These days, Iowa-raised Trump ally Kari Lake is best known for losing — and refusing to concede — her 2022 bid for Arizona governor. But in May 2016, Lake was putting her journalism degree from the University of Iowa to good use, and even scored an interview with President Barack Obama.
“I don’t remember at the time thinking that she was the type of person who would push debunked COVID remedies,” Obama said last year while stumping for Lake’s opponent in the Arizona governor race, “or promise to issue a Declaration of Invasion at our border, or claim without any evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.”
Lake relished these comments in her autobiography Unafraid: Just Getting Started, released earlier this year: “Knowing I was living rent-free in Obama’s mind was one of the highlights of the campaign.”
But he was right. Even seven years ago, Lake wasn’t the far-right figure she is today. She was a well-known, trusted anchor at FOX10 in Phoenix, Arizona — not someone who’d describe the 44th president as “One Barack Hussein Obama, a man with a mysterious past” and “a race-baiting, weak politician,” as she does in her new book. After all, she voted for Obama in 2008, even donating to his campaign (in what’s generally considered a breach of journalistic ethics).
The old Lake didn’t refer to abortion as “the ultimate sin,” or lie about Democrats “pushing for infanticide.” She wasn’t so aghast at Critical Race Theory that she argued slavery was never a systemic issue in America, but a “weakness of basic human nature” that we should get more credit for abolishing. She wouldn’t have dismissed Anthony Fauci as an “evil elf” and an “imp” who is “most famous for failing to solve the AIDS epidemic,” nor George Floyd as a “hardened criminal” whose family got special privileges for his funeral.
According to former colleagues, Lake used to support the LGBTQ community. She didn’t use her platform to attack LGBTQ people and drag artists as groomers; in fact, according to Arizona drag queen Barbra Seville, she and Lake were friends for two decades, and Lake even brought her daughter to some events attended by drag queens.
Lake the news anchor didn’t engage in childish stunts, like smashing a TV with a sledgehammer for an anti-media political ad, or crashing her rival’s rallies with her staffers in chicken costumes, toting live hens borrowed from an intern. She didn’t pose for photos with Nazi sympathizers like Ethan Schmidt-Crockett, Greyson Arnold, Tim Pool and Paul Gosar.
As far as we know, Lake didn’t believe a housing and addiction crisis could be solved if representatives would just “stop being enablers and provide our chronically homeless the tough love they need” — i.e., increased policing, eradicating all encampments — to “contribute to productive society.”
Lake admits she wasn’t especially religious until the pandemic; now, she claims to receive “direct communication from God’s lips to my ears.” She recalls violent, elaborate dreams about being kidnapped and shot in the desert by Bill Gates and Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richter as if they’re portents, signs her QAnon-like beliefs about vaccines and elections are over the target.
Lake seven years ago didn’t lean into the most extreme conspiracy theories, at least not publicly. She wouldn’t have made a burning face mask her campaign sigil, suggested COVID restrictions somehow “destroyed our health,” nor claim the Jan. 6 Capitol riot was a “modern-day Reichstag fire.”
And while she was a Donald Trump fan by 2016, she hadn’t yet earned and embraced the moniker “Trump in heels,” lovingly describing the way his New York accent pronounced her name (“Kah-ree”) and, after losing her race for Arizona governor, spending so much time at Mar-a-lago that former Trump attorney Jenna Ellis compared Lake to “a bum college dropout,” “couch-surfing at her friend’s house.”
The old Lake wouldn’t have dedicated so much of her time fighting against imaginary election fraud — insisting all ballots be submitted in person on Election Day, and all results be reported before the day is out — that it hurt her appeal among Arizona Republicans. She wouldn’t have continued this charade a year later, collaborating on a country song called “81 Million Votes, My Ass” and getting chided for lying by Piers Morgan of all people. (“You want to fuel a sense that every time you lose an election it was rigged and stolen,” Morgan complained to Lake’s stoic, smoky-eyed mug on his show last month. “Give us [conservatives] something to feel positive about!”)
And when she braved the cold this February to deliver a speech in her home state, it wasn’t to encourage students at one of her eastern Iowa alma maters, and she certainly didn’t bother visiting one of her former newsrooms. Lake spoke in front of a packed crowd of hundreds in Bettendorf to praise Trump, repeat debunked election fraud claims and glorify Iowans’ role in the presidential selection process.
“They picked a fight with the wrong woman,” she said of her perceived enemies. “I have just enough Arizona in me. I have just enough Iowa in me. And I’m not going to let them win. No way!”
