How Trump’s pick to lead Homeland Security could be different from Kristi Noem

A major change is underway at the top of the Department of Homeland Security.

In the first Cabinet shakeup of his second term, President Donald Trump has tapped Oklahoma Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R) to take the lead on his “mass deportation” goals. The change comes after Kristi Noem was fired from her position as Homeland Security secretary. Mullin’s confirmation hearing in the Senate will be held next week.

Mullin, a plumber-turned-MMA fighter-turned-firebrand politician, has branded himself as a political outsider in Congress — and MAGA ultra-loyalist. Trump’s new Homeland Security pick comes after Noem’s leadership was increasingly scrutinized in the wake of the killings of US citizens Alex Pretti and Renee Nicole Good by federal agents.

As DHS has found itself at the center of controversies, funding battles, and public outrage, what will Mullin’s appointment bring to the agency?

“If you look at a lot of Trump’s Cabinet secretaries, he doesn’t really go with the most qualified choice at times,” Reese Gorman, political reporter at NOTUS, told Today, Explained. “Trump really tends to pick people who he likes and also just who would give him loyalty. That tends to be one of the main things that Trump looks for when appointing people to the Cabinet.”

Gorman has covered Mullin’s political rise for years. He joined Today, Explained host Sean Rameswaram to break down who Mullin is and what his vision might be for the future of the Department of Homeland Security.

Below is an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity. There’s much more in the full episode, so listen to Today, Explained wherever you get podcasts, including Apple Podcasts, Pandora, and Spotify.

We have to start with his name, Markwayne. Where does that come from?

So his two uncles were named Mark and Wayne and they combined the names to Markwayne. And at some point, his parents thought that they would drop one of them, but he just kept them. And it’s just a very Oklahoma name, Markwayne Mullin.

And what’s his origin story? How’d he get into politics?

So Markwayne Mullin is is a member of the Cherokee Nation, one of the few Native American citizens in Congress. That is something that he is really proud of that he talks a lot about. He is also from Stilwell, Oklahoma, which is one of the poorest cities in the United States. He grew up there…and he never graduated college, he has an associate’s degree, he started a plumbing company.

And as someone who went to college there and worked there for a while, I would see Mullin Plumbing vans all over the state.

Huh!

It’s one of the biggest plumbing companies in the state. And he decided to run for Congress as this outsider, where his tagline [was] “Not a politician, a businessman.”

And in the Senate and in the House, he has a reputation for being something of a fighter, which comes from his reputation from being an actual fighter!

He was an actual professional MMA fighter.

Okay, but most pertinent to our conversation today is that President Trump likes this guy. President Trump has a soft spot for this hard dude from Oklahoma. How did their relationship develop?

Their relationship developed really early on. Markwayne is somebody that, to his credit, is really good at building relationships. And so in Trump’s first term, that was no different. He was really close with Trump. … The relationship really grew when Markwayne Mullin’s son had a really traumatic injury, almost life-threatening injury, from wrestling. … He had to be flown out to California to a specialty hospital to be operated on. It was a really scary moment for Mullin and his family. Trump would visit his son at one point and would routinely call weekly to check in on Mullin and his son.

And Mullin really credits that to his growing relationship with Trump.

And what was it that turned Trump against Kristi Noem?

The straw that broke the camel’s back was her answer to a hearing question last week by Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, where he asked if Trump had approved of this $220 million ad campaign which looked almost as though a political ad, and she said that Trump had signed off on it, which incensed Trump. He was adamant that he did not approve this.

When she was asked about her alleged affair with her adviser, Corey Lewandowski, and she did not say no, she just completely dodged the question, said she was appalled that it was even being asked — that was something that also infuriated Trump.

Has Mullin said how he wants to run DHS differently than, you know, Kristi Noem did?

Following the death of Alex Pretti when he was shot and killed by Border Patrol in Minnesota, Mullin’s statement was not much different from Kristi Noem’s. He didn’t go as far as to say he was a domestic terrorist, as Noem had said. I think that you won’t necessarily see a lot of change maybe in the rhetoric or the mission of deporting people who are here illegally.

But what I think you might see is more loyalty to Trump. Noem was constantly on TV getting ahead of the administration, and was really obsessed with the visuals of it all. And so I think maybe some of that might change, the visuals of it. But the actual overall mission is still going to be this mass deportation effort of people who are here illegally.

And as much as Republicans in Congress may have wanted leadership change at the Department of Homeland Security, they haven’t yet come out and said, “We want a policy change from the White House.”

Not at least publicly. There’s definitely members who I talk to on a daily basis [who] do express some [reservations] about the administration’s efforts right now, but they are afraid to go on the record. Being a Republican and criticizing the administration is not great for your political success. And so a lot of these members are afraid to criticize this publicly. But it is a real concern that a lot of them have, especially vulnerable members. The optics of this are really not good.