Each week, PunchUp’s On the Ropes mailout will bring you a side-eyed and snarky take on the weird and wild stuff going on in politics and public life, as well as the highlights from Latch’s reporting at the Daily Beast. We’d love to hear from you, whether it’s the stories that are resonating, the scandals that are reverberating, or the gossip that seems too ridiculous to be true—which probably means that it is.
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It’s been a rough week for struggling Markwayne Mullin, who, it had clearly been hoped inside DHS, would celebrate his first 100 days as Homeland Security secretary with a string of media appearances pushing his and the department’s successes. Instead, he managed only to make seemingly everyone in the United States dislike him, and reinforce what a binfire the place actually is.
Mullin, 48, took over from fired Kristi Noem, 54, in March, promising a quieter period that he said would keep DHS out of the headlines. Unfortunately for the former Oklahoma senator and boss of his family’s plumbing firm, that’s not exactly gone to plan.
This week, Mullin somehow turned a massive victory for the right, in the SCOTUS decision that the Trump administration could send home 350,000 migrants holding Temporary Protected Status (TPS), into a horrible failure with a series of backfiring and misinformed media hits, as Latch reported for the Daily Beast.
He even managed to flip his own win over Stephen Miller to have his unqualified buddy parachuted in as ICE director—which sources told me suggested Donald Trump’s immigration czar’s power is on the slide—into a shitstorm, with PunchUp’s revelation that the appointment had led to mutiny and threats of mass resignations throughout the agency.
With his MAGA base furious at his comments that those with TPS could be paid to self-deport, Mullin was then forced into a desperate damage control effort to clear up a mess entirely of his own making. He did so, Latch spotted, while playing with his pink “pacifier” stress ball, which he says is a “fidget tool” that gets his “motor” going. (Given Mullin’s constant mistakes, it is unclear which “motor” he is referring to.)
Not ones to kick a man while he’s down (oh, go on then), PunchUp has decided to “celebrate” Mullin’s 100 days in charge by dedicating this week’s On the Ropes to the man himself. We’ll examine just how dismal a job he’s been doing so far and give the skinny on the behind-the-scenes mess at Disasterville DHS—including who’s REALLY pulling the strings inside the scandal-hit department…