‘Grinding The Democrats Down’: Sen. Markwayne Mullin On Trump’s Cabinet And The GOP Game Plan

The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) on a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

So far, President Trump is batting a thousand on confirmations for his cabinet secretary nominees. Just this week Kash Patel was confirmed as Director of the FBI while Labor Secretary Linda Chavez-DeRemer seems to have secured the support of the Senate. This is the fastest pace since 2001. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin joined Morning Wire to discuss Trump’s cabinet nominees, the Senate’s strategic approach to the confirmation process, and the significance of the GOP’s “Big Tent” strategy in uniting diverse political factions within the Republican Party.

* * *

JOHN: Joining us to discuss the rapid fire series of confirmations and where the Trump cabinet and agenda stands now is Oklahoma’s Senator Markwayne Mullin. Senator, first of all thank you for joining us.

MULLIN: It’s my honor. Thanks for having me on.

JOHN: Let’s start with Kash Patel. You’ve been a strong advocate for Patel – why do you believe we need a “disruptor” like him to lead the FBI?

MULLIN: I wouldn’t describe him as a “disruptor.” I would say he’s someone who chases the facts. He exposed the wrongs, or the hypocrisy, or the cover-ups within FBI. He did this way before he was even being considered to be the director of the FBI. He was a whistleblower before people were even looking into it. You take somebody like him who understands the intel system, understands the mission of the FBI and has been concerned enough back years ago that he was willing to expose it. Why wouldn’t you want somebody like that? Because he’s not there to destroy the FBI. He’s there to get them back on mission focus. He’s there to support the field agents, to put them back on the mission focus of protecting the American people, not taking directive orders from a Democrat Party that’s wanting to investigate students for showing up to school board meetings, or classifying Catholics – and I’m not joking when I say this – as possible terrorists because they disagreed with the Democrat agenda, especially when it came to abortions. That was what that was all about. It’s concerning that the Democrat Party had weaponized the FBI for political gain and political purposes. What Kash is going to do is put them back on mission focus. That means he’s going to reform the 7th floor of the Hoover Building and take the politics out of it – and put the American people back in focus.

JOHN: Thus far all of President Trump’s nominees have gotten through the confirmation process relatively smoothly. Is this simply due to GOP majorities – or do you believe that Democrat opposition has been weakened by Trump’s mandate?

MULLIN: I think you’ve got a little bit of both. I think the American people spoke very loud and on November 5th, when he won the popular vote and obviously electoral vote. I think the Democrat Party is trying to reorganize and find themselves, and they can’t. They keep reverting back to 2017 rhetoric and I hope they stay there — because if they stay there, we’re going to continue to win elections. But at the same time, what you’ve seen is a new leader in the Senate with Leader Thune. He is 100% grinding the Democrats down from the get go. He said, “We can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way. It’s up to you.” And so once the president got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these agents and on these nominees, and these nominees haven’t stopped. What I mean by the clock, just to explain to your listeners, after they get out of committee, which we already had people preset. So, first of all, Leader Thune directed the chairs of the committees to get started on the hearings early, even before Trump was sworn into office. That normally doesn’t take place. So he preset it. We came in on January 3rd. The president wasn’t going to get sworn in until January 20th, but we already started hearing so we could get them reported out of committee and onto the floor for the hearing. So starting on January 20th, he started the clock on these nominees. Once they get reported out of committee, it’s called a 24-hour soak. Then, if they’re a cabinet position, meaning a secretary, it is a 30-hour debate. So that’s when we say we’re invoking cloture. It’s a 20 or 30 hour debate. So it’s 54 hours on secretary levels. On directors, like Kash Patel, when you invoke culture on them, you have a two hour debate. So while you still have a 24-hour soak, you only have two hours of debate on that person. So you can move those faster. He has literally kept that clock running 24/7, 7 days a week even when we’re not here. The Democrats will negotiate and say, “Okay, what we will do is we’ll continue the clock if you don’t make us vote on Saturday and Sunday – well, not Sunday.” Like we did with Pete Hegseth on Saturday. They said, ”If you don’t make us stay over on the weekend, we will allow the clocks to run consecutively, even though we’re not here.” So, we’ll go ahead and invoke culture on the next person. When the 30 hours run out, say, it’s 6:00 in the morning on Saturday, the next 30 hours will start. So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once. That’s why we’re so far ahead, because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit, on the Democrats.

