Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain
The Mythology, the Money, and the Machine of Markwayne Mullin
There is a moment near the end of The Wizard of Oz, no, not Wicked, that most people remember as the pivot of the whole story. Not the ruby slippers. Not the yellow brick road. Not even the flying monkeys. It is the moment when Toto — the small, unassuming terrier that nobody was watching — walks up to a curtain, grabs it in his teeth, and pulls.
What is revealed is not a monster. It is not a warlock. It is a frightened, ordinary man, feverishly working a bank of levers and dials, projecting a towering illusion onto a screen, filling the air with smoke and amplified thunder, bellowing a voice large enough to silence armies. “The great and powerful Oz has spoken!” he says, even as the dog keeps pulling.
“Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.”
Senator Markwayne Mullin — now Secretary of Homeland Security, the ninth in that office’s history — would like you to focus on what is in front of the curtain. He would very much like you to think about the fists. The physique. The plumber from Oklahoma who pulled himself up by his bootstraps. The tough-talking Cherokee patriarch with six kids, a cattle ranch, and an undefeated MMA record. The guy who stood up in the United States Senate, took off his ring, and told the president of the Teamsters to “stand your butt up.”
That is one hell of a show.
This essay is Toto and I'm pulling back the curtain.
The Mythology of Markwayne
Let’s start with what Markwayne Mullin would tell you, because the legend is so polished it has the feel of something carved. Born in Tulsa in 1977, the youngest of seven. Raised on a ranch in Westville, Oklahoma — a tiny town of near the Arkansas border in Adair County, deep in Cherokee Country. His father Jim ran a small plumbing company. When Jim’s health deteriorated in 1998, twenty-year-old Markwayne — still on a wrestling scholarship at Missouri Valley College — came home and took the wheel of a six-person operation.
What followed, if his official biography is to be believed, is one of Oklahoma’s great entrepreneurial success stories. He expanded Mullin Plumbing into a multi-state empire. He added divisions: Mullin Environmental, Mullin Services, Mullin Properties. He purchased ranches in Adair and Wagoner Counties. He built Oklahoma’s largest plumbing service company. By 2013, he owned eight businesses. A political consultant noticed his MMA career, called him, and asked if he’d run for the Second Congressional District seat. He ran on anti-ACA, anti-regulation, anti-government-overreach energy, and he won.
The official biography is not entirely wrong. He did take over a failing family business. He did grow it substantially over two decades. He did represent a hard-scrabble corner of Oklahoma that most Washington politicians could not locate on a map. And he is, by enrollment, a citizen of the Cherokee Nation — a fact he has used with varying degrees of enthusiasm depending on the audience and the occasion.
But the biography is also a performance. And performances, by their nature, require a curtain.
The Bootstrap That Was Already There
Here is the first thing behind the curtain: Markwayne Mullin did not build Mullin Plumbing from nothing.
His father built it. His father built the business, trained the employees, established the client relationships, and created the infrastructure that Markwayne inherited in 1998. What Markwayne did — and credit where it’s due — was take a sick man’s struggling operation and make it considerably larger. That is not nothing. Growing a six-person plumbing shop into a regional enterprise over twenty years takes real work. But the foundation was not Markwayne’s. The first brick was not his. The company name was not his idea. The word “bootstrap” implies that you were shoeless to begin with.
Mullin was not shoeless. He was handed a boot.
The financial disclosures and public records tell another part of the story. In 2012, the Associated Press reported that Mullin Plumbing had received approximately $370,000 in federal stimulus funds channeled through the Cherokee and Muscogee Nations. Mullin said he had no idea the money came from federal stimulus. Cherokee Nation records, obtained by the Tulsa World, told a different story: the firm knew. Mullin’s official posture was plausible deniability — the convenient kind, the kind that a man with legal counsel deploys when the records don’t match the testimony.
Then came the pandemic. During COVID-19, Mullin’s four businesses — Mullin Plumbing, Mullin Plumbing West, Mullin Environmental, and Mullin Services — accepted $1.45 million in Paycheck Protection Program loans. Those loans were subsequently forgiven. All of them. Every dollar.
