Welcome to Off Message. I'm Isaac Dover. Today's guest, Linda McMahon, small business administrator, and you may know her from her previous career, running the worldwide wrestling entertainment company, and of course running for Senate in Connecticut twice.

On Monday, President Trump complained on Twitter about Democrats holding up his nominees, but McMahon, who is the cabinet member who has the closest and longest personal relationship with him, told me that she was dealing with what she called a bottleneck from the West Wing, as kept her from staffing up and slowed down her work.

She said we're not even staffed up to where we need to be or where we were to do a lot of our regular activities.

And she said, look, there are employees that she has there who are working long hours and they're people serving and acting jobs and they're getting some of it done.

But it is slowing things down.

She also told this really compelling story of her own small business career

that started when she and her husband had no money, actually declared bankruptcy, standing in the

driveway of their house, watching her car be repossessed while she held her son. Shane McMahon,

who now is well known through the wrestling world.

She did not want to be small business administrator originally.

She came in to meet with Trump during the transition, thinking that she wanted to be Commerce Secretary,

but Trump was the one who brought up the SBA job with her.

And she's really taken to it.

She moved to Washington and has been meeting and talking with all the district directors is this whole plan that she got into about how she's going to try to spread the word

about what the Small Business Administration does.

Because she says if she had known about it when she was

getting her business off the ground probably would have been a lot easier. Remember to subscribe

and rate us on iTunes. Follow me on Twitter and on Facebook at Isaac Dover and email me at

Isaac at Politico.com. Keep those emails coming. A lot of great suggestions have been coming

in on what those future guests should be, what you'd like to hear us doing. And you will hear in the coming weeks people like Terry McColliffe,

Governor of Virginia, Chad Griffin from the Human Rights Campaign, and a lot of other great guests.

But before we get to today's episode, I want to give a plug for my friend and editor,

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