Sen. Markwayne Mullin has been ceaselessly tweeting the last few weeks, providing real-time updates on nominees confirmed to President Donald Trump’s administration.
“It gives me something to do,” Mullin told NOTUS on Thursday, before the Senate confirmed Kash Patel and after he’d posted a video about Patel’s nomination on Instagram.
“I’m not kidding … It gives me a purpose, a drive, but I’m more personally connected than I’d say most people are,” Mullin said.
Mullin was elected to the Senate in 2022, making this the first time he’s gone through the process of confirming nominees at the start of a new administration. He’s voted yes on every Trump pick to come through so far, and he’s gone out of his way — and beyond what most senators do — to cheer the nominees across the finish line.
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He’s been consistent in that role: talking with other senators about them, boosting them in media interviews, inviting them to his office and posting a promotional video or picture.
Mullin’s X posts read like Senate cloakroom scheduling announcements, detailing when the Senate would vote on them.
Sen. John Cornyn told NOTUS he’s seen Mullin’s frequent posts.
“If I want to know what the schedule is, I can check out my Twitter feed, but obviously we all kind of do our own thing when it comes to social media. And [Mullin]’s found a niche that he seems to enjoy, and I think it can prove to be useful,” Cornyn said.
In Mullin’s telling, his relationships with many of the major nominees, like Tulsi Gabbard — who he calls his “sister” — and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — who he said he got to know while traveling on behalf of the Trump campaign — go back further than their relationships with many other senators. It’s given him a head start in advocating for them, he said, when some of his colleagues are only sitting down to talk to them for the first time after they’re announced as up for their jobs.
Mullin told NOTUS on Thursday there are “very few” nominees he didn’t know “way before this.”
He said conversations he had on the 2024 campaign trail have been formative for his approach to confirmation season in the Senate.
“President Trump never wanted to put the cart before the horse, so he never talked about cabinet positions at all, but us on the plane did,” Mullin said to NOTUS. “Just a group of us talking just about it. ‘Who do you think would be good at this one?’ It was a constant conversation. And I’m not saying everybody we discussed, obviously, got in, but a lot of them we just — like I said, it’s been an intriguing nomination process my first time to go through it.”
Mullin told NOTUS that the Teamsters union leader, Sean O’Brien, came to him with the idea of nominating Lori Chavez-DeRemer as secretary of labor — a step in reconciling with O’Brien, whom he challenged to a fight at a Senate hearing in 2023. The senator said he and O’Brien separately pitched her to the president, and Trump apparently liked the idea so much he nominated her.
The White House and the Teamsters union did not respond to a request for comment.
Several of Trump’s nominees have faced steep odds, and Mullin has stuck his neck out for them. Mullin advocated for Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth when many senators were agonizing over whether his past conduct was disqualifying — or trying to figure out who Hegseth was in the first place. Mullin even pushed back during Hegseth’s hearing, accusing some of his colleagues of voting while drunk and cheating on their partners.
As of now, he’s not showing any signs of stopping until every nominee is through.
“He’s been very active in cabinet nominees, and that’s good,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville told NOTUS. “He’s helped President Trump, as we all have tried to, and he’s done a good job as well as everybody else in our conference.”
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Em Luetkemeyer is a NOTUS reporter and an Allbritton Journalism Institute fellow.
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS and Oklahoma Watch.
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