Here is where the irony achieves a kind of operatic perfection. In August 2022, when President Biden announced student loan relief, Mullin fired off a tweet: “There’s no such thing as a free lunch.” The White House promptly responded — from its official Twitter account — by noting that Congressman Mullin had just had $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.
“Congressman Markwayne Mullin had over $1.4 million in PPP loans forgiven.” — @WhiteHouse, August 2022
Mullin did not respond to requests for comment. He rarely does.
This is not a man who built his empire without the government. This is a man who built his empire with the government’s money, then ran for Congress on a platform of opposing the government’s money. The curtain is not even subtle here. The curtain is made of dollar bills.
And it goes further. The House Ethics Committee previously cited Mullin for his business dealings while in Congress. In 2018, the panel required him to repay $40,000 to his family business after concluding the money he had received was out of compliance with House rules. His wife collected a salary exceeding $100,000 from Mullin Plumbing — a company he claimed not to be running — even while he voted against disclosing PPP recipients to the public.
“This Is a Service. No One Here Pays Me to Go.”
In April 2017, Mullin attended a town hall in Jay, Oklahoma. A constituent stood up and said the obvious, time-honored American thing: you’re our congressman, we pay your salary, you work for us.
Mullin’s response was not what anyone in the room expected. “You say you pay for me to do this? That’s bullcrap. I pay for myself.” He continued: “I paid enough taxes before I got here and continue to through my company to pay my own salary. This is a service. No one here pays me to go.”
Let that land for a moment.
A sitting member of Congress — collecting a $174,000 annual salary, plus benefits, staff, an office, travel allowances, and a gold-plated health insurance plan — told his constituents, to their faces, that they do not pay him. That he is essentially doing them a favor by showing up. That his own tax payments, made through his business empire, have already covered the tab.
The Washington Post’s fact-checkers awarded this claim three Pinocchios. The math does not work. Federal taxes do not get earmarked for individual salaries. The logical framework Mullin deployed — essentially arguing that because rich people pay more taxes they therefore fund their own public service, making accountability to constituents optional — is not an accounting principle. It is a fucking aristocratic worldview.
What it reveals, more than anything, is what Mullin actually believes about the transaction between a citizen and their representative: that it flows one way. That he is conferring a blessing on the ungrateful masses, not drawing a check from them. The self-made myth requires that nothing be owed. Not to the government that forgave his loans. Not to the constituents who trusted his word. Not to the community whose votes gave him the microphone.
But it is a performance. It has always been a performance. The fist-shaking at the plebeians is the thunder machine. The arrogance is amplified. The man behind the curtain is furiously working the levers.
The Promise He Made and the Promise He Broke
When Markwayne Mullin first ran for Congress in 2012, he made a solemn pledge — not merely as a political talking point, but as what he presented as a core moral commitment. He would serve three terms. Six years. He was not going to be a career politician. He was going to go to Washington, disrupt the machinery of professional governance, and come home. The people of Oklahoma’s Second District, exhausted by entrenched incumbency, found this enormously appealing.
He also signed a formal pledge with U.S. Term Limits — the national advocacy organization — committing to co-sponsor and vote for a constitutional amendment imposing term limits on all of Congress: three terms in the House, two in the Senate.
By 2016, he had quietly abandoned both commitments. He never co-sponsored the term limits amendment. He never even responded when U.S. Term Limits contacted his office to ask why. “He’s the only candidate in the country who might break two separate term limits pledges,” the group’s executive director told reporters. “He broke ours; he might break his own.”
On July 4, 2017 — not a date one chooses accidentally — Mullin announced his candidacy for a fourth term. He acknowledged breaking his pledge. His justification? He could “make a difference” in Donald Trump’s presidency.
Former Oklahoma Republican Senator Tom Coburn, not a man given to hyperbole, was blunt: “The arrogance of power has affected his thinking, and when a man’s word doesn’t mean anything, nothing else matters.” Coburn told 1170 KFAQ that Mullin had “drunk the Kool-Aid” and now owed his allegiance to Washington, not Oklahoma. “If you can’t believe him on term limits, what else can you believe him on?”
