Trump Threatens to Withhold New York’s Education Funding Unless Racist Mascoting Returns

June 3, 2025
By: Dave Zirin

After pocketing billions from minstrelsy, Linda McMahon wants to force New York schools to bring it back.

Sometimes the irony doesn’t just burn. It flays the skin. Donald Trump’s education secretary, Linda McMahon—she and her family are the longtime overlords of World Wrestling Entertainment—has made billions in part by having her wrestlers embody ethnic and racial stereotypes to the thrill of the crowd. Black pimps, savage Pacific Islanders, and, of course, primitive Indigenous people with fake war cries and painted faces played by people who are about as Native American as Colin Firth—all part of the program.

This has always reflected the comedic tastes of Linda’s violently misogynistic and virulently racist husband, Vince, all of which McMahon knew how to monetize. Racism as popular entertainment is Linda McMahon’s lane. With no education experience, often looking confused when questioned about the subject (for McMahon, AI is a steak-sauce), her only qualification for working in Trump’s cabinet is her talent for covering up alleged rape and child abuse and defending racism—both handy for this administration.

The shamelessness reached a new peak on May 31 when McMahon held a press conference at Massapequa High School in Long Island, New York, to defend racist Indigenous mascoting. Linda excoriated the state’s ban on Indigenous mascots for public high school sports because, wait for it, it’s the banning of these minstrel shows that is, in fact, racist.

Because of this so-called racism, she announced that Trump will pull education funds from the state unless Massapequa High School can keep calling themselves “the Chiefs.” The regime also demanded that Governor Kathy Hochul issue a personal, public apology for responding to grassroots pressure and enacting the ban. It’s more unprecedented mafia politics from this regime, using the threat of destroying the state’s public schools unless its reactionary social agenda is obeyed.

“The Trump Administration will not stand idly by as state leaders attempt to eliminate the history and culture of Native American tribes,” McMahon said, surrounded by a coterie of white students. McMahon was also backed by the Native American Guardians Association, a conservative organization of Indigenous people that had been flown in from North Dakota. Meanwhile, the actual tribal councils in New York State have affirmed and reaffirmed that mascoting is degrading, and, according to American Psychiatric Association studies, harms Native kids. Given McMahon’s history of allegedly covering up child abuse, the education secretary’s disregard of these studies is chilling. She is here to hurt children at the behest of this administration’s retrograde racial politics.

By conflating Indigenous minstrelsy—white people in face paint—with representation, it also makes it easier for non-Natives to ignore actual issues plaguing Native communities, like poverty and poor healthcare access. It’s a warped version of visibility that only serves to erase. As a spokesperson from the National Congress of American Indians said, “These depictions are not tributes—they are rooted in racism, cultural appropriation, and intentional ignorance.”

McMahon traveled to Massapequa following a report decrying mascot bans by the Civil Rights Division of Trump’s Justice Department, which has now been weaponized to attack all anti-racism as prejudicial to whites. Like a remedial debater backed by zero studies or stats, Trump and his cronies contend that if we can have mascots like the Dutchmen, as a different high school in Long Island does, then it is racist to prevent Native Americans from being mascots too. It’s a stupid, tiresome argument straight out of 1982, but I’ll address it nevertheless: There aren’t broad, national organizations of Dutch people clamoring to change these names. Maybe that’s because during this thing that happened called history, the Dutch were the conquerors of the greater New York City area, not the conquered. They were not the victims of land theft and genocide. Making mascots of Native Americans not only commemorates the demeaning stereotype of savageness but also implicitly celebrates the white folks in the stands whose ancestors had the gumption—or more accurately, the guns and germs—to eradicate them. This isn’t about Indigenous rights or representation. It’s about making non-Native students and community members comfortable with their own racism: white supremacy without the guilt, which is a running theme of this administration.

Then there is the poisonous lie that Trump cares about Indigenous populations, when his bald racism against Native people has been a consistent part of his life for decades. If he really cared, he’d apologize for the fact that Native people are being “mistakenly” arrested by ICE. It’s just more gaslighting from this regime, akin to this cabinet of open antisemites claiming to have zero tolerance for antisemitism. This past week, a true hater of Jews, conservative nepo baby Kingsley Wilson, was promoted to spokesperson of the Department of Defense over the meek objections of the ADL.

As for Massapequa, despite being a very conservative community, on hours’ notice it pulled together a significant protest that filled the streets outside the school. We need more of this. Or we can passively accept that Linda McMahon, part of the family that took an Italian wrestler named Joe Scarpa and renamed him Chief Jay Strongbow, gives a damn about any of this.

Some might say that this is yet another of the administration’s weapons of mass distraction, diverting our attention to this absurdity instead of the new budget that will upend people’s lives and kill many people who will be forced to lose their health insurance. This may be true on one level, but we have to see that McMahon’s erasure agenda walks hand in glove with Trump’s oligarchical heist. The more we are divided, instead of unified like the protesters in Massapequa, the more they will steal. Anti-racism is not a side issue. It’s an essential part of the kind of unity that can successfully challenge an outlaw administration.

That’s why they hate it so much. Trump and McMahon are willing to halt school funding, humiliate elected officials, and demonize—or even criminalize—people who won’t mock Native Americans at sporting events.

It boggles the mind that this is how they are choosing to exercise the most powerful levers of federal power—until you realize that their agenda cannot succeed without division, no matter how racist, no matter how undemocratic, and no matter how violent.