The MAGAfication of Mike Rogers

When Mike Rogers left Congress in 2015, he was an old-school Republican who was weary of Donald Trump. Now, as he mounts his second run for the Senate, he has completely adopted a MAGA worldview.

Rogers’ evolution can be read in two ways: a legitimate tack to the far-right or a cynical ploy to court Trump voters.

An example of this shift is Rogers’ stance on former FBI Director James Comey, whom Rogers defended from Trump attacks in 2017, but now says ruined the FBI. Rogers served as an FBI investigator in the 1990s.

“When James Comey got in, he just destroyed 70 years of what was a culture of staying out of politics, being law enforcement,” Rogers said in June before adding that he always “opposed Comey.”

But when Comey testified before Congress eight years earlier about Trump pressuring him to drop an investigation into the Trump campaign, Rogers said that Comey’s testimony was “credible.”

“I do believe James Comey,” Rogers told CNN. “I think James Comey is a very good man. The FBI agents loved James Comey.”

Rogers made a similar Trumpian evolution on cryptocurrency. In 2017, he wrote two op-eds warning that Bitcoin posed a national security threat because of its use in money laundering and the international drug trade.

“Hackers collect ransomware profits in bitcoin to protect their identities and locations,” Rogers wrote in the New York Daily News. “Others use bitcoins to buy and sell illegal drugs and weapons on the deep and dark web. Terrorists can finance operations using digital currency. Why would an average person want to use bitcoin? Because it’s largely unregulated, and many people believe that’s a good thing.”

Trump was similarly skeptical of cryptocurrency in his first term, but has now embraced the technology. This includes launching his own cryptocurrency, Trumpcoin, which has netted the Trump family millions of dollars. Rogers’ views have followed suit.

“Making America the crypto capital of the world should be nonpartisan,” Rogers wrote on Facebook in May. “But now, the same Democrats who claimed to support America’s crypto future are trying to tank it. Once again, Democrats prove that they would rather watch President Trump fail than America succeed.”

A few weeks later, Rogers attended a Bitcoin conference in Las Vegas.

Not all of Rogers’ reversals take years to gestate. In June, he said Trump should seek congressional approval before striking Iran, and days later praised Trump for proceeding without it.

“I think this was exigent circumstances,” Rogers said in a June 23 radio interview. “I mean, there was a unique window in order to do this. You can’t do that by committee. You have to be able to take action in that window.”

A CNN poll found that 56% of Americans opposed Trump’s Iran strikes.

Rogers lost the 2024 U.S. Senate race in Michigan by 19,006 votes. He is running again in 2026 with Trump’s endorsement.