JOHN: Really not wasting a second there. Wednesday was the hearing for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. She was somewhat controversial on the Right because of her past support of pro-union policies and her past work for Planned Parenthood. You were one of her key proponents, even suggesting her nomination to President Trump. How do you envision her impacting labor relations in the current political climate?

MULLIN: Well, you have to go back to the coalition that President Trump has built. So, President Trump has brought a unique coalition together, right? Let’s just look at Tulsi. That conversation started over two years ago between President Trump and I, when he asked how do I get Libertarian and Independents to vote for us? We don’t have to win their vote, but we need to increase their percentages. I said, “Let’s bring Tulsi in.” Immediately that relationship started. Tulsi’s relationship with Bobby is what brought Bobby onto the campaign and the President quickly embraced him when he asked us to go to for me to be a surrogate to Indian country for him — even though a Republican hadn’t won Indian country since Nixon — President Trump wanted to put a special interest towards them. And so he ended up winning 63% of the Native American vote. When he asked, “Do you think we can win it?” I said, “Sir, you won all 77 counties in Oklahoma. There’s no greater population of Native American tribes in one area other than Oklahoma.” And I said, “So if you can win it in Oklahoma, you can win it nationally.” When you start looking at the unions, he asked right after Sean O’Brien, who had him and I had obviously public, very public disagreements. He asked us just a couple of months later. “Hey, I need you guys to work together.” His phone call to me was his [saying?], “Listen, we need the union votes. I want you to make friends with Sean. I believe you guys will get along. I talked to him. You guys actually have a lot in common.” He asked Sean to do the same thing. We got in a room together, and we’ve been friends ever since that day. And so the coalition that the president’s brought together is unique. At the same time, we have to understand that we can’t always use this conservative purity test when the president has got a mandate from the American people that he’s working for everybody. And that means this new coalition, we have to stay true to our values, but understand we’re accepting individuals that we may not 100% agree to, but we’ve got to show them some love. And Lori represents that. We have our differences, obviously. We’re a Right-to-Work state, a very proud Right-to-Work state. That’s what started the whole confrontation, honestly, between Sean and I. But at the same time, the unions have a place in this country, and I recognize that. There’s not a successful business that doesn’t have successful business employees. And there’s not an employee that has a good job that doesn’t have a business to work for. So they take both of us. Lori was a great compromise. It was one of those areas that, yeah, we’re going to give the unions a nod. We won 59% of the union vote, which he’s the first Republican president to do that in decades. We’re going, we’re going to give you a little nod, agree that we disagree on some issues, but we’re going to find common ground to work for because they’re looking for a party right now. The Democrat woke agenda doesn’t fit the workforce that we have in America right now. And so Sean and I spoke, Sean actually brought Lori to me and said, “What do you think about Lori? I think this is someone that the unions can support.” And I said, “I think that’s a great idea. Let’s talk to the president about it.” So we both visit with the president at different times about it. The president loved the idea, and that’s how it happened. So, I get that some of my conservative friends out there had reservations about it, but if we want to continue to win elections for the Republican Party and not go down this socialist woke agenda road that the Biden administration was trying to move us towards, then we got to understand we’re gonna have to allow some people in our party that we can welcome in and start working on things we have in common, not just focused on the differences.

JOHN: Well, that Big Tent approach clearly paid dividends in this last election for Trump, winning percentages of demographics we haven’t seen Republicans win in decades, as you said.

MULLIN: That’s right.

JOHN: Now you’re a member of the Senate GOP Deputy Whip team, which allows you to influence the legislative agenda significantly. What are your top legislative priorities for the 119th Congress?

