Senator Markwayne Mullin’s first inkling that he was about to be offered a new job came with a call from the White House switchboard that he was not at all expecting.
Speaking to reporters outside the U.S. Capitol on Thursday just minutes after President Donald Trump announced that he’d be tapped to lead the Department of Homeland Security, Mullin called the news “a little bit of a surprise” and said he wasn’t headed directly to the White House today following the news.
“Need to talk to my wife first,” he said.
Mullin added that he and Trump “have a really good relationship” and “talk all the time,” and said he was “super excited” to get the massive department “working for the American people.”
“The Department of Homeland Security very broad jurisdiction, and Ithink there is a lot of work that we need to do and I am excited,” he said.
The president’s choice of Mullin to replace the embattled Noem will put a first-term senator with just an associate’s degree in charge of a sprawling bureaucracy encompassing everything from airport security to disaster response to the United States Coast Guard.
Mullin, 48, has served in the upper chamber since 2023 after a decade-long career representing the Sooner State’s first Congressional district in the House of Representatives.
Before he was first elected to the House in 2012, he hosted a syndicated home improvement show on a Tulsa radio station and ran an eponymous plumbing company, Mullin Plumbing, as well as other family-owned real estate and farm operations.
An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, Mullin also had a brief but undefeated career as a mixed martial arts professional in the Xtreme Fighting League, recording one technical knockout victory in 2007 and two victories by submission in 2006 and 2007.
He spent his House career as a backbencher but gained a measure of attention during the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol when he and two other House members helped police barricade the House chamber doors against a riotous mob of President Donald Trump’s supporters.
When he and other members were leaving the chamber to shelter at a secure location during the attack, he witnessed a U.S. Capitol Police lieutenant shoot a pro-Trump rioter, Ashli Babbit, as she tried to climb through a locked door into a secure portion of the Capitol near the chamber.
He later told ABC News that the officer “didn’t have a choice” to shoot her.
“The mob was going to come through the door, there was a lot of members and staff that were in danger at the time. And when he [drew] his weapon, that’s a decision that’s very hard for anyone to make and, once you draw your weapon like that, you have to defend yourself with deadly force,” he said.
Mullin later added that the officer’s actions “saved people’s lives.”
When then-Senator Jim Inhofe announced his retirement in February 2022, Mullin entered and won a special election to serve out the remaining three years of his term starting in January 2023.
He quickly made his mark in the upper chamber as a full-throated supporter of Trump’s MAGA movement who wasn’t afraid to tangle with detractors — rhetorically or otherwise.
In one now-infamous exchange, he accused Teamsters president Sean O’Brien of “intimidation” during a Senate Health, Labor, Education and Pensions Committee hearing on a Democratic-backed labor organizing bill.
He claimed the Teamsters forced union members to pay dues and complained about an attempt by union organizers to establish a union at his former plumbing business.
After Mullin pressed O’Brien about his salary compared to that of a UPS driver, O’Brien called the query “out of line” to which Mullin replied: “Shut your mouth.”
The Teamsters boss called Mullin a “greedy CEO” and mock him as a “tough guy.”
Months later, Mullin clashed with O’Brien again during a second appearance before the HELP panel when he challenged the Teamsters leader to a fight after reading a tweet in which O’Brien had called him a “cowboy” and invited him to find him “anyplace, anytime.”
Mullin said: “You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults, we can finish it here.”
The confrontation ended when then-HELP Committee Chair Bernie Sanders told him to “sit down” and reminded him that he was a United States Senator.
