When Markwayne Mullin, an Oklahoma businessman, was trying to stand out in a crowded Republican primary in 2011, he made a striking promise: If voters sent him to Congress, he said, he would serve for just three terms before heading for the exit.
Six years later, with that self-imposed term limit drawing near, Mr. Mullin changed his mind; he wanted to stay. The plumbing company owner without a bachelor’s degree, who had campaigned as the ultimate outsider and political novice, had decided that with President Trump now in the White House, he was finally positioned to be an insider pushing for the policies he’d long sought.
“The only way we can do that is make sure that we have people in key places,” Mr. Mullin said in a video announcing his turnabout. “And the first lesson I learned up there is, you got to build relationships.”
It was the beginning of an arc in Congress that took him from the fringes of American politics to its epicenter, just as Mr. Trump was upending Washington with a more populist, pugilistic style that mirrored Mr. Mullin’s own.
Over the years that followed, Mr. Mullin, a former mixed martial arts fighter with right-wing views, would build close ties to Mr. Trump that helped him land in the Senate in 2023. By the time Mr. Trump returned to the White House last year, he had established himself as a steadfast MAGA loyalist and an indispensable Capitol Hill ally to a president who seems to prize fealty above almost anything else.
His political evolution culminated on Thursday, when Mr. Trump tapped Mr. Mullin to replace Kristi Noem as his homeland security secretary. If Mr. Mullin were to be confirmed by the Senate, where he is popular with members of both parties, he would take the reins of a massive federal agency at the center of the president’s sweeping and signature immigration agenda.
Mr. Mullin does not fit the traditional mold for a cabinet secretary. He has never held a prominent party leadership role. He has not served on any of the congressional committees that directly oversee the Homeland Security Department or immigration enforcement. He has no law enforcement experience, and before running for Congress, he had never worked in government.
But in Mr. Trump’s Washington, none of those things matter. What does is that, in his short Senate career, Mr. Mullin has become the senator perhaps mostly closely aligned with the president. By his own account, he talks to Mr. Trump often, and Republican and Democratic senators alike see him as a key link to the White House. Drawing on his House experience, he has fostered discussions between the chambers to help advance Mr. Trump’s legislative priorities. He has vocally endorsed the president’s hard-line immigration policies, and he has frequently echoed Mr. Trump’s skepticism and falsehoods about election integrity.
All the while, Mr. Mullin has continued to style himself as an outsider. He occasionally wears his cowboy hat on the Senate floor, where headgear is frowned upon, to knock the institution’s staid norms. In a chamber that takes its traditions of decorum to sometimes absurd extremes, he sticks out as he walks the marbled corridors, his steps often heralded by the repetitive, hollow plunk of a small rubber ball that he bounces as he saunters through the Capitol.
A former mixed-martial arts fighter, Mr. Mullin once tried to start a brawl with a union boss in a Senate hearing. He helped defend the House floor on Jan. 6, 2021, from a right-wing mob that believed Mr. Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen — and then voted to overturn the results anyway. As he criticized the American withdrawal from Afghanistan, he twice tried to enter the country over the objections of political and congressional leaders.
Yet even as he presents himself as an anti-establishment crusader ill at ease with the Washington elite, Mr. Mullin has parlayed that brand into being the quintessential insider, now poised to become a cabinet secretary overseeing the heart of the Republican Party’s policy agenda.
“I’m here to enforce the policies that Congress passed,” Mr. Mullin said on Thursday. “And right now I’m part of it. But once I make that transition, my focus is to keep the homeland secure.”
Mr. Mullin was elected to the House in 2012, when the anti-elite ethos of the Tea Party movement propelled outsider candidates across the country. At the time, Mr. Mullin hosted a home improvement radio show and ran his business, Mullin Plumbing. The company ran regular television and radio commercials that featured Mr. Mullin introducing himself — “Hi, I’m Markwayne Mullin” — to the public.
His campaign website hammered home his disdain for Washington. Visitors were greeted by a photo of a genial Mr. Mullin next to the phrase “not a politician.” If they clicked, his biography was headlined: “A rancher. A businessman. Not a politician!”
In his early years in Congress, Mr. Mullin proclaimed himself a “citizen legislator,” saying that his business background set him apart from Washington’s political class. The company also brought him some unwanted attention. A yearslong ethics investigation ended with Mr. Mullin repaying $40,000 he had improperly been paid from one of his companies, after the House Ethics Committee found that he had sought guidance about how to comply with rules related to his family businesses, but failed to follow the advice.
Mr. Mullin was part of a coalition of conservatives vehemently opposed to President Barack Obama and his signature health care law, the Affordable Care Act. Mr. Mullin pushed to repeal the law as he backed a government shutdown in 2013. He opposed the compromise that ultimately ended it.
