Former Rep. Mike Rogers (R., Mich.) believes that “the best diplomat is commerce,” he told the Washington Reporter in his latest interview. Rogers, the former Chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, closed out his narrow 2024 defeat in Michigan’s U.S. Senate race with an economics-focused tour across the Wolverine State.
Now, Rogers is kicking off a Let’s Get to Work video series in which he will visit farms, manufacturing facilities, dive bars, and diners across Michigan in “Dirty Jobs” style, listening to how President Donald Trump’s agenda is working for voters.
Rogers, the GOP’s likely nominee for the open Senate seat in Michigan, does not yet know his Democratic opponent. But he’s teed himself up for a fight with blue states like New York and New Jersey.
Rogers controversially told the Reporter that in Michigan, “we think we invented the Coney Island hot dog,” which he said has been his favorite snack on the trail so far. Rogers’s tour has taken him across the state, where he’s heard directly from voters of all backgrounds.
“When you think about our Greek diners and our Coneys, and now we have a new Albanian version of the Coney Island hot dog spreading across Southeast Michigan, I’m telling you, New Jersey, New York, they got nothing on us,” he said.
The response that voters have given Rogers regarding Trump policies like no tax on tips and no tax on overtimes, he said, has been “huge.”
“The more that they know about it as they’re going through tax time, it’s been pretty eye opening,” he added. “We were at one stop where the guy works a lot of overtime. He pays about $500 at the end of the year normally. So they take all that money out of his check, and at the end of the year, he works all that overtime, and he has to pay the federal government $500 for the privilege of working extra hours. This year, he’s going to get $3,500 back. That’s a $4,000 swing. It will have an impact; there’s a bartender we’ve got. He’s gonna get $12,500 back. $12,500, that’s a lot of money.”
“Another win,” he added, “was this factory; they’re going to put in another line. The manager told me ‘I’m going to be able to buy new equipment.’ He’s a small business owner. He’s going to be able to put in that second line, and he said, probably for the first time in his company’s history, he might be able to add a second shift.”
Rogers’s Let’s Get to Work tour has taken him to restaurants across the state that have benefitted from the Working Families Tax Cut. “I do think those are going to have an impact,” he said of the policies. “There’s also a great little diner, it’s been there for 100 years; Frank’s Diner on the west side of the state. She’s going to use the accelerated depreciation to put in a soda machine, one of the old soda jerk machines. She’s pretty excited about it, because it fits the theme. She said, to me ‘I’m not sure I could have been able to do that and double the deductions for small business.’ It doesn’t have to be a giant factory to have a positive impact. She’s going to put in one of those things. She thinks it’s going to help her business.”
Another Trump policy that Rogers said he “love[s]” is Trump Rx, and he noted that he was ahead of the curve on working to lower the costs of prescription drugs for Americans. “We said this in our last campaign; we are subsidizing the rest of the world’s prescription drugs, all the research and development, all of that. And by the way, I want the next generation of scientists here. I want scientists working on Alzheimer’s. I want to solve that. I want some scientists working on curing cancer. I want all that.”
“What I don’t want to have to do is we shouldn’t pay for it all, and then Europe gets it at a tenth of the price,” he said. “That is ridiculous. I love what he’s doing. I love the fact that he’s giving options to people, and we’re going to be every bit of a part of that, because my argument is they should have to pay a percentage of that R and D that’s worked in the cost of drugs. So what’ll that do? Theirs are going to have to go up, but they’ve been riding off of us for free for too long, and then ours are going to come down; that’s the benefit of that.”
While the Reporter could not corroborate Rogers’s claim that Coney Island hotdogs are originally a Michigan product, his discussion of Ford as a quintessential Michigan company was less controversial.
The Trump administration has rolled out a series of proposals to help restore American auto manufacturing, which Rogers called “great.”
“We’ve seen reshoring happening,” he said. “The best thing you can do is have an economy where somebody buy a car. Henry Ford got it. He was the guy that said that every one of my assembly line workers is going to be able to buy one of these cars. That’s huge. The artificial cost that the Democrats drove up these cars was immense…having lots of tax deductions, making sure that autos were okay in the moving parts of vehicles across the border for assembly, making sure that people had more money in their pocket to buy a car, making sure you could write off the taxes on the interest on a new car, all of those things are making a difference.”
