Trump slurring, a Bondi gaffe and ‘mutilization’ of English dominate swearing-in of Kristi Noem replacement
President Donald Trump replaced the first victim of his reputation-burning inner circle, Kristi Noem, on Tuesday as he gathered reporters at the White House to witness the swearing-in of Markwayne Mullin as Homeland Security secretary.
Instead of a spectacle, however, the event was more of what reporters have come to expect from Trump White House events — namely, an Everything, Everywhere All At Once approach to governance where no topic is off limits and in fact may be more likely for the president to speak about than the actual topic of the day.
That was certainly the case as a slurring Trump (who seemed to be talking with a slight lisp or trouble with enunciation, something that happens a lot lately) used the ceremony to address the Iran war, voter ID, mail-in ballots and host of other topics with a crowd of reporters who acted like Mullin, the guest of honor, was a distraction at best.
The president, too, seemed only marginally interested in Mullin’s appointment and admitted to reporters that he didn’t know about various parts about Mullin’s background — including, glaringly, his Native-American ancestry, when he picked him.
“Markwayne is also career as an MMA fighter,” Trump said, stumbling through his words.
“I didn’t know all these things. I would’ve picked him faster if I had known. I would’ve made a quicker decision,” he continued, seeming to slurp in the air as the small crowd in the Oval Office laughed along.
Asked specifically how Mullin would run the agency different than Noem, the president declined to even mention his departing Cabinet secretary by name as he touted the security of the “safest border we’ve ever had” and credited those efforts to Tom Homan, his border czar, whom he called “incredible.” He added that Mullin would oversee an agency that was going to do “a lot of things,” once again slurring through his praise: “We’ve had a lot of [unintelligible.] But a lot of things that, uh, we can do. And we’re gonna do. We have to get criminals out of our country that were allowed in, by Biden.”
The president riffed on various topics including his election victories in Mullin’s home state of deep-red Oklahoma as what should have been a short swearing-in ceremony lasted 45 minutes with Trump’s Q&A period, little of which had to do with the secretary’s new job or priorities for immigration enforcement. Most of the questions to the president pertaining to immigration related to the ongoing efforts in the Senate to strike a deal aimed at re-opening the agency Mullin is set to run, but neither the secretary nor Trump offered a real position on the emerging framework set to potentially end a shutdown that is now in its second month.
Trump, batting away questions from CNN’s Kaitlan Collins and others, said he hadn’t seen the deal that Democrats and Republicans both said was presented to the White House (and originally rejected) on Monday. He told reporters instead that he disliked the idea of making any deal with the opposition party, whom he accused of wanting to harm Americans.
But he also said he wanted to “support Republicans,” who in the Senate are largely getting behind a plan to re-fund DHS, minus ICE’s enforcement and removal operations, in a bill that would clear a 60-vote filibuster threshold while also potentially putting in place some of the Democrats’ demanded list of reforms for the agency. Republicans would then fund the remainder of ICE through a 50-vote reconciliation package, though some members of the party doubt that strategy will work.
The president also veered into an attack on transgender people as he discussed the Senate’s gridlock, which is largely due to his insistence that it pass a voter ID bill called the SAVE Act before it does anything else. Talking about his efforts to cram anti-transgender language into the bill, Trump accused doctors of conducting the “mutilization” — which is not a word — of children.
“If you look at transgender mutilization of children, we don’t want that. It’s the multilization of children. We don’t want that,” Trump said, before turning to another topic just as quickly. Its a bastardized non-word that Trump must by now know is not a real word, yet has repeatedly uttered over the past few weeks.
But Trump wasn’t the only one who had trouble with his words at Tuesday’s event.
Pam Bondi, the attorney general, flubbed her minute in the spotlight as she accidentally rearranged the oath of office Mullin repeated in front of the crowd, which included his family.
