State Sen. Wendy Rogers wants to name a highway for Donald Trump

Who’s ready to motor down the Donald J. Trump Highway?

The U.S. is filled with highway stretches named for former presidents. Portions of interstates in Colorado, Wyoming and Maryland are named after Dwight D. Eisenhower. Eleven states, from California to Georgia, have highways named after Ronald Reagan. But the names of these highways were changed after those presidents left office, or after their deaths.

Arizona state Sen. Wendy Rogers apparently doesn’t want to wait until a McDonald’s diet or Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s health advice summons the 45th and incoming 47th president to his great reward. In a bill filed before the start of the next legislative session, Flagstaff's extremist GOP lawmaker wants to rechristen a stretch of State Route 260 as the Donald J. Trump Highway.

Rogers did not respond to an email seeking comment.

SR 260 runs east-west through north-central Arizona for more than 217 miles, connecting Cottonwood to Eagar, near the Arizona-New Mexico border. The bill has no shot of passage — unless Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs is really desperate to get reelected — but that didn’t stop Rogers from using its text to take a victory lap after Trump’s victory over Vice President Kamala Harris in November.

The bill states that the memorial highway designation “respectfully represents” Trump’s building of the border wall in his first term, his support for the military, his decision to pull the U.S. out of the Paris Climate Accords and his creation of the Department of Government Efficiency, to be headed by Telsa and X CEO Elon Musk.

It curiously neglects to mention that Trump did not actually build a wall spanning the entire southern border, nor did he make Mexico pay for it as he promised. It also excludes that Musk’s so-called DOGE agency isn’t actually a government department and has no real authority over anything.

For Rogers, it’s just the latest grasp for attention in a career full of them. In 2022, Phoenix New Times named the Flagstaff Republican the “Best Racist Blowhard.” She earned that title — and has continued to earn it — by affiliating with the extremist Oath Keepers group, pushing election denialism and promoting QAnon conspiracies.

In May 2022, she was censured by a bipartisan group of state lawmakers after saying at a white nationalist's conference that she’d hang her political opponents. Most recently, it was revealed that she followed several neo-Nazis on social media. When you think about it, pushing to name a highway for Trump looks relatively normal in comparison.

Then again, Trump already has one. After the end of Trump’s first term, Oklahoma state legislators renamed a section of state highway 287 after the former president. Rogers’ bill isn’t likely to get that far, so maybe she can focus on more pressing issues for Arizonans, like renaming the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America."