Cannot grant privileges as root@localhost mysql

I've been digging around trying to fix this issue however i'm coming up short. I'm trying to grant all privileges on *.* to 'root'@'%' with grant option on a mariadb server, as a current user of 'root'@'localhost' and continually get access denied. SHOW GRANTS FOR CURRENT_USER()G; *************************** 1. row *************************** Grants for root@localhost: GRANT SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE, DELETE, CREATE, DROP, RELOAD, SHUTDOWN, PROCESS, FILE, REFERENCES, INDEX, ALTER, SHOW DATABASES, SUPER, CREATE TEMPORARY TABLES, LOCK TABLES, EXECUTE, REPLICATION SLAVE, REPLICATION CLIENT, CREATE VIEW, SHOW VIEW, CREATE ROUTINE, ALTER ROUTINE, CREATE USER, EVENT, TRIGGER ON *.* TO 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED BY PASSWORD '*sanitized' WITH GRANT OPTION *************************** 2. row *************************** Grants for root@localhost: GRANT PROXY ON ''@'' TO 'root'@'localhost' WITH GRANT OPTION i have tried FLUSH PRIVILEGES several times as well as restarting the service. +--------------------------+---------------+------------+------------+ | host | user | Grant_priv | Super_priv | +--------------------------+---------------+------------+------------+ | localhost | root | Y | Y | MariaDB [(none)]> select current_user(); +----------------+ | current_user() | +----------------+ | root@localhost | +----------------+ select user,host from mysql.user; +---------------+--------------------------+ | user | host | +---------------+--------------------------+ | root | % |