Donald Trump’s new pick to run the Department of Homeland Security has made big money thanks to his boss’s attacks on Venezuela and Iran—and stands to make even more.
Markwayne Mullin, 48, was nominated by Trump as the next DHS secretary to succeed Kristi Noem, 54.
Noem, nicknamed ICE Barbie, was ousted after two bruising days of congressional hearings in which she declined to deny having an affair with her key aide Corey Lewandowski, and was questioned on a $220 million ad campaign featuring her riding a horse.
Mullin has emerged as one of the biggest stock traders in the Senate.
Five days before military action in Venezuela, Mullin purchased substantial positions in defense contractor RTX Corp. and oil giants Chevron and ConocoPhillips, according to Capitol Trades.
Based on those federal disclosure filings and publicly available share price data, Mullin made up to $35,050 from the trio of positions by Monday. That’s equal to around 20 percent of his $174,000 annual Senate salary, or approximately to what the average American earns in six months, according to Forbes.
Mullin was a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, which receives classified briefings on U.S. military operations.
Disclosure rules require members of Congress to report stock trades only within broad ranges, not as precise figures, meaning the exact scale of any gains cannot be determined.
On Dec. 29, 2025, according to financial disclosures first flagged by financial website Quiver Quantitative, Mullin bought between $15,000 and $50,000 each in Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and RTX. Five days later, U.S. forces launched Operation Absolute Resolve against Venezuela.
At the close of trading on Jan. 20, Chevron alone had climbed by around 9.5 percent, while RTX had risen by approximately 6 percent.
Then came Iran. On March 2, when markets reopened after the weekend that bombs had first dropped, RTX leapt up five percent and ConocoPhillips roughly four percent.
By Monday, just four days after Mullin was nominated for the DHS Secretary position, all three positions had seen significant gains since Mullin first bought them: Conoco was up 30 percent, Chevron 26 percent, and RTX nearly 15 percent, according to Yahoo! Finance’s stock tracking software.
After the Venezuela strike, Mullin was interviewed on CNBC’s Squawk Box, where he discussed the attack’s potential impact on shareholders.
“When you start looking at Venezuela, if they stabilize, most of these majors, including Exxon, [are] going to run there,” he said. “We’ve had relationships, I mean, look at Chevron.”
“Once [Chevron] stabilizes, every major company is going to be buying to get involved in that area, because there’s a tremendous amount of opportunity for the company and for their shareholders.”
The Daily Beast has contacted a representative for Mullin for comment.
Mullin previously failed to disclose hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock and bond trades, NOTUS reported last July. It found that while he was working as a senator for Oklahoma, seven of his stock trades were reported two and a half years late. The Stop Trading on Congressional Knowledge Act, or STOCK Act, requires members of Congress and their immediate family to make declarations within 45 days.
“Much like tax returns, financial disclosures occasionally need to be amended to reflect the most accurate, up-to-date information,” a spokesperson for Mullin said at the time. “That’s what we did here.”
Mullin’s latest trades have drawn criticism from Democrats. Evanston Mayor and Illinois congressional candidate Daniel Biss told the Daily Beast, “Members of Congress and high-ranking cabinet officials should not trade or hold individual stocks—period. Holding individual stocks creates an obvious conflict of interest that lets government insiders cash in while destroying trust in government.”
Biss, who has been an outspoken critic of Trump’s ICE crackdown in Illinois, added: “With the Trump Administration engaging in unprecedented corruption every day, it is more important than ever that we put the government back on the side of the people, and eliminate these shady insider deals.”
Trump has said that Mullin would take over at DHS on March 31, although that is subject to a Senate confirmation being held quickly enough. He got the job after supposedly impressing Trump with his TV appearances, CNN first reported.
However, Mullin has found himself at the center of several live bloopers since the fighting with Iran began, including calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “President Hegseth” twice in one interview.
He also accidentally said the U.S. wanted to liberate the people of Iraq, despite attacking neighboring Iran, and called the conflict a war during a press conference where he was trying to argue that it was not a war.
Among her list of errors, Noem was accused of orchestrating a $220 million advertising campaign that heavily featured her own face. However, in November, it was reported by ProPublica that the campaign had been partly filmed by a strategy group that the husband of her assistant secretary, Tricia McLaughlin, worked for. McLaughlin has since resigned.
Benjamin Yoho’s firm was said to have helped film Noem’s “Stronger Border, Stronger America” campaign despite not being listed in any filings.
