The Free Speech Ideologue Taking on Europe

Sarah Rogers: The Trump State Department Free Speech Ideologue Taking on Europe

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The Free Speech Ideologue Taking on Europe

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The Free Speech Ideologue Taking on Europe

Sarah Rogers’s combative online persona has earned her a reputation. But the State Department official is more deliberative than she seems.

September 1, 2026, 5:00 AM

By **Sam Skove**, a staff writer at *Foreign Policy*.

!An illustration featuring a grayscale portrait of Sarah B. Rogers looking upward and to the right. A vertical paper strip overlays part of her face, featuring handwritten text that reads "Freedom of Speech" along with the word "MAGA" printed on a red rectangle. The background includes a blue line-art map of Europe, yellow EU stars arranged in a circle, and the U.S. Department of State seal.

*An illustration featuring a grayscale portrait of Sarah B. Rogers looking upward and to the right. A vertical paper strip overlays part of her face, featuring handwritten text that reads "Freedom of Speech" along with the word "MAGA" printed on a red rectangle. The background includes a blue line-art map of Europe, yellow EU stars arranged in a circle, and the U.S. Department of State seal.*

Mark Harris illustration for Foreign Policy; U.S. State Department photo

*
*
*

Sarah Rogers, who leads the U.S. State Department’s public diplomacy section, loves to be undiplomatic.

The Biden administration State Department had sought to create maps that were “more gay,” the former elite trial lawyer and free speech activist told Rep. Brian Mast during a congressional hearing in March that covered diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

Sarah Rogers, who leads the U.S. State Department’s public diplomacy section, loves to be undiplomatic.

The Biden administration State Department had sought to create maps that were “more gay,” the former elite trial lawyer and free speech activist told Rep. Brian Mast during a congressional hearing in March that covered diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.

A “civilizational death drive stalks Europe,” she tweeted in December.

In January, she wrote that the perpetrators of 2015 sex attacks in Cologne were “barbarian rapist hordes,” in a deliberately provocative statement she said was aimed at pushing back on how German law regulates similar types of speech.

Rogers, who speaks in full, sharp sentences, is not the sort of person you relax around. She’s the sort of person who, when her acquaintances hear that you interviewed her, ask if “she was nice to you.” The sort of person who once mused about creating fake website profiles so that she could fight anyone who might troll her wedding announcement.

And thanks to her relentlessly provocative online presence, she has achieved a degree of fame rarely if ever earned by her predecessors. Her primary target: America’s Western European allies.

It’s a focus that puts her at the center of a sweeping Trump administration policy to remake Europe in MAGA’s image. U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance first articulated the push at the 2025 Munich Security Conference, where he shocked European leaders by painting a picture of a continent suffering from mass migration, restricted free speech—and a drift into authoritarianism. The White House expanded on his ideas in the 2025 National Security Strategy, which spoke of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory.”

But Rogers is the campaign’s most enduring face and, arguably, one of its best chances for success. In her position as undersecretary for public diplomacy, she controls a budget of around a billion dollars a year aimed at winning over foreign citizens via advertising campaigns, scholarships, and more.

She now stands to also become the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), the parent organization for U.S. government media outlets abroad, including Voice of America, which reaches hundreds of millions of people.

And behind Rogers’s online persona is a mind that is perhaps more careful than her mail-fisted approach online suggests.

“She’s very deliberative,” said Noah Peters, who previously worked with Rogers on freedom-of-speech legal cases and served in the current Trump administration. “She wants to build change that lasts.”

---

!Sarah B. Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, speaks at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.

*Sarah B. Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, speaks at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C.*

Sarah B. Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, speaks at the U.S. State Department in Washington, D.C., on June 11, as Ike Lawrence Epstein and Dana White of the Ultimate Fighting Championship and U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio listen. The event marked a new partnership promoting sports diplomacy initiatives ahead of a UFC match at the White House. Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

Besides a short internship at the State Department in college, Rogers has never worked in foreign policy before. She also, unlike many of her predecessors, has never worked professionally in journalism or communications.

Instead, Rogers’s route to her current role is a result of her work as a lawyer—and a confluence of her free speech activism and MAGA politics.

Rogers, a New Jersey native, graduated from Dartmouth in 2005 and Columbia Law School in 2008. Her dream as a teenager was to be a novelist, she told me during an interview this July, but she settled on law. She later worked as in-