Mike Rogers was taking a piss in the men’s room of an automobile factory in his Michigan district back in 2001 when he looked up and literally saw the writing on the wall.
“There, above the urinal, was my picture, and the caption was something like, ‘Mike Rogers wants workplace deaths to go up,’” he recalled years later.
“After seeing that, I thought, ‘Wow, this is a whole new game,’” he wrote in a Politico piece in January 2015, explaining his decision to leave Congress. The bathroom art was “a completely inaccurate” caricature of his vote to repeal “some very onerous regulations on business crammed through at the last minute of the Clinton administration,” he maintained.
Fourteen years later, “a life in politics,” particularly Congress, had become unbearable, he wrote. It was “like being in the middle of the worst divorce you’ve ever seen, every day,” he went on. “The level of pettiness and small-minded meanness in political discourse is disheartening at best. It works against our national interests at its worst.”
And that was before Trump. Rogers—who’d left the FBI after six years to run for state office before winning a seat in Congress—had gained a reputation for thoughtful bipartisanship, so much so that he’d been chosen to chair the House Intelligence Committee, a place so fractious when he arrived that top CIA officials called it “the little house of broken toys.” Over his four years as chairman from 2011 to 2015, he became a model for bipartisanship—a soon to be extinct homo politico, a RINO—Republican in Name Only—an epithet in the emerging Tea Party—MAGA world. It’s only gotten worse since then, of course, under Trumpism’s encroaching shadow, as anyone paying even passing attention knows all too well.
And yet now he wants back in, albeit on the other side of the Capitol, in the allegedly more genteel U.S. Senate. He’s running for the open seat against Democrat Rep. Elissa Slotkin, a former CIA analyst with multiple Iraq tours, later a senior Pentagon official. It’s been dubbed “the national security race.” And to win it, he’s had to throw in his lot with Donald Trump—thus bargaining away a bit of his soul.