heart University in Fairfield, Connecticut.
After Donald Trump’s 2016 victory, McMahon was nominated to lead the Small Business Administration. The Senate confirmed her on February 14, 2017, by a vote of 81 to 19, and she took office the same day. As administrator she oversaw loan programs, entrepreneurial assistance, and disaster-relief operations. The administration highlighted her role in the Pledge to America’s Workers, a public-private effort that the White House said produced more than 16 million training and education opportunities. She resigned in April 2019 to chair America First Action, a super PAC supporting Trump’s reelection effort. She later chaired the America First Policy Institute, a think tank associated with Trump-aligned policy work, where education proposals emphasized parental choice, career and technical education, and greater state control. She also served as co-chair of Trump’s 2024 presidential transition team.
Trump announced her nomination as secretary of education in November 2024. Supporters pointed to her business record, her brief service on Connecticut’s education board, her university trusteeship, and her SBA experience with workforce programs. Opponents argued that she lacked traditional experience in public-school administration or classroom teaching and questioned whether her background prepared her to oversee federal education policy. After confirmation she described her priorities as expanding school choice, aligning education more closely with employment, strengthening basic instruction, and reducing the federal department’s administrative role. Only Congress can abolish the Department of Education, but she has used administrative tools, including interagency agreements, staff reductions, and contract cancellations, to move programs toward other agencies and shrink the department’s footprint. By 2026 the department’s workforce had fallen substantially from its level at the start of the administration, and management of numerous K-12 grant programs and parts of the student-loan portfolio had been shifted elsewhere. She has called this work the department’s “final mission” and has said the goal is to return more decisions to states and parents.
Her public arguments often cite long-running concerns about student proficiency. In remarks prepared for a 2026 White House back-to-school event she referred to national assessment results showing that only about 30 percent of students were proficient in reading or mathematics, and she contrasted those outcomes with decades of federal spending. In higher education she has pressed colleges to publish clearer admissions standards, broaden ideological diversity among faculty, and address declining public confidence in the sector. Those positions track broader administration themes and have drawn both support from advocates of school choice and criticism from groups that favor a larger federal role in equity, civil-rights enforcement, and student financial aid.
Personal details have also remained part of her public profile. She and Vince McMahon, married since 1966, have been reported as separated. Their children, Shane and Stephanie, both held prominent roles in WWE. Linda’s early interest in teaching, her French degree, and her later philanthropic and board work in education are frequently cited by her office as context for her cabinet appointment, even though most of her career was spent in corporate management and political advocacy rather than in schools.
Across these stages her trajectory is unusual: from a bankruptcy in the 1970s to the leadership of a publicly traded entertainment company, two unsuccessful Senate campaigns, a bipartisan-confirmed term at the Small Business Administration, and appointment as education secretary with a mandate to reduce the agency she heads. Assessments of that record divide largely along views of professional wrestling as a business, of Trump-era workforce and education policy, and of how much authority the federal government should exercise over schools. What is not in dispute is the sequence of offices she has held and the scale of the company she helped build before entering national politics.