Markwayne Mullin
Successor to Kristi Noem – his mission is fight
Updated March 6, 2026 – 8:56 a.mReading time: 2 minutes
Trump removes Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem. She will be replaced by a former MMA fighter who has provoked criticism several times.
The man is not afraid of a fight, after all, he was a professional in the popular combat sport Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) for a good two years. Markwayne Mullin, the Republican senator from the state of Oklahoma, also maintained his hard line in politics. At the hearing of the powerful trade unionist Sean O’Brien in the US Parliament, the senator threatened to beat the employee representative. “If you want to talk that much, we can work it out here as two consenting adults,” Mullin said.
Most recently, the senator sparked criticism after he said on Fox News about the Iran war: “War is ugly, it smells horrible, and if anyone has ever been there and could smell, taste, breathe in and hear the war around them, then that is something you will never forget, and it is ugly.” In fact, Mullin never served in the US Army himself.
He had already described his fighting methods unmistakably before: “I’ll do anything, I’m not afraid of anything. And by the way, I don’t care at all where I bite.”
Mullin, 48, has been a U.S. senator for Oklahoma in the U.S. Congress since 2022. A member of the Cherokee Nation tribe, he is the first Native American senator to do so in two decades. He previously served as the U.S. Congressman for Oklahoma’s Second Congressional District from 2013 to 2023.
At the age of 20, Mullin took over his father’s plumbing business and expanded it. He briefly switched to becoming an MMA professional – his own homepage shows him as undefeated in five professional fights. And as a millionaire – that fits into the world of US President Donald Trump.
Trump named Mullin as the new head of the US Department of Homeland Security on Thursday. The former senator from Oklahoma replaces Kristi Noem. She had drawn sharp criticism for her political crisis management following the fatal shootings of US citizens by agents from the US immigration agency ICE. Noem described the killed US citizens as “domestic terrorists”. That alone triggered a wave of criticism.