MULLIN: Well deregulation is my biggest focus, the deregulation of the business sector. You’ve got to start with certain focuses and my focus is on energy. By the way, President Trump is all on board on this too, not just because it’s my agenda. He sees it the same way, because we both come from a business perspective. I tell everybody, when you make decisions, it will be based on two things: the way you were raised and your life experience. My life experience is business.  And you understand when you’re in business that everything that you factor as a cost starts and begins with energy. You can’t build a product and you can’t deliver a product with that without factoring in the energy cost because it takes energy to build it and it takes energy to deliver it. So, it’s always a baseline add-on when you’re talking about cost. So if you’re going to bring down inflation, you’ve got to bring down energy. The only way we bring down energy prices is you’ve got to make it conducive that people can trust their long term investment and not just four years at a time. But most energy companies are investing 15 to 20 years at a time when they look at returns. So you’ve got to have stability in the energy market. And that means you’ve got to have deregulation that’s not just an executive order, but it’s legislation and made into law. So it can’t be overturned on day one, like Joe Biden did to the Trump administration. So, stability in the regulatory market is my number one goal.

JOHN: Final question. Now the big bugaboo for Democrats is DOGE and its leader Elon Musk. How do you and your Republican colleagues in the Senate feel about how DOGE is going about its business?

MULLIN: I can’t speak for everybody in the Senate, especially my colleagues, but I’ll take it back to what I said earlier. We all make decisions based on how we were raised and our life experiences. So when you look from a business perspective, not a political perspective, you understand that every successful business out there, large or small, has hired a consultant at some point to come in and overlook their business operations. Not that they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s just that a consultant comes in from an unbiased perspective and just simply looks at numbers. And as a business owner, sometimes you can have pet projects that you just continue to dump money into that doesn’t make any sense. And there’s no way for it to be successful, but you’re so invested in it, you just can’t find a way out. And when a consultant looks at it and goes, “Hey, this makes no sense,” it opens your eyes up. Well, take politics, for example, you’ve got someone that’s been in there for 40 years. They’ve got a project in their state that doesn’t make any sense to continue because it’s outdated, but they’re personally connected to it and they’re not going to let it pass. Well, you take Elon Musk, who’s the most successful entrepreneur we’ve had in our lifetime and he’s working for the federal government as a free consultant. Consultants are typically expensive — and he’s doing it for free and giving his resources for free, and he’s looking at these programs from an unbiased perspective. Just the numbers. Does it work for the taxpayers? Does it make sense? How much waste, fraud and abuse is in the taxpayer dollar right now? And he’s exposing it at alarming rates. The reason I say alarming is because you think, ”Why haven’t we seen this?” Just take Social Security alone.You see the amount of people who are over 150 that are still on Social Security. I’m thinking, “I don’t remember seeing that report.” We celebrate people when they turn 100, and you typically see those in the paper. 150? I think that’d be pretty much news. I haven’t seen any of these individuals, but they’re still on the books for Social Security. Just simply cleaning up things like that makes a huge difference. That’s what a consultant can do, and that’s the role that DOGE is playing with Elon Musk, and I look at it from that perspective. Like I said, I can talk to my other colleagues and see how they look at it. But that’s what I’ve been on all these media outlets saying — the same thing that I am saying to you: try and argue with that perspective. You can’t. Because it does make sense. That’s why, that’s why private companies do it.

JOHN: Yeah, it doesn’t. I think it’s making sense to a lot of Americans as they watch this, polling shows that Trump’s approval is higher than it’s ever been than at any point in his first term. So things are going pretty well. He’s got a lot of momentum right now.

MULLIN: He has highly favorable numbers in Oklahoma. Literally, the numbers just came out the other day. It just blows my mind that his numbers are that good, and I’m just speaking for Oklahoma. His numbers obviously are good across the country.

JOHN: Well, senator, thank you so much for taking the time.

MULLIN: Thank you. Appreciate it.

