Mike Rogers (MI) wants Michigan voters to know he's one of them: a guy who put himself through college on an auto plant floor.

"I worked in a car factory," he said in a September 2024 campaign ad. "These jobs are important to our families." When a group called Autoworkers for Trump endorsed him, his campaign put out a statement quoting him: "As someone who has worked in two auto factories, I know the blood, sweat, and tears our auto workers put in each and every day."

A Michigan Advance investigation published September 24, 2026, took that story apart.

He named a car that hadn't been invented yet

Rogers has told the story two different ways, and one of them can't be true.

At a Trump rally in September 2024, he said: "I worked in a car factory — that Convertible Sebring. Remember those? Those are gems."

At a rally in Howell with JD Vance in September 2025, he went further: "When you think about my time on the assembly line, I worked in two different assembly lines, one that built Chrysler, Sebring, convertibles... And if you got one that wasn't, I didn't build that one."

He said the same thing to Breitbart News in 2025.

The problem: Rogers was in college at Adrian College in 1981 and 1982. Chrysler didn't make the Sebring until 1995, when it replaced the LeBaron, according to J.D. Power, as the Advance reported. By 1995, Rogers had already served in the Army, worked as an FBI agent, and was a sitting Michigan state senator.

He could not have built a Sebring on any line while working his way through school. The car didn't exist.

The LeBaron version doesn't hold up either

In his current campaign, the story changed. On Albanian TV of America, Rogers said he "started out working on a car assembly line. I built Chrysler convertibles, the LeBaron."

Here's what the Advance found. From 1981 to 1982, Rogers worked at a Brighton company called Cars & Concepts. It was an aftermarket shop — founded by a former Republican congressman, Dick Chrysler — that took cars already built on Chrysler's own assembly lines and added parts to them. Its best-known work was turning finished LeBarons into convertibles with removable sunroofs.

It did not build LeBarons. According to a Stellantis historian the Advance spoke to, Chrysler's Michigan LeBaron production had ended at its Hamtramck plant in 1981. By the time Rogers was working in Brighton, no Michigan plant was building the car.

His campaign insists the shop had an assembly-line-type process. Spokesperson Alyssa Brouillet said Rogers "drilled the left and right A-pillars to secure the molding" and riveted panels while the car moved down the line. After the Advance kept asking, the campaign added a second job — at Thermofil in Fowlerville, mixing materials for dashboards — but would not say when he worked there, even when asked three times.

Auto workers call it stolen valor

The UAW isn't buying it. Art Reyes II, a former president of UAW Local 651, which represented Delphi plant workers in Flint, said Rogers never mentioned factory work when the union lobbied him in the early 2000s.

"If you did not do time in the plant, that's fine, but don't act as if you had," Reyes said. He compared it to "stolen valor."

The factory story is also new. According to the Advance, it appears to date from his 2024 Senate race — years after his seven terms in Congress ended. And the union says the record it knows him by is his record in Congress, "where he supported bad trade deals that cost Michigan autoworkers good union jobs."

Not the first time he's embellished

This is a candidate who told donors in a fundraising email that he saw Osama bin Laden's body "with my own eyes." He was at home in Washington, looking at a photograph. He also claimed his Democratic opponent "believes America deserved 9/11" — a line PolitiFact rated Pants on Fire.

The pattern is the same each time: take something small and real, and inflate it into a story that sells him to voters.

In summary

Mike Rogers (MI) has told rallies, donors and TV audiences that he built Chrysler Sebrings — and later LeBarons — on an auto assembly line in college. The Sebring wasn't made until 1995, when he was already a state senator, and the shop where he worked in 1981–82 modified finished LeBarons rather than building them. His campaign has named a second plant but won't say when he worked there.

Source

Mike Rogers claims he was an assembly line worker. The UAW said that is stretching the truth. — Michigan Advance, September 24, 2026

Photo: Rogers in Lansing, April 17, 2026. Katherine Dailey/Michigan Advance.