U.S. Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), a tribal citizen of the Cherokee Nation and a member of the Senate Committee on Indian Affairs, drives illegally as he navigates Washington, D.C. in his Jeep.
During a Fox News interview on Sunday, Mullin said he doesn’t wear a seatbelt when driving in the nation’s capital because he is afraid of being carjacked.
“I don’t want to be stuck in my vehicle when I need to exit in a hurry, because I got a seatbelt around me and that — and I wear my seatbelt all the time,” he told Fox News host Brian Kilmeade.
Mullin was responding to President Donald Trump’s call to militarize Washington, D.C., by taking over the D.C. police force and sending in the National Guard.
Arguably, people need to be prudent about their safety anywhere these days. However, Trump’s and Mullin’s facts don’t add up.
Here are the facts:
At its peak in June 2023, Washington, D.C. recorded a carjacking rate of 20.6 per 100,000 residents. By June 2025, that rate had dropped sharply to 5.1 per 100,000 — a reduction of 75%, according to the Council on Criminal Justice.
Mullin lives in Westville, Oklahoma, near the Arkansas state line and about 80 miles from Tulsa. In 2023, the most recent year for which FBI statistics are available, there were 3,139 vehicle thefts in Tulsa — a rate of 765.4 per 100,000 residents.*
Does he wear his seatbelt in Tulsa?
* For Tulsa, Oklahoma, carjackings are often tracked under broader categories like "motor vehicle theft" or "robbery," and specific carjacking statistics at the municipal level are rarely made available.
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