Markwayne Mullin describes frantic pace of Trump call to replace Noem as DHS chief: ‘Need to tell my wife first’
Markwayne Mullin’s first inkling that he was about to be offered a Cabinet post came with a call from the White House switchboard that the first-term Oklahoma senator 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, the MAGA loyalist called the news “a little bit of a surprise” but then said he wasn’t headed directly to the White House.
“Need to talk to my wife first,” the hulking one-time MMA fighter told reporters.
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. His committee assignments include the Armed Services Committee, the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee, the Committee on Indian Affairs and the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee.
He is currently the only sitting senator who lacks a Bachelor’s degree and he has no meaningful experience with the labyrinthine department he will soon lead. And while he is known to be a full-throated supporter of Trump’s immigration policies, he is not from a border state and has no real experience dealing with immigration issues.
His political career began when he successfully ran for a House seat left open by the retirement of former Representative Dan Boren in 2012.
At the time, 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.
