Jeff Bryant, veteran education journalist, covered Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearings for The Progressive. She is, of course, Trump’s choice for Secretary of Education. Everyone was stumped by her ability to dodge every question. Bryant said she was “elegant” in her obfuscations.

McMahon accepted the leadership of a department that Trump wants to abolish. She doesn’t know much about the department, so she had the challenge of defending an impossible position. She will lead a department that she wants to kill off.

McMahon became a billionaire with her husband, as an entrepreneur in the wrestling entertainment business. She may not know much about the functions of the U.S. Department of Education, but she has very strong and extremist views about education. She is Chairman of the Board of the America First Policy Institute. Go to its website and you will see what I mean. AFPI is closely allied with the aims of groups like Moms for Liberty. McMahon’s group thinks that teachers are “indoctrinating” students with radical ideas about race, gender, and America.

As Bryant writes about her testimony, she seems to have no strong views at all. Don’t be fooled.

He writes:

U.S. Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey, likely spoke for many viewers of Secretary of Education appointee Linda McMahon’s Senate confirmation hearinglast week when he said, while questioning McMahon, “I guess I’m frustrated . . . . This whole debate we’re having right now, it just feels like it’s untethered from just the reality on the ground.”

Kim’s frustration grew from his exchange with McMahon about President Donald Trump’s efforts to cut and dismantle the Department of Education, in particular, the department’s Office for Civil Rights, and how that squares with the department’s obligation to address what Kim described as “a surge in antisemitism” in schools and on college campuses. McMahon’s ensuing non-answer—she pledged only to examine “what the impact” of the cuts would be—was just one example of her tendency throughout the hearing to obfuscate or respond to questions with platitudes.

During the hearing, McMahon refused to give U.S. Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, a clear answer to his question about whether schools that have race- or gender-related afterschool clubs are in violation of Trump’sexecutive order to eliminate federal grants to organizations that support diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). Murphy called her lack of clarity “chilling.”

When Delaware Democratic Senator Lisa Blunt Rochester asked McMahon if she believed that every school receiving federal dollars should follow federal civil rights laws, McMahon said, “Schools should be required to follow the laws,” but refused to provide a straight answer when Blunt Rochester then asked, “If private schools take federal dollars, can they turn away a child based on a disability or religion or race?”

McMahon stated her resolve “to make sure that our children do have equal access to excellent education,” but said that was a responsibility “best handled at the state level”—even though the failure of states to ensure equal access was a major reason for the Department of Education’s creation in 1980. 

While she affirmed that many of the education department’s programs were established by law—though she was unsure of how many—she suggested that legally established education department functions might be relocated to other federal departments. When asked what she would do if Trump ordered her to carry out a policy change that violated congressionally established law, McMahon said, “The President will not ask me to do anything that is against the law,” which hardly seems plausible…..

Please open the link to finish the article. It was Senator Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire who said that McMahon was engaged in “elegant gaslighting.”

Bryant defines gaslighting:

Gaslighting—a process by which a person is psychologically manipulated through a pattern of comments or actions intended to make them question their perceptions of reality or accurate memories—more or less describes what Republicans have done with education policy for the past forty or fifty years.