Last Saturday, at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner at the Washington Hilton, Sarah Rogers—under secretary of state for public diplomacy—was sitting next to congressional leader Steve Scalise when she heard “shots fired” through the radios of Scalise’s protection detail.
Cole Tomas Allen—a teacher from California—had stormed a security checkpoint and, heavily armed, was headed for the ballroom and President Donald Trump when he was apprehended by the Secret Service. Rogers recalls how “armed men—law enforcement—charged into the room toward where we were sitting and, for about 45 seconds, I was legitimately terrified.”
Despite the obvious ways political violence “endangers free speech,” Rogers told me that Trump’s defiant response on that evening was just right. “We should not let bad, sick people change the course of our country or dictate how we live our lives,” she said.
Fighting attempts to silence free speech is also Rogers’ day job.
At 43, blonde, striking, and social media–savvy, you might say she’s the poster girl of the Trump administration’s diplomacy. She’s also been nicknamed “America’s free-speech czar.” In the coming months, the Senate will consider her nomination for a secondary role, CEO of the U.S. Agency of Global Media, which runs government-sponsored media like the Voice of America radio programs. That means she’s careful what she says—though she’s never been one to be too careful.
Her vision is still as bold as ever. The State Department is releasing a new Public Diplomacy Strategic Plan. Shared exclusively with The Free Press, the department identifies “digital freedom”—encompassing online free speech—as a foreign-policy goal for the first time, per Rogers. The strategy also links support for freedom of speech with the rejection of political violence, and explicitly opposes “policies that fuel social strife” in Europe, including “illegal and mass migration.”