Rogers added that the no tax on overtime provision was also “huge.”
“Three million Michigan families get overtime,” he said. “Think of that. That’s huge. Three million. And so having that cash, that one guy, $4,000 in new money, he’s thinking ‘maybe I can afford a new car. Maybe I can lease a new vehicle.’ Great, love it. America’s been pretty good to those two car companies, three car companies, two still in America, and they ought to step up to the plate a little bit for their own country.”
As Rogers has toured Michigan over the past few years, he’s seen that the main issue of affordability is “just having the ability to make sure your paycheck covers all your bills at the end of the month, and hopefully have a little left over for a great fishing trip out on one of the Great Lakes.”
“The Biden inflationary four years have been devastating to families, devastating, and what the Republicans who are in office now are doing is they’re trying to unwind it as much as they can, as fast as they can,” he added. “They’ve had four years to do it, and then you had eight years of Obama doing the same kind of thing to try to undo all that is taking some time. So that’s the biggest one.”
A complementary pair of affordability issues, he said, are “jobs and opportunity: will my kids have an opportunity to work here and make it here? We lost 30,000 manufacturing jobs under the Democrats since 2018. Those are middle class jobs, gone. People are worried about ‘am I going to still have a job here that’s interesting? Can my kids find a job here so that we stay together as a family? And can we afford life?’ You get through those three things, and we have plans for all of it. How do you buy a house? Well, we got a plan to buy a house because that’s the number one thing I hear with young people is ‘I can’t buy a house.’ Well, guess what? We’ve got some pretty aggressive ideas on how we’re going to get people to buy houses.”
He’s learned from the trail that “people just want somebody who understands it, who’s working on real solutions, not all the chatter that you get in politics today. I’m not looking to be the number one whatever meme guy. I don’t need the most likes; what we want to do is we want to get the most done. And I think that’s what separates me and that’s why I think we’re doing so well in the election so far.”
The difference between Rogers and the Democrats clamoring to beat him in November is that each Democrat has staked out a lane opposing Trump and Republicans on the very policies that Rogers said would be crucial to fueling Michigan’s comeback. But, there is a challenge he has to overcome.
Democrats do a “phenomenal job” of lying to voters about their records,” he warned. “They say, ‘I’m for you,’ and then vote against you, by the way, and then they’ll come back and they go, ‘no, really, I’m for you,’ and then they vote against you. That happens a lot. We’ve been sending two people of the same party to the United States Senate for 32 years. They go back to Washington. They go off to do other things. They forget about our state and our manufacturing.”
“Part of our Let’s Get to Work tour is about reminding Michiganders who we are and what we can do together if we get back into the business of building things again,” he said. “And what we’re finding is they do understand where their costs came from, where that inflation came from, where their high gas prices came from, their high energy bills through all that Green New Deal nonsense that made them buy all those windmills and buy land four times more its value, put up solar and guess what? Now we’re paying the price. Who’s paying the price? It’s not those big companies, it’s not the government, it’s you. And so people are starting to figure that out.”
But, Rogers is optimistic. “It’s going to take some time for us to talk to people and let them know that,” he said.
Below is a transcript of our interview with Rep. Mike Rogers, lightly edited for clarity.