JOHN: That was Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma – and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

***

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The following is an edited transcript of an interview between Daily Wire Editor-in-Chief John Bickley and U.S. Senator Markwayne Mullin (R-OK) on a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

So far, President Trump is batting a thousand on confirmations for his cabinet secretary nominees. Just this week Kash Patel was confirmed as Director of the FBI while Labor Secretary Linda Chavez-DeRemer seems to have secured the support of the Senate. This is the fastest pace since 2001. Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin joined Morning Wire to discuss Trump’s cabinet nominees, the Senate’s strategic approach to the confirmation process, and the significance of the GOP’s “Big Tent” strategy in uniting diverse political factions within the Republican Party.

* * *

JOHN: Joining us to discuss the rapid fire series of confirmations and where the Trump cabinet and agenda stands now is Oklahoma’s Senator Markwayne Mullin. Senator, first of all thank you for joining us.

MULLIN: It’s my honor. Thanks for having me on.

JOHN: Let’s start with Kash Patel. You’ve been a strong advocate for Patel – why do you believe we need a “disruptor” like him to lead the FBI?

MULLIN: I wouldn’t describe him as a “disruptor.” I would say he’s someone who chases the facts. He exposed the wrongs, or the hypocrisy, or the cover-ups within FBI. He did this way before he was even being considered to be the director of the FBI. He was a whistleblower before people were even looking into it. You take somebody like him who understands the intel system, understands the mission of the FBI and has been concerned enough back years ago that he was willing to expose it. Why wouldn’t you want somebody like that? Because he’s not there to destroy the FBI. He’s there to get them back on mission focus. He’s there to support the field agents, to put them back on the mission focus of protecting the American people, not taking directive orders from a Democrat Party that’s wanting to investigate students for showing up to school board meetings, or classifying Catholics – and I’m not joking when I say this – as possible terrorists because they disagreed with the Democrat agenda, especially when it came to abortions. That was what that was all about. It’s concerning that the Democrat Party had weaponized the FBI for political gain and political purposes. What Kash is going to do is put them back on mission focus. That means he’s going to reform the 7th floor of the Hoover Building and take the politics out of it – and put the American people back in focus.

JOHN: Thus far all of President Trump’s nominees have gotten through the confirmation process relatively smoothly. Is this simply due to GOP majorities – or do you believe that Democrat opposition has been weakened by Trump’s mandate?

MULLIN: I think you’ve got a little bit of both. I think the American people spoke very loud and on November 5th, when he won the popular vote and obviously electoral vote. I think the Democrat Party is trying to reorganize and find themselves, and they can’t. They keep reverting back to 2017 rhetoric and I hope they stay there — because if they stay there, we’re going to continue to win elections. But at the same time, what you’ve seen is a new leader in the Senate with Leader Thune. He is 100% grinding the Democrats down from the get go. He said, “We can do this the hard way or we can do this the easy way. It’s up to you.” And so once the president got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these agents and on these nominees, and these nominees haven’t stopped. What I mean by the clock, just to explain to your listeners, after they get out of committee, which we already had people preset. So, first of all, Leader Thune directed the chairs of the committees to get started on the hearings early, even before Trump was sworn into office. That normally doesn’t take place. So he preset it. We came in on January 3rd. The president wasn’t going to get sworn in until January 20th, but we already started hearing so we could get them reported out of committee and onto the floor for the hearing. So starting on January 20th, he started the clock on these nominees. Once they get reported out of committee, it’s called a 24-hour soak. Then, if they’re a cabinet position, meaning a secretary, it is a 30-hour debate. So that’s when we say we’re invoking cloture. It’s a 20 or 30 hour debate. So it’s 54 hours on secretary levels. On directors, like Kash Patel, when you invoke culture on them, you have a two hour debate. So while you still have a 24-hour soak, you only have two hours of debate on that person. So you can move those faster. He has literally kept that clock running 24/7, 7 days a week even when we’re not here. The Democrats will negotiate and say, “Okay, what we will do is we’ll continue the clock if you don’t make us vote on Saturday and Sunday – well, not Sunday.” Like we did with Pete Hegseth on Saturday. They said, ”If you don’t make us stay over on the weekend, we will allow the clocks to run consecutively, even though we’re not here.” So, we’ll go ahead and invoke culture on the next person. When the 30 hours run out, say, it’s 6:00 in the morning on Saturday, the next 30 hours will start. So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once. That’s why we’re so far ahead, because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit, on the Democrats.