That’s a Republican senator from Oklahoma asking that question. Not a progressive from a coastal city. Not a Democratic opposition researcher. A fellow conservative Oklahoman who had known and worked alongside Mullin, asking: what, exactly, is this man’s word worth?
The curtain is still moving.
The Cherokee Identity — When It’s Convenient
Markwayne Mullin is an enrolled member of the Cherokee Nation. This is not a claim or an affiliation — it is a formal, documented status, tracing back through his maternal grandfather Kenneth Morris. He grew up on allotment land in Adair County, where nearly forty percent of the population identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native. Cherokee Country is not abstract geography to him. It is where he is from.
And yet the use of that identity across his political career is a masterclass in strategic deployment. The curtain goes up and down depending on who is in the audience.
Michael Bristow, a citizen of the Osage Nation who serves as vice chair of his tribe’s health authority, noticed it early. “When he stands up here and says, ‘I’m a proud Cherokee,’ he never says that in Oklahoma,” Bristow told Indian Country Today in 2022. “In any of his campaign ads that we’ve seen on television, or in print — he never mentions that he’s Cherokee. He never does.”
At the same tribal health conference in Washington where Mullin declared himself “the only true Native American in the Senate,” a number of attendees responded with scattered boos and muttered objections. They had seen his voting record.
That voting record tells a second story. In 2013 — as a freshman congressman in Cherokee Country, representing a district where Native women face epidemic levels of violence — Mullin voted against the Violence Against Women Act. Not the wrong version. Not a compromise bill. Both versions. He voted no on a Senate version that would have allowed tribal courts to prosecute non-Native men who assault Indigenous women on reservation land — a provision directly addressing one of the most significant jurisdictional failures in Indian Country law. He did not explain why. His office did not return calls.
This is a Cherokee man voting to deny Cherokee women and tribal courts the jurisdiction to protect them from non-Native abusers. The cognitive dissonance required to hold that position while publicly claiming a mantle of Indigenous representation is significant. As one critic put it: “They like to say that they’ve got an affiliation with a tribe, with a tribal nation. But they don’t really show that in any of their policies or the way they vote.”
More recently, Mullin authored congressional language that the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians — a federally recognized tribe — described as a “blatant attack on our sovereignty.” The Muscogee (Creek) Nation formally opposed the language. The language, critics argued, would strip the UKB of jurisdictional and economic rights within Cherokee Nation territory — to the benefit of the larger Cherokee Nation, with which Mullin has maintained a closer political relationship.
Cherokee identity, in Mullin’s political vocabulary, is a credential when it is useful, invisible when it is not, and malleable when it conflicts with ideology. That is not heritage. That is brand management.
The Donors and the Performance of Independence
The bootstrap narrative carries within it an implicit political message: this man does not owe anyone anything. He built his own empire. He funds his own campaigns. He is accountable to no one but the people.
The donor records tell a different story.
Mullin’s Senate campaign drew heavily from the oil and gas industry — the single most dominant economic force in Oklahoma, and the industry most directly affected by the environmental regulations Mullin spent his career fighting to dismantle. Lobbyists, oil and gas interests, and the health care sector contributed nearly $1 million to his Senate campaign between 2021 and 2022 alone. He received additional outside financial support from the Republican Super PAC Defend US — a group funded by dark money, which by definition means the donors are never disclosed.
Consider the symmetry. Mullin told his constituents that the EPA was “overstepping their boundaries each and every day” and that he would never have run for office if not for the agency’s “overreach” threatening his business. He then collected hundreds of thousands of dollars from industries that profit directly from weakened environmental oversight and voted consistently in their favor. He then sat on the Energy and Commerce Committee — overseeing the very industries that funded him.
This is not a man fighting for regular Oklahomans against a corrupt system. This is a man performing that fight for regular Oklahomans while serving the system from within. The amplified voice. The smoke. The thunder. The curtain.
The Theatrics of Power
On November 14, 2023, in a Senate hearing room on Capitol Hill, Markwayne Mullin gave the American public the most vivid piece of performance art of his career. Teamsters president Sean O’Brien was testifying before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee. Mullin, who had been sparring with O’Brien via social media for months, read aloud a tweet O’Brien had posted calling him a “clown and a fraud” with “#LittleManSyndrome.”
