Joe Walsh recalls Sacha Baron Cohen getting him to promote arming 4-year-olds: 'I was tired'

Now that he has entered the 2020 race, Joe Walsh is reflecting back on that interview in which he accidentally promoted the idea of arming kindergarteners.

The former congressman in 2018 was duped on Who Is America?, the Showtime prank show from Borat's Sacha Baron Cohen. In a segment, Cohen's character gets numerous politicians to promote a made-up program called "Kinder Guardians" that would involve arming children as young as four. Walsh, who plans to challenge President Trump for the 2020 Republican nomination, appears in a montage saying that under this program, "in less than a month, a first grader can become a first grenader." He adds that a "good child with a gun" will be able to stop a bad guy with a gun and says, "Happy shooting, kids."

At the time, Walsh described having been duped by Cohen, and he opened up about it further in an interview with The Washington Post on Tuesday.

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"Yeah, I got fooled,” Walsh told the Post. "Should I have been adept enough to pick it up in the moment? Probably. I'm generally pretty good at that. But you know what? I was tired, and every now and then, s--- like this gets by me."

Walsh again said that the "Kinder Guardians" promotion came in the middle of a lengthy script he was asked to read and that it "was specifically about a program that Israel does."

Still, Walsh admitted, "Sacha Baron Cohen got me," while assuring voters that "Joe Walsh does not believe 5- or 6-year olds should be armed and trained."

Cohen recently weighed in on Walsh's 2020 candidacy, tweeting a link back to the Who Is America? segment while writing that "it says something about our time" that someone who promoted this idea "is now pitching himself as the sensible alternative to Trump — and not a single person can dispute it."