Mr. Mullin was better known for personal attributes than for lawmaking. Drawing on his athletic background, he led bipartisan workouts in the House gym that helped him build critical connections with other members.
Those workout buddies included Tulsi Gabbard, then a Hawaii Democrat, and Kevin McCarthy, who was rising through the ranks of Republican leadership. Both of them, too, would hitch their political futures to Mr. Trump.
Despite his own background, Mr. Mullin did not initially gravitate to the outsider businessman in the 2016 presidential race. During the primary election, he instead endorsed Senator Marco Rubio.
But after Mr. Trump steamrolled the field, Mr. Mullin joined Republicans in lining up behind him. A citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Mr. Mullin joined a Trump campaign outreach effort to Native American voters. As the president began reshaping the party during his first term, Mr. Mullin was among his most reliable backers, consistently voting with him.
That political alliance grew into a more personal connection, particularly after Mr. Mullin’s teenage son Jim suffered a traumatic brain injury from a wrestling incident in 2020.
Mr. Mullin, a father of six, said in a 2024 podcast interview that Mr. Trump was one of the first people to call him and at one point offered to send his plane to take Jim to treatment in California. He said that the president then called every week for 18 months to check on his son.
So it was perhaps unsurprising that when Mr. Trump began falsely claiming that the 2020 election was stolen from him, Mr. Mullin — like the majority of Republicans in Congress — backed him up. He was particularly vocal about doing so, echoing the president’s language suggesting that Democrats might be “stealing” the election and that there had been widespread voter fraud. He joined other G.O.P. lawmakers in backing a lawsuit challenging the outcome in key swing states, and he signaled repeatedly that he planned to contest the election results when Congress met to certify them.
“When there’s as many questions still out there on the electoral votes and the votes that took place, we have to challenge it,” Mr. Mullin said in a Fox News interview in late December. “That’s what Congress is supposed to do on Jan. 6.”
Mr. Mullin was on the House floor, intent on performing that role, when a violent mob of Mr. Trump’s supporters who believed the claims both men had been making stormed into the Capitol to try and disrupt the peaceful transfer of power by barring the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s electoral victory.
As rioters tried to enter the House chamber, Mr. Mullin helped the Capitol Police barricade a door with a desk. He broke a leg off a wooden lectern to use as a weapon. After the rioters shattered panes of glass in the door, he urged them through the holes to stand down.
Mr. Mullin later said he had witnessed a Capitol Police officer shooting and killing Ashli Babbitt, one of the rioters who tried to rush into the House chamber as lawmakers cowered inside and rushed to escape, fearing for their lives. He later defended the officer’s actions, saying he had “saved other people’s lives.”
But the assault on his workplace did not shake Mr. Mullin’s loyalty to Mr. Trump. Hours later, when Congress reconvened after the riot was quelled, he was among 139 Republican representatives who voted against certifying election results from one state, and a narrower group that objected to the results in two.
Afterward, even as some Republicans tried to distance themselves from Mr. Trump, Mr. Mullin held fast, frequently praising Mr. Trump in policy debates. He forcefully condemned Democrats for impeaching Mr. Trump over his role in the Capitol attack, and in 2022, he introduced a measure that would have expunged the impeachment. In that resolution, Mr. Mullin continued to cite odd “circumstances, unusual voting patterns and voting anomalies” in the 2020 election.
Those public displays of allegiance may have helped Mr. Mullin clinch Mr. Trump’s endorsement during a runoff election in his Senate race in 2022. Citing Mr. Mullin’s views on the Jan. 6 attack and his conservative border politics, Mr. Trump praised his pugnacious spirit.
“Markwayne Mullin is an America First Warrior,” he said.
In his brief time in the Senate, Mr. Mullin has lived up to that description. During a 2023 hearing, he sparred with the president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters and challenged him to a physical fight, rising from his chair and reaching to take off his wedding ring before an exasperated Senator Bernie Sanders barked at him to sit down, reminding him: “You’re a United States senator.”
His alignment with Mr. Trump’s policies remains strong, particularly around an aggressive approach to immigration. In 2024, at Mr. Trump’s behest, he voted to sink a bipartisan border bill that his Oklahoma colleague, Senator James Lankford, had negotiated.
In an institution where seniority is often vaunted, Mr. Mullin is part of a younger crop of senators who are widely believed to have the president’s ear. Their frequent conversations have helped Mr. Mullin establish himself as a critical partner to Republican leadership and a liaison between senators and the White House.
That connection seems to have been key in helping Mr. Mullin win his next job.
“The president and I have a really good relationship,” Mr. Mullin said on the Capitol steps not long after Mr. Trump named him for the cabinet. “We talk all the time.”
Madeleine Ngo contributed reporting.
Michael Gold covers Congress for The Times, with a focus on immigration policy and congressional oversight.
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