The competitive spirit that characterized his entrepreneurial career led him back into sport. In his late twenties, Mullin briefly competed as a professional mixed martial arts (MMA) fighter, but quickly ended his career – with a reported record of five wins and zero losses. In Washington, a city dominated primarily by lawyers, policy experts and think tankers, Mullin consciously cultivated the antithesis of a fighter from rural America.
In addition to his loyalty to the president’s policies, it is probably this physical willingness to fight that convinces the martial arts enthusiast Donald Trump of Mullin. When the president announced his nomination, he deliberately praised him as a “MAGA warrior” and specifically referred to his undefeated MMA fighting career. They have already attended competitions together, for example in Oklahoma in 2023.
In a sense, Mullin was a Make America Great Again supporter before MAGA existed. He was drawn to politics as early as 2012 during the emergence of the so-called “Tea Party movement,” a current within the Republican Party that opposed traditional conservatives. Mullin won a congressional seat in eastern Oklahoma with a campaign that portrayed him as a conservative outsider who deeply distrusts government regulation.
His political style, like Trump’s, was never adapted to customs. Mullin speaks with a strong rural accent, occasionally stumbling over his own phrasing and not even trying to sound like a classic Washington politician. His followers seem to like exactly that about him. They consider him to be the “authentic voice of Eastern Oklahoma.”
He has developed a reputation as a political bully. In 2023, for example, Mullin, now a US senator, challenged the head of the Teamsters union, Sean O’Brien, to a fight at a hearing and appeared to be about to take off his wedding ring before Senator Bernie Sanders intervened. It is episodes like these that shape his reputation. And he is ahead of him when he takes over an agency with more than 260,000 employees, in which he is responsible for law and order, border protection, immigration policy and disaster control.