Washington Reporter:
Congressman Rogers, as a former House Intel Chair, can you walk us through your thoughts on President Trump’s Operation Epic Fury, and why this is in America’s interest?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
When I was chairman, we knew that they had the three components of a bomb: missiles, enrichment capability, and enrichment design for the top of the missile. Those are the three components, once you get those, putting them together is easy. So the only question mark we had at one point was, can you form the uranium to put on top of the missile to explode? We knew that they were pursuing that. This is 2014, so they were well on their way to a nuclear program. I had the misfortune of being there when Obama and his administration decided to give them everything they wanted, including cash, which John Kerry, by the way, said that we realize some of that money will be used for terrorism. Then, fast forward. October 7 really made people start saying, ‘how long are we going to do this for? And if they have a nuclear bomb, how much more of that are they going to do?’ This was always our concern. And so when the Trump negotiators went, and I’m just gleaning this from things I know and reports and what I used to know in the past, the Iranians acknowledged that they had enriched nearly 500 kilograms up to 60 percent. Think about this: 0 to 20 is really hard. 20 to 60, not as hard. Sixty to 90, which is weapons grade, is pretty easy. So they were bragging that they had these nuclear weapons, they said that they weren’t ever going to give up their pursuit of nuclear weapons. And you see the havoc that they have caused across the Middle East, and the amount of deaths, destruction of commercial enterprise, the whole nine yards. The question for the administration was, they just told us to go jump in the lake. We offered them enrichment capability for a civilian nuclear program. We’d bring it in and take it out in perpetuity, which is a heck of a deal; that’s pretty expensive. They said ‘no, we want to do a civilian program, ten stories underground, wink wink, nudge nudge.’ So it became clear: they weren’t going to negotiate. They were going back to their nuclear weapons program. They had their proxies that were still free and moving about. They had cash to give them. I think that the question is, do you do this forever, and let them get a nuclear bomb? And what happens when they get a nuclear bomb, by the way, which they said they would use on Israel? Well, I take them at their word. Between 2023 and 2025, there were over 200 individual attacks on U.S. interests across the region, through Iran or these proxies. We were at war; Americans just didn’t know it. The administration said we’re either going to fix this problem or we’re going to deal with a nuclear Iran. And I think that’s what got us to where we are.
Washington Reporter:
How do you see this as an opportunity for the Trump administration to renegotiate or reconfigure its relationships with countries like India and Turkey? How could the world look different when the dust settles here, outside of just our relationship with Iran?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
I think the overwhelming military force and success with pinpoint accuracy and the defeat of Chinese and Russian military weapon systems and defense systems should be a wake up call for India and it should be a wake up call for China. The United States military beat every bit of it with their Israeli partners; that’s phenomenal. And if you’re buying that junk, Turkey, if you’re buying that junk, India, I think it’s time we have another conversation about ‘where do you want to go and how do you want to do this?’ We prefer commerce. Let’s get this thing worked out. I think this is going to have a positive impact around not only the Middle East, I do think this is going to help conversations happen around the world.
Washington Reporter:
When it comes to China, do you think that this will satiate their expansionist demands? How do you think they’re viewing all of this in Beijing?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
No, I don’t think it will satiate. But, they’re going to have to refactor their weapons so they have two sets of problems in the Chinese military. One, it was massive, and they were trying to scale it down. They had no real professional non-commissioned officers core, our sergeants, if you will. They’ve been trying to change that. If they’re smart, and if they have these expansions, I do think that they start looking at performance. Size alone isn’t going to do it. They now have the world’s largest navy. That’s great. Size has its own quality, but at some point they’re going to have to start looking at if America can degrade that quickly and defeat our weapon systems that quickly, we better reconfigure this. They keep talking about 2027 as the time they’re really looking at being ready to go into Taiwan. If they wanted to do it, they may have to refactor that.
Washington Reporter:
How do you view the performance in this operation from Trump, Pete Hegseth, and Marco Rubio in particular, as you’ve been watching all of this unfold?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Great. I wish the communications were better and were a bit more clear, because I think the American people would be absolutely with them. You have Democrats now talking about how terrible it would be if we had to go seize enriched uranium. They have been clownish. It’s unbelievable where they have ended up on this whole thing. The moves have been pretty masterful. They put the resources there. They tried to negotiate. They offered a very generous package. I would never have thought that they would have offered enriched uranium for a civilian nuclear program in perpetuity, as long as it had controls on it. I don’t know what else they could have done to try to get them to the table. And of course, I think the military execution of this has been unbelievable.