Then Mullin stood up from the dais, appeared to begin removing his ring, and said: “Sir, this is a time. This is a place. You want to run your mouth? We can be two consenting adults. We can finish it here.”
Committee chair Bernie Sanders had to shout him down: “Stop it. You’re a United States senator. Sit down.” Sanders banged his gavel. “This is a hearing. And God knows the American people have enough contempt for Congress. Let’s not make it worse.”
The clip went viral. Mullin’s base loved it. The tough guy, the former MMA fighter, the man who will not be pushed around. The real Oklahoman who does not bow to union bosses and coastal elites.
What got somewhat less attention in the coverage was what the hearing was actually about. It was titled “Standing Up Against Corporate Greed: How Unions Are Improving the Lives of Working Families.” It was convened to examine wage stagnation, the gap between executive compensation and worker pay, and the role of organized labor in addressing economic inequality. Mullin — whose businesses had employed hundreds of people — spent the hearing not exploring those questions, but performing dominance at a witness.
The workers whose issues were supposed to be the subject of that hearing were an audience for the show. They were not the point. The point was the show.
Ironically, Mullin had criticized O’Brien’s $200,000 annual salary at that same hearing — while also, in that same hearing, claiming he had only paid himself $50,000 a year running his plumbing empire. A company that, the records show, was generating millions in revenue, had distributed far more than $50,000 to him annually, and whose wife had been collecting a six-figure salary from company funds the entire time.
The levers behind the curtain were working overtime that day.
The Secretary of Homeland Security
On March 24, 2026, Markwayne Mullin was sworn in as the ninth Secretary of Homeland Security — the first member of the Cherokee Nation to serve in a presidential Cabinet. Attorney General Pam Bondi administered the oath. Trump called him “spectacular.” Mullin called it an honor. He said he wanted to keep DHS out of the headlines.
Let us think about what this means for a moment.
Mullin inherited a department that, by the time he arrived, had detained more than 70,000 people in an ICE detention network operating across 200-plus facilities, with documented patterns of abuse and death. Twelve people had already died in ICE custody in the calendar year of his confirmation — more than double the rate from the same point in the prior year. The Detention Watch Network noted that 43 people total had died under Trump’s second-term detention expansion. The administration’s stated goal was deporting 1,000 undocumented immigrants per day.
Mullin’s predecessor Kristi Noem had been pushed out in part for her chaotic administration of the agency. He vowed to be different — more methodical, less theatrical. He reversed some of Noem’s most dysfunctional policies. He paused the plan to buy eight large-scale detention warehouse facilities, temporarily halted deportation flights for review, and reversed Noem’s $100,000 contract-approval bottleneck that had strangled federal disaster relief. Republican colleagues exhaled. He seemed competent. He seemed steady.
And then, on April 16, 2026, in an interview with Fox News host Laura Ingraham, he said the United States should only accept “the right kind of immigrants.” Civil rights organizations and critics drew immediate comparisons to the ideological vocabulary of past exclusionary eras in American history. His DHS had also, by that point, confirmed a deportation cost of $18,225 per person — framing the agency’s mission as much in budgetary language as humanitarian law.
Here is what the Oz frame asks us to understand about this moment: the relative calm of Mullin’s early days at DHS is not reform. It is rebranding. The machine is still running. The deportations are still happening. The warehouses may be paused, but the ideological and legal framework for mass detention is intact. He has simply turned down the volume on the chaos. He is, to use his own word, “practical.”
Practical is the word that machinery uses for itself.
And there is an historical dimension to this that should not be lost. A Cherokee man now runs the agency responsible for the deportation of people whose descendants may one day be enrolled citizens of sovereign nations. The Cherokee people arrived in Oklahoma because the federal government removed them from their homelands at gunpoint, marching them along what became known as the Trail of Tears. They lost thousands of people to that march. And now their enrolled citizen stands at the helm of the apparatus that marches other people — with different faces, different languages, different borders — toward a different kind of expulsion.
History does not repeat itself exactly. But sometimes the rhyme scheme is unmistakable.
