Trump currently has no plans to pick a favorite in the state’s Senate GOP primary.
Michigan Senate candidate Mike Rogers, the former House Intelligence Committee chairman and FBI agent who is hoping to succeed retiring Democratic senator Debbie Stabenow this cycle, will formally announce Tuesday that he is supporting former President Donald Trump in 2o24, his campaign tells National Review.
The endorsement from the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s top Michigan recruit is yet another indication that the former president is continuing to lock up support from on-the-fence lawmakers and 2024 congressional candidates as he approaches the first presidential nominating contests this month. Many Republican candidates now see Trump’s primary victory as inevitable, and view endorsing him as a precursor for base voters’ support in contested primaries even in Michigan — a blue-leaning swing state that hasn’t elected a Republican to the U.S. Senate in three decades.
Rogers’s endorsement of Trump, first reported by the Detroit News, is quite the turnaround for someone who has previously said the former president’s “time has passed,”and who even briefly explored challenging him for the 2024 presidential nomination.
That’s now water under the bridge for Rogers, who predicted last year that Trump would not be the party’s 2024 nominee. “If you weren’t disagreeing at some point along the way, you weren’t engaged in politics,” he said in an interview ahead of Tuesday’s endorsement.
He adds that crime, inflation, and security at the U.S.-Mexico border are top reasons Republicans should back Trump. “Differences within a party tend to be small and tempered,” he says. “When you look at what is at stake, I think Donald Trump’s policies and what he can do on the very first day when he walks in are going to be very, very important for our party and the country’s future.”
Trump, who won the state in 2016 but lost it to Joe Biden four years later, has no current plans to pick a favorite in Michigan’s Senate GOP primary, one of the former president’s 2024 campaign advisers tells National Review. Also competing in the state’s August primary are former Representative Peter Meijer, businessman Sandy Pensler, and former Detroit police chief James Craig, among other GOP candidates. Pensler and Craig have already endorsed Trump, and Meijer has maintained that he will support the former president if he’s the party’s 2024 nominee.
High-profile Democratic candidates running for Stabenow’s seat include Representative Elissa Slotkin and actor Hill Harper.