Kimmel Fails Damage Control Effort After Criticizing Mullin for Being a Plumber
27th March 2026
On Thursday, ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel tried and largely failed to clean up his Tuesday remarks, where he declared Markwayne Mullin is not qualified to be secretary of Homeland Security because he used to be a plumber. Kimmel’s damage control effort would fail because he tried to have it both ways as he tried to double down on the original comments while also implying his criticism of Mullin is just about ideas.
Kimmel began by observing how “the president and his pals in the MAGA media are not happy with me right now. Trump even called in to Fox to complain about me tonight. His apple polishers are all in a tizzy because I made light of the fact that his new head of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin, before he was a senator, was a plumber. And now he’s the head of Homeland Security. Which is not necessarily the kind of resume you might hope for, for the person in charge of protecting us from terrorism.”
Once again, Kimmel omitted the management experience Mullin gained in that as he turned the family plumbing business into the largest in Oklahoma. Nevertheless, Kimmel continued, “Of course, they decided to twist that to say it was an insult to plumbers, which it was not. I wouldn’t put a plumber in charge of Homeland Security for the same reason I wouldn’t call a five-star general to pull a rat out of my toilet, okay? It has—we all have our areas of expertise. They went nuts about this. They went nuts on every channel. But I think that my favorite part—bit of performative outrage came from a person named Rob Finnerty of Newsmax.”