What Is Behind the Curtain
So: what do we find when Toto pulls?
We find a man who inherited a business and describes himself as self-made.
A man who collected $1.45 million in federal loan forgiveness and rails against government dependency.
A man who told his constituents that they don’t pay his salary, then spent fourteen years drawing that salary.
A man who pledged to serve three terms and served five — and counting, in his new Cabinet seat.
A man who invokes Cherokee heritage before tribal and national audiences and voted against the Violence Against Women Act protections for Cherokee women.
A man who takes oil and gas money and sat on the committee that oversees them.
A man who performed a near-fistfight in a Senate hearing about workers’ rights while missing the point of what workers’ rights are for.
We find a man who is genuinely from somewhere. Who has real roots in eastern Oklahoma. Who has, by most accounts, real personal relationships and real physical toughness and real loyalty to certain people within his orbit. None of that is performance. The man behind the curtain is a human being, not simply a mechanism.
But the project — the political project, the brand architecture, the mythology — is a machine. And the machine serves interests that are not yours. It serves the donors who need regulators kept docile. It serves the ideology that frames federal money as virtue when it flows up the ladder and dependency when it flows down. It serves the party infrastructure that needs a tough-talking Cherokee from the heartland to give a particular face to policies that extract from working Oklahomans while protecting those at the top.
The Wizard of Oz is, at its core, a story about the power of perception management over a credulous population — and about what happens when that management fails. The Wizard was not evil in the cartoonish sense. He was, as he told Dorothy, “a very good man.” He was just a very bad wizard. He could not give the Scarecrow a brain, the Tin Man a heart, or the Lion courage. He could only give them the performance of those things — the diploma, the ticking clock, the medal — and hope they didn’t notice the difference.
Mullin cannot give working Oklahomans better wages, affordable healthcare, or relief from the fossil fuel oligarchy that controls their environment and their economy. He can give them the performance of toughness and grievance. He can give them a senator willing to start a fight at a labor hearing. He can give them the image of a Cherokee plumber who made it on his own.
They deserve more than a performance.
They deserve more than the man behind the curtain.
Contemptus usque ad mortem!
From the Front Porch
In Solidarity,
Uncle Tifa
Believe the Women
Release All The Fucking Epstein Files Now!
A Note on Sources
The factual record underlying this essay draws from the following:
Mullin’s business history and biography: Wikipedia / Markwayne Mullin; Senator Mullin official Senate biography (mullin.senate.gov); Britannica; BBN Times profile (March 2026)
Federal stimulus and PPP loans: Associated Press / Tulsa World (2012); The Frontier (2020 PPP analysis); Sludge / CQ Roll Call (Congressional PPP investigation); Oklahoma Watch (2025 fact-check); ProPublica PPP tracker; Native News Online (2022 commentary)
Term limits pledges: U.S. Term Limits organization statement; Associated Press / Washington Times (2016); Nondoc editorial (July 2017); Oklahoma Observer (2017); Tom Coburn statements via 1170 KFAQ
“Bullcrap” taxpayer salary incident: The Hill (April 2017); CNN; Washington Times; Talking Points Memo; Washington Post Fact Checker (Three Pinocchios)
O’Brien hearing confrontation: NPR; NBC News; CNBC; CBS News; Axios (all November 2023); The Hill (March 2026)
Cherokee identity and Indigenous voting record: High Country News (December 2019); Indian Country Today / Indianz.com (September 2022); The Nation (2013); MVSKOKE Media (2025); Friends Committee on National Legislation (March 2026 update); KOSU Oklahoma Public Radio
Donor and campaign finance: The Frontier / Oklahoma state campaign finance reporting (2022); League of Conservation Voters scorecard; OpenSecrets
DHS tenure: CNN (April 2026); Spotlight PA (April 2026); Detention Watch Network statement (March 2026); VisaVerge / DHS deportation cost figures (April 2026); BBC/Minneapolis Today (”right kind of immigrants” remarks, April 2026)
House Ethics Committee findings: CQ Roll Call / Washington Post (2014-2018 reporting)
Published on justvote.substack.com as part of the “Uncle Tifa’s Front Porch” series