McMahon escapes Cabinet’s clutches
Linda McMahon can hold her head high.
It wasn’t major news last month when the Connecticut resident announced she was leaving her position as head of the Small Business Administration. Still, it’s a Cabinet-level position, and the state should offer thanks to its two-time would-be senator for accomplishing something few of her contemporaries have achieved.
She’s escaped the federal government without a major scandal.
It can be hard to keep track of the sheer volume of stories that would have been dire, potentially catastrophic scandals under previous administrations. There just isn’t enough time in the day to pay attention to everything that’s been uncovered, which tends to work to the benefit of those involved. Eventually, though, reality catches up.
But none of the scandals have touched Linda McMahon, who moved seamlessly from running WWE to operating a federal bureaucracy. The list of things Linda McMahon did not do is lengthy.
For instance, Linda McMahon did not pay a discounted rent to live in a D.C. home owned by a lobbyist, nor did she spend federal dollars on personal expenses and secure frequent first-class plane tickets back home. That was former EPA head Scott Pruitt, who nonetheless managed to hack through environmental regulations meant to ensure things like clean air.
Linda McMahon did not maintain partial ownership of companies linked to the Russian and Chinese governments while making policy decisions affecting relations with both countries. That was Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross, who is worth something like $660 million but isn’t, at 81 years old, interested in slowing down. Ross also said he was going to sell some businesses but never got around to it, and has been the subject of multiple insider-trading investigations.
Linda McMahon was not in any way guilty of taking a $12,000 charter plane to get to a hometown event. That, instead, was former Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke, who was the target of 15 separate investigations when he left his job just before Democrats regained subpoena power by winning the House of Representatives.
In her time with the Small Business Administration, Linda McMahon did not spend $341,000 of public money on travel, including by booking needless charter flights. Expensive travel is apparently to Cabinet members as home improvement is to local mayors. It probably seems innocent enough, and who is really going to care? Anyway, this instance was the work of former Health and Human Services Secretary Tom Price, who tried and failed to lead the dismantling of Obamacare.
Costly air travel has also been a favorite of Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchin, who has racked up almost $1 million in flights on military aircraft. He did so without breaking any laws, an investigation found, even as one of the trips was to Kentucky to get a prime view of the solar eclipse in August 2017. One person not on that site-seeing flight? Linda McMahon.
Linda McMahon further did not order a $31,000 dining room set for her office, deny it was ever ordered and finally recant that denial when incriminating emails came out. That was Ben Carson, who runs the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
There were, of course, plenty of people who served in Cabinetlevel positions without getting into trouble before Linda McMahon, but she made her way through particularly treacherous waters. Her Senate campaigns may not have gone well, but they raised her profile to the point that she made sense as a candidate to not be corrupt in a highprofile job. In that, she made her adopted home state proud.
As to why she left the Cabinet, Linda McMahon apparently looked at everything that has been happening in Washington over the past two-plus years and decided what the country really needs is another four years on top of those currently scheduled.
Linda McMahon is going to lead a super PAC called America First Action, which can raise unlimited funds from a variety of sources with a goal of securing the president’s re-election. If she is successful, we could be looking at unauthorized Cabinet-level charter flights from now until early 2025.
Thankfully, at least, we can be reasonably certain that none of those flights will have Linda McMahon on board.