Hello, and welcome back to Inc.'s 1 Smart Business Story. Markwayne Mullin arrived in Washington in 2012 as a self-made Oklahoma plumber, vowing to shake up the system and return home after six years. But he broke that promise.

Now the ex-MMA fighter and small-business champion who railed against government overreach has quietly become one of Trump's most indispensable insiders. His net worth ballooned from roughly $6 million to over $66 million during his time in office and he’s defended policies that directly hurt the small-business owners he claimed to represent. Despite it all, his base remains devoted.

Now Trump has nominated him to lead the Department of Homeland Security, the administration's most explosive agency. It’s a long way from the Oklahoma ranch where his political identity was born. So what’s next for Mullin?

In this article you'll find:

BY ISSIE LAPOWSKY

The Oklahoma entrepreneur ran for Congress as an outsider challenging the system. Now tapped to run DHS, he’s become the ultimate insider.

In late November, just a few days before Thanksgiving and about three months before President Donald Trump would pick him to run the sprawling Department of Homeland Security, Senator Markwayne Mullin took a break from Washington, D.C., to wander the grounds of the Oklahoma cattle ranch where his son Jim was about to be married. “It’s a big day!” the 48-year-old father of six said straight to camera in a video he posted on X.

Mullin, who, on Capitol Hill, tends toward tightly tailored suits that emphasize his ex-MMA fighter physique, was dressed down in double denim and a wide-brimmed Stetson as he surveyed the progress. Bales of hay the size of boulders were being lowered by tractors into stacks to serve as the ceremony’s backdrop, while Mullin’s wife of 28 years, Christie, hair up and still dressed in sweats, busily arranged chairs into tidy rows. Inside a repurposed gas station that had been transformed into a reception hall, vintage Mobilgas and Amoco signs hung from the rafters, and unfussy but festive centerpieces adorned each white-linen-covered table.

“Can you believe your mom did all this?” Mullin asked Jim, who toured the ranch by his father’s side.

It was a proud dad moment. It was also a fairly glowing glimpse into one of the many businesses that Mullin and his wife own throughout Oklahoma. Spread across more than 1,600 acres, the ranch and wedding venue is one source of income. Mullin also owns twin real estate businesses, Mullin Properties and Mullin Properties West. According to his campaign website, Mullin has owned more than a dozen businesses over the years, including an HVAC company, a septic services firm, a construction company, and a restaurant, as his financial disclosure forms indicate.

Mullin is perhaps most closely associated, though, with Mullin Plumbing, the once-struggling family business that he took over from his ailing father and transformed into a multimillion-dollar home services firm, employing hundreds of people. Mullin sold that business to a private equity firm in 2021 for an undisclosed sum (financial forms suggest it may have gone for tens of millions of dollars), but he still owns a minority stake.

Since his first campaign for Congress in 2012, Mullin’s status as a blue-collar business owner has been his brand. “I’m a guy that can lose money really good raising cattle, and I make it back in a truck,” he once said. (Mullin’s Senate office did not reply to multiple requests for an interview or requests to confirm the details in this story.)

In Washington’s sea of lawyers and corporate executives, Mullin’s Main Street background has buoyed his political career and established him as the voice of small-business owners in their fight against government overreach. But his business entanglements have also dogged his time in office, prompting ethics investigations into his companies’ advertisements, questions about where the line between personal pride and overt promotion lies, and allegations that Mullin has traded on his political position to enrich his businesses.

Indeed, Mullin’s estimated net worth now exceeds $66 million, according to Quiver Quantitative, a platform that tracks politicians’ financial disclosures. That’s more than 11 times OpenSecrets’ estimate of his net worth the year before his first term in Congress. As former Oklahoma congresswoman Kendra Horn once told a local television station when she was running for Senate against Mullin in 2022, “It is an objective fact that he is much, much wealthier now than he was when he went into Congress.”

He’s also much, much more powerful. He has often been called upon to be the Senate liaison to his former colleagues in the House. He’s been called the GOP’s Dem whisperer. And yet he is among the Senate’s staunchest, most outspoken allies of President Trump, including offering his full-throated defense of the administration’s recent attacks on Iran. President Trump, in turn, has referred to Mullin as a “MAGA warrior.”

On March 5, Mullin’s loyalty was rewarded when Trump tapped him to replace the Department of Homeland Security’s embattled leader Kristi Noem, who has led the administration’s militant crackdown on immigration. The news appeared to take even Mullin by surprise; he told a phalanx of reporters on the steps of the Capitol that he found out about the nomination shortly before the public did and still had details to hash out with the president.

If confirmed, Mullin will inherit the administration’s most divisive and politically explosive federal agency, running immigration enforcement and border security, while protecting the U.S. homeland amid a new war in the Middle East. For a plumber-turned-politician who once staked his political career on Main Street, Mullin is now a long way from home.

The first time Karl Ahlgren met Markwayne Mullin, he didn’t seem like much of a politician, which is what led Ahlgren to believe he might be an especially good one. “He was just a guy,” Ahlgren tells Inc.

It was 2010 and Ahlgren had spent decades working in Republican politics, including as chief of staff for Tom Coburn, then an Oklahoma congressman. Now, he was running a political consulting firm with a business partner who went to Mullin’s gym.

Mullin was Oklahoma through and through. He was a Christian and an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, a small-business owner with a double-barreled first name, and a local radio host who, in requisite regional fashion, pronounced the word wrestling with an a. Ahlgren’s partner told him they must meet.

