A MAGA senator got tangled up in a TV interview over who the president is.
Markwayne Mullin was appearing on Fox News, where he tried to lionize Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as the U.S. war with Iran raged.
Hegseth has been one of the most prominent figures in the Trump administration since the war, codenamed Operation Epic Fury, began on Saturday morning.
Mullin, 48, is seemingly all for it—so much so that he accidentally referred to the defense secretary as “President Hegseth” as he talked up the Army National Guard veteran’s war-fighting credentials.
“War is ugly, it smells bad, and if anybody’s ever been there and, been able to smell the war that’s happened around you and taste it and fill it in your nostrils and hear it, it’s something that you’ll never forget, and it’s ugly,” he said.
It is not something the senator from Oklahoma will be familiar with, however, having never served, though he did win three professional mixed martial arts fights from 2006 to 2007.
“And fortunately, you have President Hegseth—or I say President Hegseth—Secretary Hegseth, that has got a great relationship with President Trump, and President Hegseth’s been there. He’s done that.”
The Republican’s double slip-up comes just a day after a similar incident, in which the Senate Armed Services Committee member appeared on Fox Business to discuss the war.
That time, though, he forgot who it was the U.S. is supposed to be liberating.
“It’s up to the Iraqi people or, I’m sorry, the Iranian people to choose their next go—their next leader,” he fumbled.
“It’s up to them to rise up and kick this regime out of place,” Mullin continued. “If they do not, then they will be with a different leader, but the same regime.”
He said he hoped Iranians “choose to get a different leader that we can have a relationship with, which we would love to. Prior to 1979, we had a good relationship with Iran.”
The joint U.S. and Israeli strikes killed Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, as well as a number of the top figures Trump says he had identified to replace him.
Speaking to ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday, Trump said, “The attack was so successful it knocked out most of the candidates.
“It’s not going to be anybody that we were thinking of because they are all dead. Second or third place is dead.”
At a press conference on Monday, self-proclaimed “secretary of war” Hegseth laid out his macho, non-P.C. vision for the U.S. military in its Iran war.
The bullish Hegseth said the conflict was being fought “on our terms, with maximum authorities,” and without America’s “traditional allies, who wring their hands and clutch their pearls, hemming and hawing about the use of force.”
