Braun was born in Jasper, Indiana, on March 24, 1954. He graduated from Jasper High School. Braun was a three-sport star athlete; he married his high school sweetheart, Maureen, who was a cheerleader. He attended the all-male Wabash College, where he was a member of Phi Delta Theta fraternity and graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in economics, and Harvard Business School, where he earned a master's degree. After graduating from Harvard, Braun moved back to Indiana and joined his father’s business manufacturing truck bodies for farmers. When the economy of the mid-1980s hit farmers hard and his father's business nearly went under, Braun steered the business in the more lucrative direction of selling truck accessories. The business subsequently grew from 15 employees to more than 300. In 1986 Braun and Daryl Rauscher acquired Meyer Body Inc., a manufacturer of truck bodies and distributor of truck parts and equipment. In 1995 Braun fully acquired the company. Meyer Body was renamed Meyer Distributing in 1999. Braun is its president and CEO. In 2018 Braun's personal finance disclosure listed assets worth between $35 million and $96 million.
Early political career
Braun was a member of the Jasper School Board from 2004 to 2014. He served in the Indiana House of Representatives for Indiana District 63 from 2014 to 2017. Braun resigned from the state House on November 1, 2017, to focus on his U.S. Senate campaign. In 2017, the American Conservative Union gave him a lifetime score of 82%. In July 2018, Braun called for the Indiana attorney general, Republican Curtis Hill, to resign amid allegations that Hill had drunkenly groped a lawmaker and three legislative staffers.
U.S. Senate
2018 Senate election
Braun won the Republican primary for the United States Senate in the 2018 election, defeating U.S. Representatives Todd Rokita and Luke Messer by over 56,000 votes. He received 208,520 votes, or roughly 41% of the total. Braun ran as an outsider, emphasizing his career in business. He defeated Democratic incumbent Joe Donnelly in the November general election with 51% of the vote to Donnelly's 45%; the Libertarian candidate, Lucy Brenton, tallied less than 4%. In late 2019, the Indianapolis Star reported that Braun's 2018 campaign was the beneficiary of $2.8 million in spending by a political action committee with strong connections to indicted money launderer Lev Parnas and one of his shell companies. Parnas supplied photographs of him and Braun embracing at a 2018 campaign event to the House of Representatives as part of his cooperation with the impeachment of President Trump. They were made public in January 2020.
Tenure
On January 3, 2019, Braun was sworn in as the junior United States senator from Indiana by Vice President Mike Pence. On May 24, 2019, Braun was one of eight senators who voted against a $19.1 billion emergency aid package for states and territories that endured hurricanes, floods and fires. Braun said the disaster assistance process was "just another path for runaway spending on unrelated projects." Despite his opposition, the package was enacted with bipartisan support and President Trump's approval. After Trump announced that American troops would pull out of northern Syria in October 2019, Braun supported the move, saying, "I don’t think we can be the policeman of the world. We should lead, but we should do it in a way that is sustainable." As a result, in that month, Turkey launched a military offensive against the American-allied Kurds in that area. After that, Braun called Trump "smart", questioning why the United States should "be in the crossfire" between Turkey and the Kurds. He called the idea that ISIS would recover strength as a result of the conflict "an assumption". On December 10, 2019, Braun said that the impeachment inquiry against Donald Trump had been a "disaster for Democrats", adding that Democrats had wanted to impeach Trump ever since his election in 2016, "when they didn't have any idea of what their reason would be." In May 2020, Senator Charles Schumer put forth a resolution to officially release the guidance by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on how to safely lift restrictions related to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States. A leaked version of the guidance showed that it was more detailed and restrictive than the White House recommendations released in April 2020. Braun blocked Schumer's resolution, saying that the CDC's recommendations would hinder the economy.
Braun opposes the Affordable Care Act, supported efforts at the congressional level to repeal it, and supports a lawsuit to roll it back. Braun has called for "free-market competition" and "market-driven" solutions on health care. During his 2018 Senate campaign, he criticized incumbent Democratic Senator Joe Donnelly as a "defender of Obamacare." He expressed support for keeping in place protections for individuals with preexisting conditions; Politico and PolitiFact noted that both the House efforts and the lawsuit to repeal the Affordable Care Act, which Braun supported, would weaken protections for preexisting conditions.
Immigration
Braun has said, "building the wall must be the first step to any solution" on illegal immigration. He opposes a pathway to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who came to the United States as minors, known as DREAMers.
Tax reform
Braun supported the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017, the Republican Party's tax reform bill. He said the tax reform bill was "revenue-neutral"; the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office estimated that the bill would increase U.S. debt. Braun has called for cuts to the U.S. budget, saying that the U.S. "has a spending problem."
Free trade
In 2018, Braun supported President Trump's trade and tariff policies, saying that they have "yielded phenomenal results." Previously, he supported free trade policies.
During Donald Trump's impeachment trial, Mike Braun voted to acquit Trump. When asked if it was acceptable for Trump withhold foreign aid in order to coerce a foreign leader to investigate Joe Biden, Braun said that he did not believe that such behavior was proper but that "it didn't happen." Braun also said that Trump did what he did because Trump was legitimately motivated by a desire to reduce corruption in Ukraine. After he was acquitted, Braun said that Trump "hopefully" learned something from the impeachment trial.
Electoral history
Personal life
Braun and his wife, Maureen, have four children. He is Roman Catholic. Braun's brother, Steve Braun, is also a politician in Indiana.