Washington Reporter:
How is this playing out with Republicans in Michigan and with Democratic voters? We’re about two weeks into this; what are you hearing from voters in Michigan about their thoughts on this operation?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Most Republicans get it. People are nervous about where it goes and how long it goes, and if there are troops on the ground. And I think the big debate is, what is a troop on the ground? If Delta Force goes in and secures uranium, is that boots on the ground? Are you talking about the 101st Airborne Division going in and trying to secure territory? I think where the president is is the first part of that, but not the second part of that. And that’s where I would be: I don’t think we need big military divisions on the ground, the First Marine Expeditionary Force, none of that. I don’t think we need it. And I wouldn’t do it. That’s why I think clarity would be more helpful. I think they’re getting there, but they all ought to say the same thing at the same time about this thing, because people have questions.
Washington Reporter:
Is there a wedge between Democratic voters in Michigan and where you see the Democratic field on this issue?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
I don’t think the Democrats are with voters much at all. They’ve been wrong on the whole woke thing. They’re wrong on Venezuela now, even though, by the way, just a few short years ago, they were all rattling their saber and bumping their chest, saying we’ve got to go do something about Iran, including Hillary Clinton saying where she was going to bomb it if she became president. Right now, all of a sudden, apparently, they have this amnesia. That looks pretty clownish to me, so I don’t think they’re in line with voters. And I think voters aren’t ready to trust them yet either. On all the things we just talked about, this is, to me, one of them. You can’t get good information from them. I don’t really understand their opposition. It’s not very clear to me; they’re all over the map on it, and they had to change their own positions to get to all over the map on it. Voters are genuinely concerned about their own personal economics, and they’re concerned about some entanglement into a long engagement. I don’t see that. We’ve spent a lot of time talking about it on radio. We do our bit. I’m burdened by having lots and lots of facts on this, because I spent a whole lot of time on this when I was chairman of House Intel, thinking about how do we push back? How do we stop their nuclear program? How do we stop their enrichment program? How do you stop their ballistic missile program? And there were things happening, but, man, it was sure nibbling at the edges compared to this.
Washington Reporter:
Are you concerned, based on what you knew during your time as House Intel Chair, and what you see as someone who has been informed on this since then, about Iranian sleeper cells in America retaliating against Americans?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Yes, that’s a real threat. When I was a young FBI agent, I was assigned to the Organized Crime Squad, but when the Gulf War broke out, they took all of us agents, and I got assigned to what would have been a sleeper cell team. And so we surveilled and did all those kinds of things. What was interesting is that we found with the Iraqis, they had been here for ten years, and they kind of liked it here. They were easier targets for us to approach and try to get them pried off their mission set. Iranians will probably be a little more dug in, but it is something we have to worry about. And the biggest thing is, remember, all those millions of folks that we had no idea who they are, that worries me more than anything, because some of these folks who have been here, we probably have decent intelligence that they may be affiliated with the Iranian intelligence apparatus.
Washington Reporter:
To clarify, you’re talking about the people who were let in under Biden, is that right?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
People who were invited to come on in and do whatever you need to do. If you’re a criminal, well, apologize later was their policy.
Washington Reporter:
We saw the launch of the Shield of the Americas in conjunction with a lot of our allies in this hemisphere. What do you make of that? Do you think this is a way to effectively address the issues of illegal immigration and drug smuggling that are obviously top priorities for the administration?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Yes, they do. The more cooperation, the better. I always say the best diplomat is commerce. So we can open up commercial lanes and we’d love to sell them American made products, and let them sell us a few things, that’d be okay. If you look at the USMCA, Canada, New Mexico, United States, would be a powerful counterweight economically to all the Irans, the North Koreas, the Russias, the Chinas, that would be really powerful, and stretching that throughout the Latin America. For a long time, nobody paid attention to Latin America. We all went, ‘oh, that’s a problem. Well, why is there Hezbollah being trained in Venezuela? That’s a problem. How about Hamas training in Venezuela?’ Then you see the Northern Triangle down there, where you have all kinds of bad actor proxies. Some of them were trained by the Cubans. But it was also Hezbollah. It just has been a cauldron of all these folks who are seeking to do harm to the United States. So having a cohesive plan on how you move that out, and, by the way, tell them stop sending death to our kids, makes this a great day for America, honestly.