JOHN: Really not wasting a second there. Wednesday was the hearing for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez-DeRemer. She was somewhat controversial on the Right because of her past support of pro-union policies and her past work for Planned Parenthood. You were one of her key proponents, even suggesting her nomination to President Trump. How do you envision her impacting labor relations in the current political climate?

MULLIN: Well, you have to go back to the coalition that President Trump has built. So, President Trump has brought a unique coalition together, right? Let’s just look at Tulsi. That conversation started over two years ago between President Trump and I, when he asked how do I get Libertarian and Independents to vote for us? We don’t have to win their vote, but we need to increase their percentages. I said, “Let’s bring Tulsi in.” Immediately that relationship started. Tulsi’s relationship with Bobby is what brought Bobby onto the campaign and the President quickly embraced him when he asked us to go to for me to be a surrogate to Indian country for him — even though a Republican hadn’t won Indian country since Nixon — President Trump wanted to put a special interest towards them. And so he ended up winning 63% of the Native American vote. When he asked, “Do you think we can win it?” I said, “Sir, you won all 77 counties in Oklahoma. There’s no greater population of Native American tribes in one area other than Oklahoma.” And I said, “So if you can win it in Oklahoma, you can win it nationally.” When you start looking at the unions, he asked right after Sean O’Brien, who had him and I had obviously public, very public disagreements. He asked us just a couple of months later. “Hey, I need you guys to work together.” His phone call to me was his [saying?], “Listen, we need the union votes. I want you to make friends with Sean. I believe you guys will get along. I talked to him. You guys actually have a lot in common.” He asked Sean to do the same thing. We got in a room together, and we’ve been friends ever since that day. And so the coalition that the president’s brought together is unique. At the same time, we have to understand that we can’t always use this conservative purity test when the president has got a mandate from the American people that he’s working for everybody. And that means this new coalition, we have to stay true to our values, but understand we’re accepting individuals that we may not 100% agree to, but we’ve got to show them some love. And Lori represents that. We have our differences, obviously. We’re a Right-to-Work state, a very proud Right-to-Work state. That’s what started the whole confrontation, honestly, between Sean and I. But at the same time, the unions have a place in this country, and I recognize that. There’s not a successful business that doesn’t have successful business employees. And there’s not an employee that has a good job that doesn’t have a business to work for. So they take both of us. Lori was a great compromise. It was one of those areas that, yeah, we’re going to give the unions a nod. We won 59% of the union vote, which he’s the first Republican president to do that in decades. We’re going, we’re going to give you a little nod, agree that we disagree on some issues, but we’re going to find common ground to work for because they’re looking for a party right now. The Democrat woke agenda doesn’t fit the workforce that we have in America right now. And so Sean and I spoke, Sean actually brought Lori to me and said, “What do you think about Lori? I think this is someone that the unions can support.” And I said, “I think that’s a great idea. Let’s talk to the president about it.” So we both visit with the president at different times about it. The president loved the idea, and that’s how it happened. So, I get that some of my conservative friends out there had reservations about it, but if we want to continue to win elections for the Republican Party and not go down this socialist woke agenda road that the Biden administration was trying to move us towards, then we got to understand we’re gonna have to allow some people in our party that we can welcome in and start working on things we have in common, not just focused on the differences.

JOHN: Well, that Big Tent approach clearly paid dividends in this last election for Trump, winning percentages of demographics we haven’t seen Republicans win in decades, as you said.

MULLIN: That’s right.

JOHN: Now you’re a member of the Senate GOP Deputy Whip team, which allows you to influence the legislative agenda significantly. What are your top legislative priorities for the 119th Congress?

