Editor’s note: AU’s “Wall of Separation” blog will provide this semi-regular summary of Trump administration actions to undermine church-state separation, religious freedom, and the rights and freedoms that depend on them. We’ll keep you updated on how AU is fighting these attacks, and how you can help defend church-state separation – the cornerstone of our democracy. You can read our last installment here.
Four weeks in, amidst a flurry of executive orders and constant attacks on our civil liberties, one thing is for sure: The Trump administration and his allies are moving full steam ahead with Project 2025. As Trump fills out his cabinet and other executive advisers, here’s a look at how some of them are expected to advance pieces of Project 2025’s Christian Nationalist agenda.
The Senate is expected to vote tonight on the confirmation of Linda McMahon as Trump’s education secretary. The fact that some news outlets are calling McMahon the “least controversial” of Trump’s cabinet picks tells you a lot about the current state of affairs under his administration. McMahon has extremely limited previous experience in education and has mostly spent her career as the billionaire co-founder of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE). More recently she chaired the Christian Nationalist Shadow Network group America First Policy Institute.
McMahon is expected to lead the Department of Education even as she attempts to fulfill Trump’s promise of abolishing it. However, the Department of Education was created through an act of Congress, and it can’t be ended through an executive order alone. It would take another act of Congress to close it down completely. During her confirmation hearing, McMahon acknowledged this point and stated that her plan is to create a “blueprint” for Congress to shut it down.
Americans United sent a letter to senators last week urging them to oppose McMahon’s confirmation. AU’s primary opposition centers around McMahon’s support for private school vouchers, another Project 2025 goal. In Trump’s executive order ‘Expanding Educational Freedom and Opportunity for Families’ he instructs the incoming education secretary to find ways to divert public funds to private school vouchers.
McMahon is far from the only Trump appointee expected to undermine church-state separation. Through an executive order, Trump established the White House Faith Office and appointed prosperity gospel televangelist Paula White to lead it. Although this office existed under previous administrations, it sat mostly inactive during Trump’s first term. According to White’s social media, her new role is to “work alongside Attorney General Pam Bondi to combat discrimination against Christians in federal institutions and ensure religious liberties are upheld across the country.”
Americans United is as skeptical about White’s appointment as we are about Trump’s previously announced task force to combat “anti-Christian bias.” AU President and CEO Rachel Laser swiftly noted that White was unfit to serve in the White House in 2019 and continues to be unfit to serve today: “White is a Christian Nationalist powerbroker who’s spent much of her career operating in the shadows to influence public policies that discriminate against women, LGBTQ+ people and religious minorities, and the nomination of partisan judges who will support those harmful policies. This appointment is yet another example of President Trump pandering to his Christian Nationalist supporters and rewarding his loyalists.”
White is not the only Trump adviser signaling they’ll advance the goals of Project 2025 and Christian Nationalists. Newly confirmed U.S. Secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Scott Turner in early February announced new guidance that HUD would implement Trump’s demand that the federal government only recognize an unscientific, Christian Nationalist view of gender that erases transgender and gender-nonconforming people. “It means getting government out of the way of what the Lord established from the beginning when he created man in His own image,” Turner said. As my colleague Rob Boston wrote in a recent blog post, “There was a time when Christian Nationalists would at least try to pretend that their discriminatory policies had some non-religious rationale. Under Trump, they don’t even bother.”
The flood of attacks on our communities, our rights and our freedoms can leave us feeling helpless and at a loss for what to do next. But if there was ever a time to get involved in your community and on church-state issues, it is now. At Americans United, we know that the separation of church and state protects freedom without favor and equality without exception for us all. We hope you’ll join us in our movement for a national recommitment to this founding constitutional principle. Here are a few actions you can take now:
