WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump has chosen a cowboy-hat-wearing former MMA fighter who once nearly challenged a witness to fight and who likes to bounce a rubber ball to relieve stress to be the new leader of the Department of Homeland Security.

On Thursday, Trump announced Kristi Noem, the face of his disastrous immigration crackdown in Minnesota, would be replaced by the at-times confrontational and pugnacious GOP Sen. Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

“I am super excited about this opportunity,” Mullin told reporters. “It came not as a complete surprise, but as a little bit of a surprise.”

“It’s just pretty humbling when you start to think about it,” he added. “Little kid from west Oklahoma gets to serve in the president’s cabinet. That’s pretty neat.”

Mullin, 48, is well-liked among his Senate GOP colleagues and by Trump. He’s been one of Trump’s top defenders on Capitol Hill, making seemingly nonstop appearances on cable news shows defending his administration, a strategy that almost certainly helped him get the nomination.

“Don’t fight him,” Trump joked at an event Mullin attended at the White House last year. “He’s a serious fighter in a lot of ways, and he’s a great guy, too.”

An enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation, a rancher, and a businessman, Mullin was first elected to the House in 2012. During the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, Mullin helped set up a makeshift barricade inside the House chamber. He and Rep. Troy Nehls (R-Texas) tried to talk to a rioter through broken glass, according to a video of the scene later entered as evidence in a criminal trial. Later that night, he joined the majority of Republicans who still voted to object to the certification of Trump’s election loss.

After being elected to the Senate in 2022, Mullin would still come over to the House side, sometimes serving as liaison of sorts between Senate Republicans and his former far-right colleagues in the House. Last year, he shuttled between the chambers when the House Freedom Caucus was making one of its several ill-fated stands against a deficit-boosting tax bill. In an interview with HuffPost at the time, he declined to say the right-wingers would fold, even though it was obvious they would.

“We’re just gonna make it, hopefully appeasing enough, but not loving it, that they would support it,” Mullin said while bouncing his rubber stress ball that can often be heard echoing through marbled Senate hallways.

Mullin was more hostile toward Teamsters General President Sean O’Brien during a Senate Committee hearing in 2023, when he actually rose from his seat as if he wanted to physically fight. Last October, the two had a friendlier exchange, and Mullin offered to shake O’Brien’s hand.

In recent days, some of Mullin’s cable TV appearances defending the president’s new war against Iran have gone viral online after he insisted the president hadn’t broken his campaign promises not to start new wars.

“He ran on ending wars,” Mullin said in an exchange with CNN’s Kasie Hunt earlier this week. “This isn’t a war.”

Then he got raked online for musing about experiencing war, despite never having served in the military himself.

“It smells bad,” Mullin said on Fox News. “If anybody has ever been there and been able to smell the war that’s happening around you and taste it and fill it in your nostrils and hear it, it’s something that you’ll never forget.”

He is expected to be confirmed by the Senate with bipartisan support despite having little experience dealing with homeland security or immigration policy. At least one Democrat is supporting his nomination: John Fetterman of Pennsylvania.

But Mullin could have trouble winning over one key GOP senator: Rand Paul of Kentucky, who chairs the Senate Homeland Security Committee that will need to approve his nomination to the full Senate floor.

“I respect Bernie Sanders because he’s an open socialist, and you know that he’s a communist, so you know what you’re getting. Rand Paul’s a freaking snake,” Mullin told a group of voters, according to reporting by Oklahoma journalist David Arnett. He then went on to sympathize with Paul’s neighbor, who was sentenced to jail for assaulting the senator in a 2017 dispute.

“I understand completely why his neighbor did what he did. And I told him that to his face,” Mullin said.

However, since Fetterman also serves on the Homeland Security Committee, Mullin could ultimately go through to a vote on the Senate floor even if Paul ends up opposing his nomination.

Asked Thursday if he was confident about his chances of confirmation, Mullin said, “We’re going to try to earn everybody’s vote…My focus is to keep the homeland secured.”

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