El-Sayed: Mike Rogers Is Afraid of ‘Pissing Off Daddy Trump’

August 21, 2026
3:31 am

▶

Listen to Article

Michigan Democratic Senate hopeful Abdul El-Sayed’s latest jab at Mike Rogers—calling him scared of “pissing off Daddy Trump”—is the kind of Beltway snark that plays well on cable but lands flat with gun owners who remember Rogers’ actual record. As a former FBI agent and longtime House Intelligence Committee chair, Rogers spent years championing the very surveillance tools and “terror watch-list” expansions that Second Amendment groups have repeatedly flagged as back-door gun bans. His voting record includes support for the 2013 Manchin-Toomey background-check expansion and the 2016 Feinstein amendment that would have barred anyone on the no-fly list from purchasing firearms—positions that earned him an “F” from the NRA-ILA long before Trump entered the arena. What El-Sayed is really signaling is that Rogers’ primary vulnerability isn’t Trump loyalty; it’s that he’s spent a career inside the Beltway consensus that treats gun control as a technocratic tweak rather than a constitutional red line. Michigan’s gun owners—especially those who watched the state’s own red-flag and universal-background-check pushes sail through Lansing with bipartisan fingerprints—aren’t looking for another “reasonable Republican” who promises to be slightly less enthusiastic about restrictions. They’re looking for someone who treats the Second Amendment as a hard brake on federal power, not a talking point to be negotiated away when the next mass-shooting headline hits. The larger takeaway for the 2A community is that personality-driven attacks like El-Sayed’s are designed to keep the conversation on Trump rather than on policy substance. If Rogers wants to neutralize that line of attack, he’ll need to do more than pledge allegiance to the former president; he’ll have to draw a bright line against any future surveillance-based gun restrictions and commit to rolling back the very FBI authorities he once helped expand. Until then, Michigan gun owners have every reason to treat both candidates’ rhetoric as noise and focus on whose record actually protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Best FFL Software Ranked and Compared!

What El-Sayed is really signaling is that Rogers’ primary vulnerability isn’t Trump loyalty; it’s that he’s spent a career inside the Beltway consensus that treats gun control as a technocratic tweak rather than a constitutional red line. Michigan’s gun owners—especially those who watched the state’s own red-flag and universal-background-check pushes sail through Lansing with bipartisan fingerprints—aren’t looking for another “reasonable Republican” who promises to be slightly less enthusiastic about restrictions. They’re looking for someone who treats the Second Amendment as a hard brake on federal power, not a talking point to be negotiated away when the next mass-shooting headline hits.

The larger takeaway for the 2A community is that personality-driven attacks like El-Sayed’s are designed to keep the conversation on Trump rather than on policy substance. If Rogers wants to neutralize that line of attack, he’ll need to do more than pledge allegiance to the former president; he’ll have to draw a bright line against any future surveillance-based gun restrictions and commit to rolling back the very FBI authorities he once helped expand. Until then, Michigan gun owners have every reason to treat both candidates’ rhetoric as noise and focus on whose record actually protects the right to keep and bear arms.

Share this story