U.S. State Department

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., 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-house counsel for tobacco giant Philip Morris before landing at the Brewer law firm, where she was part of a team that won a landmark case defending the National Rifle Association (NRA) before the Supreme Court.

Shifting from the fast-paced world of blue chip Manhattan law to the slow-moving machinery of government has come with a learning curve, Rogers told me during lunch at Ned’s, a members-only club popular with the MAGA set near the White House.

“When you say jump, the [law] associates are already vying for how high,” Rogers said. “That’s not how bureaucracy works.”

Those who worked with her in that time routinely describe her as intelligent, articulate, and driven—a lawyer to be feared. “We let her kind of be the tank with us crouched behind,” said Will Fleming, a lawyer who partnered with Rogers on the NRA case.

She also had a flair for the way a dramatic story can serve a larger goal, and a willingness to push emotional buttons. In one trial related to the NRA case, she painted a picture of a nighttime attack on her that she implied reframed her thinking about guns.

“Before working on this case, I didn’t really agree with the NRA on the Second Amendment. Then one night walking home I was attacked by two men in the dark. And it didn’t matter that I had taken a kick-boxing class at the gym,” Rogers said, against the protest of an opposing lawyer, according to a court transcript.

But Rogers was not just a highly paid lawyer. She was also a budding free speech activist.

Rogers, a self-described older millennial (she is 43), came of age just as the internet was developing into a platform for the creation and dissemination of mass culture. One of the emblematic features of that era was the flowering of message boards. She participated in one such forum in law school that she described to Semafor as “4chan for lawyers.”

She found some of the board’s anonymous content objectionable—but also wasn’t happy to see it attract lawsuits aimed at unmasking posters, which, according to Rogers, followed scrutiny over people posting pictures of women, including herself.

“Even the practice of posting pictures of yourself on the internet, I didn’t really like, but what I disliked a lot more was the prospect of having my IP address subpoenaed and having my life destroyed,” she said.

U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio departs Munich after attending the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio departs Munich after attending the Munich Security Conference on Feb. 15. ‘Western Civilization’ Is a MAGA Dog Whistle Rubio is wrong to cite it as the basis for the U.S. alliance with Europe. Shadow Government |........

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