MULLIN: Well deregulation is my biggest focus, the deregulation of the business sector. You’ve got to start with certain focuses and my focus is on energy. By the way, President Trump is all on board on this too, not just because it’s my agenda. He sees it the same way, because we both come from a business perspective. I tell everybody, when you make decisions, it will be based on two things: the way you were raised and your life experience. My life experience is business.  And you understand when you’re in business that everything that you factor as a cost starts and begins with energy. You can’t build a product and you can’t deliver a product with that without factoring in the energy cost because it takes energy to build it and it takes energy to deliver it. So, it’s always a baseline add-on when you’re talking about cost. So if you’re going to bring down inflation, you’ve got to bring down energy. The only way we bring down energy prices is you’ve got to make it conducive that people can trust their long term investment and not just four years at a time. But most energy companies are investing 15 to 20 years at a time when they look at returns. So you’ve got to have stability in the energy market. And that means you’ve got to have deregulation that’s not just an executive order, but it’s legislation and made into law. So it can’t be overturned on day one, like Joe Biden did to the Trump administration. So, stability in the regulatory market is my number one goal.

JOHN: Final question. Now the big bugaboo for Democrats is DOGE and its leader Elon Musk. How do you and your Republican colleagues in the Senate feel about how DOGE is going about its business?

MULLIN: I can’t speak for everybody in the Senate, especially my colleagues, but I’ll take it back to what I said earlier. We all make decisions based on how we were raised and our life experiences. So when you look from a business perspective, not a political perspective, you understand that every successful business out there, large or small, has hired a consultant at some point to come in and overlook their business operations. Not that they don’t know what they’re doing, it’s just that a consultant comes in from an unbiased perspective and just simply looks at numbers. And as a business owner, sometimes you can have pet projects that you just continue to dump money into that doesn’t make any sense. And there’s no way for it to be successful, but you’re so invested in it, you just can’t find a way out. And when a consultant looks at it and goes, “Hey, this makes no sense,” it opens your eyes up. Well, take politics, for example, you’ve got someone that’s been in there for 40 years. They’ve got a project in their state that doesn’t make any sense to continue because it’s outdated, but they’re personally connected to it and they’re not going to let it pass. Well, you take Elon Musk, who’s the most successful entrepreneur we’ve had in our lifetime and he’s working for the federal government as a free consultant. Consultants are typically expensive — and he’s doing it for free and giving his resources for free, and he’s looking at these programs from an unbiased perspective. Just the numbers. Does it work for the taxpayers? Does it make sense? How much waste, fraud and abuse is in the taxpayer dollar right now? And he’s exposing it at alarming rates. The reason I say alarming is because you think, ”Why haven’t we seen this?” Just take Social Security alone.You see the amount of people who are over 150 that are still on Social Security. I’m thinking, “I don’t remember seeing that report.” We celebrate people when they turn 100, and you typically see those in the paper. 150? I think that’d be pretty much news. I haven’t seen any of these individuals, but they’re still on the books for Social Security. Just simply cleaning up things like that makes a huge difference. That’s what a consultant can do, and that’s the role that DOGE is playing with Elon Musk, and I look at it from that perspective. Like I said, I can talk to my other colleagues and see how they look at it. But that’s what I’ve been on all these media outlets saying — the same thing that I am saying to you: try and argue with that perspective. You can’t. Because it does make sense. That’s why, that’s why private companies do it.

JOHN: Yeah, it doesn’t. I think it’s making sense to a lot of Americans as they watch this, polling shows that Trump’s approval is higher than it’s ever been than at any point in his first term. So things are going pretty well. He’s got a lot of momentum right now.

MULLIN: He has highly favorable numbers in Oklahoma. Literally, the numbers just came out the other day. It just blows my mind that his numbers are that good, and I’m just speaking for Oklahoma. His numbers obviously are good across the country.

JOHN: Well, senator, thank you so much for taking the time.

MULLIN: Thank you. Appreciate it.

JOHN: That was Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma – and this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.

***

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