Washington Reporter:
You were talking about commerce as the best diplomacy. You ended your last campaign doing a diner tour of Michigan. You just started the Let’s Get to Work series. What’s been your favorite meal in Michigan thus far?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
You can’t beat a Michigan Coney Island hot dog. We think we invented the Coney Island hot dog.
Washington Reporter:
That’s the most controversial thing you’ve said.
Rep. Mike Rogers:
I know it is. And we’re looking for a fight from our friends out east. When you think about our Greek diners and our Coneys, and now we have a new Albanian version of the Coney Island hot dog spreading across Southeast Michigan, I’m telling you, New Jersey, New York, they got nothing on us.
Washington Reporter:
As you’ve been talking to these business owners, how has the Trump administration’s Working Families Tax Cut and broader affordability agenda been received by voters in Michigan?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Huge and the more that they know about it as they’re going through tax time, it’s been pretty eye opening. I have a great example. We were at one stop where the guy works a lot of overtime. He pays about $500 at the end of the year normally. So they take all that money out of his check, and at the end of the year, he works all that overtime, and he has to pay the federal government $500 for the privilege of working extra hours. This year, he’s going to get $3,500 back. That’s a $4,000 swing. It will have an impact; there’s a bartender we’ve got. He’s gonna get $12,500 back. $12,500, that’s a lot of money.
Washington Reporter:
It’s a lot of Coney Island hot dogs.
Rep. Mike Rogers:
He was a pizza guy.
Washington Reporter:
That’s a lot of pizza too; are you going to also claim you invented Chicago-style pizza in Michigan?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
No, no, we have Detroit-style pizza. I do think those are going to have an impact. And we talked to a lot of people about it. There’s also a great little diner, it’s been there for 100 years; Frank’s Diner on the west side of the state. She’s going to use the accelerated depreciation to put in a soda machine, one of the old soda jerk machines. She’s pretty excited about it, because it fits the theme. She said, to me ‘I’m not sure I could have been able to do that and double the deductions for small business.’ It doesn’t have to be a giant factory to have a positive impact. She’s going to put in one of those things. She thinks it’s going to help her business.
Washington Reporter:
I assume she’ll add a good Michigan product, Coca Cola?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Well, we have Vernors; have you ever had Vernors?
Washington Reporter:
I can’t say I have.
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Wow. You’ve not lived. You’ve got to come up. Another win was this factory; they’re going to put in another line. The manager told me ‘I’m going to be able to buy new equipment.’ He’s a small business owner. He’s going to be able to put in that second line, and he said, probably for the first time in his company’s history, he might be able to add a second shift.
Washington Reporter:
As you talk to these voters, employers, and employees in Michigan, what is their thought when they hear that whoever your Democratic opponent is opposed to every single one of these measures?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Well, first of all, it’s going to take some time for us to talk to people and let them know that. The Democrats, they do a phenomenal job. They say, ‘I’m for you,’ and then vote against you, by the way, and then they’ll come back and they go, ‘no, really, I’m for you,’ and then they vote against you. That happens a lot. We’ve been sending two people of the same party to the United States Senate for 32 years. They go back to Washington. They go off to do other things. They forget about our state and our manufacturing. Part of our Let’s Get to Work tour is about reminding Michiganders who we are and what we can do together if we get back into the business of building things again. And what we’re finding is they do understand where their costs came from, where that inflation came from, where their high gas prices came from, their high energy bills through all that Green New Deal nonsense that made them buy all those windmills and buy land four times more its value, put up solar and guess what? Now we’re paying the price. Who’s paying the price? It’s not those big companies, it’s not the government, it’s you. And so people are starting to figure that out.
