Mike Rowe doubles down on defense of blue collar workers after ‘tone deaf’ Kimmel joke
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After being disparaged on social media, “Dirty Jobs” television show veteran Mike Rowe doubled down on his criticism of Jimmy Kimmel’s “tone deaf” monologues mocking new Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin for being a former plumber.
Rowe said she didn’t realize her post about late-night host Kimmel’s “disdain for plumbers” had gone viral because she was too busy working.
“I want to apologize for not being able to respond to any of the 22,000 comments that inspired my last post,” he wrote. “I was filming all week and found my observations about Jimmy Kimmel and a former plumber named Markwayne Mullin had gone viral.”
Rowe said Kimmel’s dig at Mullin as a former plumber is evidence of “longstanding stigmas and stereotypes” against blue-collar skilled trade workers as “uneducated, one-dimensional workers who never went to college.”
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In his letter to X, he wrote: “I did not suggest that a plumber was even remotely qualified to serve in the cabinet.” “What I was saying was that being a plumber should not disqualify someone from holding such a position.”
Mike Rowe said he was offended when Jimmy Kimmel criticized Markwayne Mullin, the new head of the Department of Homeland Security, because he is a former plumber. (Michael Buckner/WireImage; Getty Images)
Kimmel, a regular critic of the Trump administration, was recently criticized as elitist for using Mullin’s previous experience as a plumbing operator as evidence that he was unqualified to lead the Department of Homeland Security.
“Trump has lined up a whole new generation of thinkers, including Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne ‘Chuck Mike Bruce Dave’ Melon — Mullin. Maybe Melon is better,” Kimmel said in the March 24 broadcast. “He’s now the former senator from Oklahoma. Markwayne Mullin was a low-level MMA fighter and plumber before he was elected to the Senate. That’s right. We have a plumber protecting us from terrorism. Now it works on Super Mario. Why not Markwayne?”
He continued, “But honestly, if Trump is going to keep picking these unqualified people to run the department, why not have more fun with it? I mean, how about Lil Wayne from Homeland Security next time instead of Markwayne? We can at least get a gig out of this, right?”
Kimmel then doubled down, saying: “I’m not upset that the head of Homeland Security used to be a plumber. I’m upset that he still isn’t a plumber.”
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Mike Rowe, a former plumber, said the digs at Markwayne Mullin were evidence of “long-standing stigma and stereotypes” against blue-collar skilled trade workers. (Photo: Jim WATSON / AFP via Getty Images)
Rowe took a dig at late-night host Kimmel for the dig, saying he took offense to “the suggestion that skilled workers should never evolve into something new.”
Isn’t Mullin’s career from being a plumbing operator to Congress and then a top Cabinet official “the embodiment of the American Dream?” he asked.
On Friday, he wrote that stereotypes promoted by jokes like Kimmel’s are contributing to the shortage of American skilled workers.
“Reasonable people can disagree about what is funny and what isn’t funny. Frankly, I don’t care. What I do care about,” he wrote, “is the extraordinary shortage of plumbers and electricians facing our nation and the long-standing stigmas and stereotypes that continue to deter people from considering lucrative careers in skilled trades.”
“Jimmy’s joke and his audience’s reaction to it are proof positive that these stigmas and stereotypes are alive and well,” Rowe wrote.
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Jimmy Kimmel, “Jimmy Kimmel Live!” show host at Disney Advertising at North Javits in New York City on May 13, 2025. (Michael Le Brecht/Disney via Getty Images)
Digging deeper, Rowe asks, “What do their credentials and degrees have to do with their actual competence? Aren’t we already surrounded by an army of perfectly qualified experts who don’t know what they’re doing?” he asked.
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“Jimmy is entitled to his opinion, as is anyone who believes Mullin is unqualified to lead DHS,” he wrote in X. “But the Constitution says otherwise and so does the Senate.”
Rowe, who runs the MikeroweWORKS Foundation, a nonprofit that promotes skilled worker careers, encouraged people to pursue careers in skilled trades, concluding: “Who knows? It could be the first step on the path to the presidency.”
Fox News Digital has reached out to Kimmel’s spokespeople for comment.
