Morning Wire - Analyzing Trump’s Cabinet with Senator Mullin | 2.23.25

Episode Date: February 23, 2025

Oklahoma Senator Markwayne Mullin joins Morning Wire to discuss how President Trump swiftly secured his cabinet confirmations, setting a new precedent in political appointments and his legislative goals in the upcoming session. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

60% of the vans on Amazon come a vendor independent, like SACMagic. Hello, here Camille of SACMagic. Our compresses, show of fraud are fabriced in Quebec, and our presence on Amazon

enlarge our clientele to the world entire. Trouve of little enterprises like another oner.com. So far, President Trump is batting a thousand on confirmations

for his cabinet secretary nominees. Just this week, Cash Patel was confirmed as director of the FBI while Labor Secretary Linda Chavez-Dorimer seems to have secured

the support of the Senate. This is the fastest pace since 2001. In this episode, we sit down with Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen to discuss Trump's cabinet nominees, the Republicans' strategic approach to the confirmation process, and the significance of the GOP's Big Tent Strategy. I'm Daily Wire, editor-in-chief John Bickley, with Georgia Howe. It's Sunday, February 23rd, and this is a weekend edition of Morning Wire. Joining us to discuss the rapid-fire series of confirmations and where the Trump cabinet and

Agenda stands now as Oklahoma Senator Mark Wayne Mullen. Senator, first of all, thank you so much for joining us. It's my honor. Thanks for having me on. So let's start with Cash Patel. You've been a strong advocate for Patel. Why do you believe we need somebody that's been called a quote unquote disruptor like him to lead the FBI? You know, I would describe him as a disruptor. I would say he's someone that chases the facts and he exposed the wrongs or the hypocrisy or the cover-ups that FBI was doing. He did this way before he was even being considered to be the director of 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 about them, 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 and put them back on mission focus of protecting 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 a possible terrorist because they disagreed with the Democrat, you know, agenda, especially at this time when it came to abortions. That was what that was all about. It's concerning that they had weaponized, the Democrat Party had weaponized the FBI for political gain and

political purposes. What Cash is going to do is put them back on mission focus. That means he's going to reform the seventh floor of the Hoover Building and take the politics out of it and put American people back in focus. Thus far, all of President Trump's nominees have gotten through the confirmation process relatively smoothly. Is this simply due to GOP majorities or or do you believe that the Democrat opposition has been weakened by Trump's mandate? I think you've got a little bit of both. I think the American people spoke very loud 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 they stay there. We're going to continue to win elections. But at the same time, what you've seen as a new leader in the Senate with the leader. with the leader Thune, he is just 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 nominees, and these nominees haven't stopped. And what I mean by the clock, just explained 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, which that normally doesn't take place. So he pre-setted. We came in on January 3rd. President wasn't going to get sworn until January 20th, but we already started hearings.

So we could get them reported out of committee 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 soap. And 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 30-hour debate. So it's 54 hours on secretary levels. On directors like Cash Patel, when you invoke cloture 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. And he has literally kept that clock running 24-7, seven days a week. Even when we're not here, the Democrats will negotiate and said, if you don't make us stay over on the weekend, we'll allow the clocks to run consecutively even though we're not here. So we'll go ahead and vote cloture on the next person. So when we get back here on Monday, we can confirm two people at once.

That's why we're so far ahead is because Leader Thune has not let up the pressure at all, not one bit on the Democrats. Really not wasting a second there. Wednesday was the hearing for Labor Secretary Lori Chavez de Riemer. 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?

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 independence to vote for us? We don't have to win their vote, but we need to increase the 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 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 win all 77 counties in Oklahoma. And 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 him and I

obviously public, very public disagreements. He asked us just a couple months later, hey, I need you guys to work together. His phone call to me was, is, hey, 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 has 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. I'm 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 have a place in this country, and I recognize that. There's not a successful business that doesn't have successful 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. Lorry 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 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. And so I get some of my conservative friends out there, had reservation about it. But if we want to continue to win elections for the Republican Party and not go down this socialist woke agenda that the Biden administration was trying to move us towards, then we got to understand we're going to have to allow some people in our party that we can welcome in and start working on things we have in common, not just focus on the differences. Well, that Big Ten 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. That's right. 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? Well, deregulation is my biggest focus. In the deregulation on the business sector, you've got to start with certain focuses. My certain focus is an energy. And by the way, President Trump is all on board on this too, not just because it's my agenda, because he sees it the same way, because we both come from a business perspective. I tell everybody you make decisions, and it's world based on two things, the way you raise your life experience. My life experience is a 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 without factoring in the energy cost, because it takes energy to build it and takes energy to deliver it. So it's always a baseline add-on when you're talking about costs. 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 investment, long-term investment, and not just four years at a time, but most energy companies are investing 15, 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 that made into long. law. So it can't be overturned like day one Joe Biden did to the Trump administration in 17 coming out in 20. And so stability in the regulatory market is my number one goal. Final question. 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 it's going about its business? 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 what we're raised in 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, it 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 it doesn't make any sense to continue to do it 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. He's doing it for free and given 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 must waste, fraud, and abuse is in the taxpayer dollar right now and he's exposing it at record rates. I don't even know what you can say record rates, alarming rates. And the reason why I say alarming is because you go, why he has, haven't we seen this? I mean, just take Social Security only, and you see the amount of people that's

over 150 that's still on Social Security. I'm going, I don't remember seeing that report. We celebrate people when they turned 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. It makes a huge difference. But 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't 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 to you and argue with that perspective. You can't because it does make sense. That's why private companies do it. Yeah, it does. And I think it's making sense to a lot of Americans as they watch the approval rating show

that Trump's approval is higher than it's ever been job approval better than ever in his first term. So things are going pretty well. got a lot of momentum right now. His numbers in Oklahoma, he has 84% highly favorable numbers in Oklahoma. Literally the numbers just came out the other day. And I'm like, that is, it's just, it blows my mind that his numbers are that good. And I'm just speaking for Oklahoma, his numbers obviously are good across the country because you see them. Wow. Well, Senator, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to us. Thank you. Appreciate it. That was Senator Mark

Mark Wayne Mullen of Oklahoma, and this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.