Sitting in the bustling Broken Arrow, Oklahoma, headquarters of Mullin Plumbing, Ahlgren recalls listening to Mullin’s story. He was born in Tulsa, the youngest of seven siblings, and grew up with a speech impediment and leg braces. Those challenges, as Mullin would later explain in a podcast interview, made him a natural fighter: “I couldn’t argue with you, and I couldn’t outrun you. I had to learn how to fight.”

Mullin wrestled his way through high school and into college. But in September 1997, his father, Jim—a hardscrabble guy who Mullin once said fixed his own broken hand with duct tape and popsicle sticks—ran into health issues. Faced with the prospect of his father’s plumbing business shutting down, Mullin dropped out of college at 20 years old to run the company, which was swimming in debt. Mullin told Ahlgren about how he and Christie, his grade school sweetheart and by then his wife, spent years repaying those debts, with Mullin himself working in the field. During those three years, he took only one day off, he often says.

Mullin began co-hosting a popular home improvement show on conservative talk radio, which further contributed to the company’s clout. Soon, its red service vans were ubiquitous, and TV ads in which Mullin offered tips on how to, say, clean a garbage disposal with ice and a wooden spoon were everywhere. “Markwayne Mullin—that name had a lot of reputation and brand value even before he came into office,” Brad Carson, the former Democratic congressman, who represented Mullin’s district in the early 2000s, tells Inc.

Listening to Mullin, Ahlgren, too, became convinced he had a future in politics. “I thought, OK, this guy is a true fighter,” Ahlgren says. He believed Mullin had “the work ethic, character, and conservative values to be an outstanding member of Congress,” Ahlgren says. But Mullin didn’t bite; he was too busy with the business, Ahlgren recalls.

“I said, not no, but heck no,” Mullin later said on local television, his right eye blackened following a wrestling match he’d apparently lost against his son the night before.

It wasn’t until the following year that Mullin’s thinking shifted, when, according to his oft-told political origin story, a minor change to clean water standards at the Environmental Protection Agency during the Obama administration threatened to shut down Mullin Environmental, his water treatment business. Mullin said he figured that if his company’s biggest threat was “some faceless bureaucrat in Washington, D.C.,” then Washington was where he should be.

Mullin announced his intent to run for Congress in Oklahoma’s second district in the fall of 2011 and went on to defeat six Republicans in the 2012 primaries. His campaign relied heavily on his business reputation, so much so that his TV ads, which featured Mullin Plumbing’s vans and offices, drew ethics concerns about whether they qualified as business promotions.

His media experience as a local radio personality didn’t hurt, either. His show, Ahlgren says, was among the station’s most popular, which provided the campaign with a reputational boost. “Markwayne and his guests were practical but also very entertaining,” Ahlgren says. “If I recall correctly, our polling showed Mullin’s name ID was extremely strong.”

His no-nonsense style and the fact that he owned a company resonated with the small-business community in Oklahoma, says Jerrod Shouse, Oklahoma state director for the National Federation of Independent Business. Shouse recalls having lunch with Mullin during the 2012 campaign and feeling like he was meeting with an old friend.

“There’s not a polished façade about him, and I mean that in the best way,” he says. But he was also struck by Mullin’s knowledge of the impact of various regulations. “I had never met a small-business owner who didn’t want to talk about [regulations],” he said. “But Markwayne had gone further than I had ever had a small-business owner go before.”

Mullin took office in January 2013, after successfully flipping a House seat that had been held by Democrats for over a decade. In an early speech on the House floor, he said his main goal was to make it easier for businesses to create jobs, and later delivered a heartfelt plea for bipartisanship. “If we don’t start putting the country first and partisanship last, we are going to ruin the country our fathers founded,” he said Mullin didn’t have a bachelor’s degree, but he became a student of Congress, says Ahlgren, who served as his chief of staff until 2017. “He’d never been in public office … so he had to learn the process,” Ahlgren says. “He wanted to make sure he understood what it meant to be a U.S. congressman.”

Matt Lira, a onetime senior adviser to both former House majority leader Eric Cantor and former House speaker Kevin McCarthy, recalls Mullin seeking him out for expertise. “He was the kind of person who was asking, ‘I want to know more about this. Who’s the smartest person I can get to?’ ” he says.

Mullin, in turn, offered his expertise as something of an in-house personal trainer, leading bipartisan workout sessions with colleagues, where talking politics was forbidden. He boasted about making his redheaded friend, former Democratic congressman Joe Kennedy III, throw up so often in workouts that Mullin began calling him Chucky.

According to Lira, that workout group became a kind of power center. “It was an indicator that this person knows how to become a leader inside the context of the peer group,” he says, noting that from his earliest days, it was clear to Republican leadership that Mullin was “going places.”

But his business ties also complicated this period. Though Mullin had appointed a CEO to oversee the plumbing business, his continued involvement—including voicing the company’s commercials—confounded congressional rules restricting members’ outside employment. In 2014, the House Committee on Ethics began an investigation into Mullin’s business activities.

The rules exist, of course, to prevent self-dealing. But to Mullin, it was evidence of the double standard that keeps anyone but career politicians out of Congress. “Many of the problems facing our nation today require the kind of common-sense, practical business approach that citizen legislators can provide,” he said at the time. “The politicians believe Congress is a place for other professional politicians.” Mullin was ultimately required to pay back $40,000 to his family business, which the ethics committee attributed to an accounting error, but was cleared of any wrongdoing in 2018.

By that time, President Trump had come into office and the Republican party was being fundamentally reshaped by the MAGA movement. Mullin was too.

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