Transcript of Analyzing Trump’s Cabinet with Senator Mullin | 2.23.25

So far, President Trump is batting a thousand on confirmations for his cabinet secretary nomination.

Just this week, Cash Patel was confirmed as director of the FBI, while Labor Secretary Linda Chávez-Doremer 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 nomination, 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.

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 disruptor like him to lead the FBI?

I would describe him as a disruptor. I would say he's someone that chases the facts that he exposed the wrongs or the privacy 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 the American people, not taking directive orders from a Democrat Party that's wanting to investigate students for showing up to school board or classifying Catholic, and I'm not joking when I say this, as a possible terrorist because they disagreed with the Democrat agenda, especially at this time 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 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 America people back in focus.

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

I think you got a little bit of both. I think the American people spoke very loud on November fifth 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 Thun, 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 President got confirmed and sworn into office on the 20th, what we did is we immediately started the clock on these committees, and these colonies haven't stopped. And what I mean by the clock, just explain to your listeners, after they get out of committee, which we already had people preset. So first of all, Leader Thun 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 preset it. We came in on January third. 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 so. 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 clôture, it's a 30-hour debate. So it's 54 hours on secretary levels. On directors like Cash Patel, when you invoke clôture 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 So 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 invoke clôture 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 Thun is 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, Laurie Chávez Doremer. 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 Talsy. 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 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, I mean, 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. 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 When you start looking at the unions, he asked right after Sean O'Brien, who him and I had obviously 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, 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 got to show them some love. And Laurie 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 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.

Laurie was a great compromise. It was one of those areas that, yeah, we're going to give the unions a nod. We want 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 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 Laurie to me and said, what do you think about Laurie? 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 have I 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 got to start with certain focuses. My certain focus is in 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 in this 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 got to bring down energy. The only The way we bring down energy prices is you 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 It turns.

So you got to have stability in the energy market, and that means you got to have deregulation that's not just an executive order, but it's a legislation made into 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, 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 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 much waste, fraud, and abuse is in the taxpayer dollar right now? And he's exposing it at record rates. I don't even know if you can say record rates, alarming rates. And the reason why I say alarming is because you go, why haven't we seen this? I mean, just take the 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 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 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 10 job approval better than ever in his first term. So things are going pretty well. He's got a lot of momentum right now.

His numbers in Oklahoma. He has 84 % highly favorable numbers in Oklahoma. The numbers just came out the other day. And I'm like, that is... 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 Wayne-Mullen of Oklahoma. And this has been a weekend edition of Morning Wire.