Republican senator claims video floating killing of journalists was a ‘joke’

The Republican US senator and Donald Trump loyalist Markwayne Mullin has evidently sought to backtrack from comments suggesting politicians could “handle our differences” with journalists by shooting and killing them, insisting he was trying to make a joke.

The Oklahoma lawmaker, a former mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, on Saturday posted to X a video of himself at a stairway in the US Capitol building recounting the tale of the newspaper columnist Charles Kincaid.

In 1890, Kincaid shot dead former Kentucky congressman William Taulbee, with whom he had been feuding.

“There’s a lot we could say about reporters and the stories they write, but I bet they would write a lot less false stories – as President Trump says, fake news – if we could still handle our differences that way,” Mullin says at the conclusion of the almost two-minute clip.

On Sunday, after his remarks were picked up and published by the Oklahoman, in a column that noted escalating verbal attacks by politicians and increasing threats of violence against journalists, Mullin downplayed them.

“Don’t forget I also joked about bringing back caning to settle political disputes,” he said in a second tweet, which contained an election map of Oklahoma showing every county red and claimed the newspaper was “out of touch” with the state.

Mullin’s comments came eight months after Robert Telles, a politician in Nevada, was found guilty of murder for fatally stabbing the Las Vegas Review-Journal reporter Jeff German, who wrote articles critical of his conduct in office.

Mullin, who served as a congressman for 10 years before winning a special election for a Senate seat in November 2022, has developed a record of making threats of physical violence during his time in Washington DC.

The former college wrestler turned MMA fighter – who claims to have won five fights during a brief professional career that ended in 2007, despite records indicating only three wins – was in the news in November 2023 for squaring up to the Teamsters union president, Sean O’Brien, during a heated session of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions.

Mullin later insisted his aggressive conduct, which included advancing on O’Brien and yelling “stand your butt up”, was an exhibition of “Oklahoma values”. In return, O’Brien, who clashed with Mullin during another verbal brawl eight months earlier, accused his rival of acting “like a 12-year-old schoolyard bully”.

The episodes gave rise to Mullin’s comments about caning people he perceived as enemies, something he alluded to in his Sunday tweet.

“This isn’t anything new,” he told Fox Business in November 2023, referring to violence, or threats of it, by politicians in the capital.

“Andrew Jackson challenged nine people to a duel when he was president, and he also knocked one guy out at a White House dinner. There’s been canings before in the Senate.

“Maybe we should bring some of that back, keep people from thinking they’re so tough.”

The journalism advocacy group Reporters Without Borders recorded 108 occasions in which Trump had “insulted, attacked, or threatened the media” during an eight-week period in the run-up to the November 2024 election that returned him to the White House for a second presidency.

Since retaking office in January, the Trump administration has continued its attacks on journalists, banning the Associated Press from the Oval Office for refusing to comply with the president’s executive order to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Trump’s assaults on press freedom have also included threats to prosecute and jail journalists who write stories that displease him – and stripping broadcast licenses of networks that air programs that are critical of him.

Kash Patel, the new FBI director, confirmed that the targeting of journalists would be a priority for Trump’s second term during a podcast interview with Steve Bannon, a rightwing ally of the president, in December 2023.

“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” he said, amplifying Trump’s lies that the 2020 election won fairly by Biden was stolen from Trump.

“We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.”