Hello, I’m Alex Swoyer. Welcome to the Washington Times interview with Senator Markwayne Mullin. After serving a decade in the House of Representatives, he now represents the great state of Oklahoma in the Senate.
[SWOYER] What’s your take, having served in the Senate since 2023, on the GOP leadership here and how they’re handling, specifically, messaging with the shutdown?
[MULLIN] Well, it’s fully different. There’s a huge swing between Mitch McConnell’s leadership and John Thune’s leadership. And I think we’re in the right hands with Leader Thune. He’s very proactive. He’s got a great relationship with the White House, which obviously Mitch did not, when Trump was in office in his first term. There’s no daylight between us and the White House or us and the House. There’s a lot more cohesiveness. When I first got here in ’23, we spent half our time trying to figure out what the House was going to do. And then when Leader Thune gave me the unofficial title to be the liaison between the two, we kind of married those together. I’ve still got a lot of good friends in the House. But, it’s a much different feel, which is good. Obviously, we are in the majority now, we’re able to make actual changes. We’ve got a president in the White House that we get along with, that we agree on the policies.
[SWOYER] Are there lines of communication between the Senate and the House now?
[MULLIN] Absolutely. There wasn’t hardly any communication, lines of communication at all. I mean, it was really odd. When I got here, I was on the Whip team, the Deputy Whip team in the House, and started with McCarthy and then underneath Steve Scalise. When I got here, I was on the Deputy Whip team immediately in my freshman year with Leader Thune. And it was just kind of interesting to me because we spent so much time trying to figure out what the House was going to do. Well, at that time, Kevin McCarthy was the Speaker and which, he’s one of my closest friends. So I was like, “well, let’s just go ask.” And that’s how that whole that started. So that line of communication continued or started with Kevin McCarthy and Leader Thune and it just kind of morphed into now having an even stronger relationship with Speaker Mike Johnson.
[SWOYER] You mentioned having close friendships with the House and also with the White House specifically and your line of communication there. I know you have a good relationship with President Trump. Others have also had a relationship with him, sometimes it goes up or down. I’m thinking of Senator Lindsey Graham.
[MULLIN] They’re like a married couple.
[SWOYER] How do you manage to retain that?
[MULLIN] Well, the president and I have never really had any differences. I mean, we’ve disagreed on a few policy issues, but really we both take it from a perspective of business. A lot of people that have a difference in opinion, they look at it from a political perspective and the president never looks at it from a political perspective. He always looks at it from a business perspective, especially when he comes to policy. Now, he’s very astute to the political pressure too, but when it comes to policy, it comes to making a deal, it’s business first. Well, we all make decisions based on two things, the way we were raised and our life experiences.
[SWOYER] Right.
[MULLIN] Before I got to politics, it was all business. Before he got politics, it was all business. So a lot of times I see where he’s coming from, and then it’s just like how do we deliver it. It’s kind of like when he was working on his nominees, he was having some nominees that were — I wouldn’t say controversial, the media said they were controversial — but they were not normal nominees for these positions. But I understood. Because if the systems broke, don’t continue to try fixing it with the same type of people. And so the president and I, we talk quite often. If I have a question, he is so accessible. He always answers his phone. He calls late at night or early in the morning, so you always got to be prepared for it. But we also joke a lot, a lot of friendly bantering.
[SWOYER] You get his sense of humor.
[MULLIN] I do. But he also makes fun of my kids, too, all the time. I mean, he sent me a text the other day, just out of the blue and says, “Tell your wife she produces wonderful children.” I was like, “Sir, I participated too.” You know what I mean. “She’s got the great genetics.” You know, and that was just out of blue. And if you’re able to see that sense of humor, you see this human side of him that truly loves America, which I get, I totally understand that. He does it not for political gain or financial. He does it for his love out of the country. He could be much more comfortable doing anything else. And when you have somebody like that, it makes it easy to get on board because you know that their number one goal isn’t their political future, but their number one goal is the country’s future.
And he truly loves his family. He truly loves his kids, his grandkids, and that’s why he’s doing it. And so that’s an easy place for us to always find common ground.
Watch the video for the full conversation.
