Former U.S. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-MI), the Trump-endorsed Republican Senate candidate for Michigan, called for President Donald Trump to deploy the National Guard to Detroit to “give these neighborhoods back” to law-abiding citizens in an exclusive interview on Breitbart News Saturday.
Rogers, who announced his Senate campaign in April, told host Matthew Boyle that he demanded Detroit Mayor Mike Duggan request Trump’s Washington, DC, crime-busting strategy to come to his city.
“What I basically said was, ‘Hey, Mr. Mayor, pick up the phone and call the president and request some backup. We’re the second most violent city in the country, behind Memphis,” the former congressman said.
He continued, “There’s a lot of neighborhoods in Detroit that just aren’t safe to be in, and it’s not fair to the people who are playing by the rules. You know, just because you’re poor or at the lower middle class does not mean you have to put up with crime in this way, at least in my mind.”
According to Rogers, Duggan has been “trying to dispute the statistics” on the crime crisis plaguing the city, so he laid out the official crime reports live on the air.
“You know, the mayor has been trying to dispute the statistics. Okay, well, they were given from Detroit to the FBI, and that’s where we got these statistics. And by the way, what it shows is that we’re about 536 percent higher on aggravated assault, 580 percent higher than the national average for murder, 180 percent for rape, 240 percent higher for robbery.”
Rogers then blasted one of his Democrat opponents, Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI), for her hypocrisy; she called on the National Guard to come into Chicago in 2016 after more than 60 people were shot over Independence Day weekend, but claimed that Rogers’ call for them to come to Detroit was “wrong.”
“It is time to call in the National Guard. Enough is enough,” Stevens wrote on July 5, 2016, with a link to a USA Today article reporting the shootings:
The Democrat congresswoman contradicted herself in another post made last week, writing, “Mike Rogers just called to deploy the National Guard to Detroit. Was wrong in ‘67 and it’s wrong now.”
“This is exactly why I introduced a bill to stop Trump’s abuse of power, because this chaos won’t stop in someone else’s community. It’ll come to ours unless we do something,” Stevens added:
Rogers told Boyle, “One of my potential opponents attacked me, saying this is a terrible idea, even though this particular candidate called for the National Guard to go into Chicago to fight violent crime in 2016.”
“So, it has been an interesting journey here. But my whole thing is, listen — if we continue to do the same thing over and over and over, we’re going to get the same result, so fifth graders can figure this out,” he continued. “Well, you’ve got to break the cycle. And I think what you saw happen in Washington, DC, is breaking the cycle.”
The Senate hopeful added that a cycle break is needed in the education system as well, which he said is “sentencing” students to poverty by failing to teach them.
“If I just look here in Michigan, the Democrats have failed Michigan, and they failed our kids … If you’re not reading by the fourth grade, you have a 70 percent chance of ending up in jail or on welfare,” Rogers said. “We have almost half of fourth graders in the state of Michigan can’t read at the fourth grade level, which means they’re headed for no place good, right?”
“We’re sentencing them to poverty,” he argued.
Breitbart News Saturday airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 from 10:00 A.M. to 1:00 P.M. Eastern.
Olivia Rondeau is a politics reporter for Breitbart News based in Washington, DC. Find her on X/Twitter and Instagram.
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