Washington Reporter:
What do you see as the top issues of the affordability realm as you’re talking with voters in Michigan?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Just having the ability to make sure your paycheck covers all your bills at the end of the month, and hopefully have a little left over for a great fishing trip out on one of the Great Lakes. The Biden inflationary four years have been devastating to families, devastating, and what the Republicans who are in office now are doing is they’re trying to unwind it as much as they can, as fast as they can. They’ve had four years to do it, and then you had eight years of Obama doing the same kind of thing to try to undo all that is taking some time. So that’s the biggest one. And jobs and opportunity: will my kids have an opportunity to work here and make it here? We lost 30,000 manufacturing jobs under the Democrats since 2018. Those are middle class jobs, gone. People are worried about ‘am I going to still have a job here that’s interesting? Can my kids find a job here so that we stay together as a family? And can we afford life?’ You get through those three things, and we have plans for all of it. How do you buy a house? Well, we got a plan to buy a house because that’s the number one thing I hear with young people is ‘I can’t buy a house.’ Well, guess what? We’ve got some pretty aggressive ideas on how we’re going to get people to buy houses. People just want somebody who understands it, who’s working on real solutions, not all the chatter that you get in politics today. I’m not looking to be the number one whatever meme guy. I don’t need the most likes; what we want to do is we want to get the most done. And I think that’s what separates me and that’s why I think we’re doing so well in the election so far.
Washington Reporter:
And there’s a lot of work coming about home ownership this Congress. One of the policies the Trump administration already did to address some of the things we’re talking about was the Trump Rx prescription drug rollout. What are your thoughts on that thus far?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
I love it. We said this in our last campaign; we are subsidizing the rest of the world’s prescription drugs, all the research and development, all of that. And by the way, I want the next generation of scientists here. I want scientists working on Alzheimer’s. I want to solve that. I want some scientists working on curing cancer. I want all that. What I don’t want to have to do is we shouldn’t pay for it all, and then Europe gets it at a tenth of the price; that is ridiculous. I love what he’s doing. I love the fact that he’s giving options to people, and we’re going to be every bit of a part of that, because my argument is they should have to pay a percentage of that R and D that’s worked in the cost of drugs. So what’ll that do? Theirs are going to have to go up, but they’ve been riding off of us for free for too long, and then ours are going to come down; that’s the benefit of that.
Washington Reporter:
Now you’ve controversially claimed ownership of Coney Island hot dogs for Michigan, but everyone would agree that Ford is a Michigan company. We saw that they announced that they’re going to lower costs for vehicles in response to some of the Trump administration’s auto policies. How have you seen the Trump administration work for the auto industry for Michigan?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
We think it’s great. We’ve seen reshoring happening. The best thing you can do is have an economy where somebody buy a car. Henry Ford got it. He was the guy that said that every one of my assembly line workers is going to be able to buy one of these cars. That’s huge. The artificial cost that the Democrats drove up these cars was immense. The CEO gave the figure, I’m maybe off a couple of thousand bucks, but it was right around $10,000. For every $1,000 you raise that price, something like 3,200 Michiganders can’t buy a car. And so you start thinking, and doing the math, that adds up pretty quick. And so having lots of tax deductions, making sure that autos were okay in the moving parts of vehicles across the border for assembly, making sure that people had more money in their pocket to buy a car, making sure you could write off the taxes on the interest on a new car, all of those things are making a difference. Oh, by the way, no tax on overtime. That’s huge; 3 million Michigan families get overtime. Think of that. That’s huge. 3 million. And so having that cash, that one guy, $4,000 in new money, he’s thinking ‘maybe I can afford a new car. Maybe I can lease a new vehicle.’ Great, love it. America’s been pretty good to those two car companies, three car companies, two still in America, and they ought to step up to the plate a little bit for their own country.
Washington Reporter:
The last time I was here, you told me that the next time we chat, you’ll tell me a couple of stories about your time taking out organized crime in Chicago. So I’m here to collect.
Rep. Mike Rogers:
That’s true, but we said they had to involve alcohol.
Washington Reporter:
That is a fair point. We’ll save it for next time! How about this — who’s going to play Mike Rogers in the inevitable movie about your life?
Rep. Mike Rogers:
Well, it would have to be a cartoon. Bugs Bunny would be my go-to.
Washington Reporter:
Mel Blanc, fun fact, was allergic to carrots!
