Wendy Rogers embraced Trump’s stolen election lie and watched her

Wendy Rogers spent 10 years trying to get elected to various state and federal offices in Arizona.

She finally won a state Senate race last fall — and immediately launched a crusade to invalidate those results.

The Republican, embracing former President Donald Trump’s lie that the 2020 presidential election was stolen with nearly unmatched zeal, has repeatedly called for the jailing of public officials who oversaw the vote. She’s traveled the country, wrongly proclaiming that the election in Arizona and elsewhere can be decertified. Trump and prominent allies have in turn praised and promoted her, and among the sizeable pro-Trump, election-denial movement, she’s become a major draw.

“There is a palpable effort to find [the] truth from 2020 before we move on to 2022,” she said to loud cheers at an event earlier this month for Kari Lake, the Trump-backed Republican candidate for governor in Arizona.

At the same event, Rogers called for Mark Brnovich, the state’s Republican attorney general, “to do perp walks and arrest those who have shamed us,” and asserted, with zero evidence, that widespread fraud was attempted in Virginia’s recent elections that saw Republicans retake the governor’s mansion and a majority in the state House of Delegates.

Though Rogers’ exertions are futile, her relentless promotion of Trump’s baseless claims has nonetheless catapulted her from perennial failed candidate to leading voice in the far-right effort to delegitimize President Joe Biden’s victory. Her national touring schedule — stumping for conservative candidates and advocating for election investigations and ballot reviews like the one that took place in Arizona that found no evidence of fraud — is unusual for a first-term state legislator, though in the age of Trump, many breakout figures have become those who echo his lines.

At an event for Josh Mandel, a Republican Senate contender in Ohio, Rogers received a standing ovation and cheers of “we love you!” Eric Greitens, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri, brought Rogers to his state to rally supporters and to conduct joint interviews in right-wing outlets. And in Pennsylvania, her appearance at an “Audit the Vote” rally — organized by the same group that arranged the Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally that preceded a pro-Trump mob attack on the U.S. Capitol — received higher billing than House and gubernatorial candidates running in the state.

Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief of staff and far-right radio host who’s hosted Rogers on his program multiple times, told NBC News the state senator is a “breakout star” who is on the “cutting edge” of the MAGA movement.

“I think if you don’t see her run for high office, you’re going to see her in the next Trump administration,” Bannon, who was just indicted by a federal grand jury for contempt of Congress for rebuffing the committee investigating that Jan. 6 attack, said. “Rogers is going to have a big role. I think people are looking to her for…