Lake’s M.O., as usual, was “election integrity.” After a whirlwind primary in which Lake scored Trump’s endorsement, she ultimately lost by a thin margin to Democrat Katie Hobbs last November. On Christmas Eve, a judge threw out Lake’s attempt to overturn the results, and Lake has been working on her appeal throughout 2023. During that time, Lake tweeted accusations at the judge — which she deleted under threat of sanctions — and her lawyers were fined for making “unequivocally false” statements in court.
“If you lose you lose with dignity, you shake that other person’s hand and you walk away,” Lake told the crowd in southeast Iowa, referencing something her father, a retired teacher and coach at North Scott High School, taught her.
“I didn’t lose,” Lake concluded, “so I’m not doing that.”
Whether she’s speaking at CPAC or a state fair, her most popular material is attacks on the news media. She’s struggling to be “Iowa Nice” these days, she joked. “I’m starting to think maybe I need to try a little Iowa— how do I say? I’m not going to say the word I’m thinking.”
“I’m about to go Iowa witch on the media.”
Kari Lake tells GOP in Bettendorf she’s ready to go ‘Iowa witch’ on the media. @K_5mydearwatson story: https://t.co/27yDJiucSD
More photos: https://t.co/DPF0gkkdvI pic.twitter.com/Sr6ZoeG8A9— Nikos Frazier (@nikosfrazier) February 11, 2023
Lake was a hit with the Iowa crowd, which included a few relatives. Audience members waved glossy signs handed out by Lake’s team that said “I’m a Kari Lake Republican” and, strangely, “Save Arizona.” At one point, someone shouted “VP!”
“That a failed gubernatorial candidate from a state some 1,300 miles away is packing a hall full of Iowans in a non-election year is testament to Ms. Lake’s appeal,” the Christian Science Monitor noted in their coverage.
Whether she manages to nab her dream job on Trump’s ticket, or — far more likely — launches a campaign for Kyrsten Sinema’s Arizona Senate seat, Kari Lake is not likely to fade into obscurity anytime soon. Lake has a destiny to fulfill — one that began when she was a little girl in rural Scott County, Iowa, watching airplanes in the sky, as she recounts in her book.
I thought, Someday I’m going to be on a plane going somewhere. At that moment the most calming, beautiful feeling came over me — I recognized it now: God had enveloped me, reaching out with a message for me — one that stayed with me all these decades later. He said, Yes, you are. You are going to be on a plane. And you ARE going places. This was definitive. This was declared. This wasn’t a choice; it was going to happen. That is how powerful that God-moment was. I wanted that feeling to last. … That moment was powerful. I knew God had something exciting planned for me.
Somewhere in Scott County
Kari Lake was born in Rock Island, Illinois in 1969. The youngest of nine children, Lake says she and her siblings would sometimes go hungry when times were tough.
“We had to fight for food, not recognition,” she told a reporter in 2022 when asked if she had to compete for attention growing up.
She elaborates in her memoir: “With eight older sisters, the hand-me-down clothes I inherited probably made me look about a decade out of style. But it never bothered me all that much. No one ever told us we were poor; back in the ’70s and early ’80s everyone had some sort of struggle.”
Her parents divorced when she was young and Lake was primarily raised by her father. She recalls with nostalgia the morning routine at John Glenn Elementary School in Donohue, which included reciting the Pledge of Allegiance and singing “three or four patriotic songs” before classes began. (“Oh how we need to return to something similar to that now, and fast!”)
Though she “barely watched television” as a kid, she describes being indelibly influenced by ’80s popular culture, gushing over Top Gun, The Right Stuff, Rocky IV, Ronald Reagan and the 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey team in her book.
“Good defeats evil. America defeats the Soviets. It was all so simple and clean.”
Another shining light of the era, she says, was Donald Trump.
“[Trump] had what so many people wanted,” Lake simps. “I could have never imagined someday I’d be in that skyscraper featured on that TV show with a man the world was just getting to know named Donald Trump. I could have never imagined that we’d be friends. And I could have never imagined the fantastical journey that led me from rural Iowa to the life I have now.”
(Lake continues to mythologize Trump’s past to this day: on Sept. 11, 2023, Lake tweeted photos of Trump and Rudy Guiliani, saying they’re “among the many heroes that emerged after 9/11.” Hilary Clinton was noticeably cropped out of the photo of Guiliani at Ground Zero, and the photo of Trump wasn’t even taken on 9/11, but seven days later on Wall Street. There’s no evidence Trump ever showed up to visit or aid recovery efforts.)
MAGA, for Lake, is clearly a Gen Xer’s rose-colored view of the 1980s. She doesn’t seem to have reevaluated or developed a more nuanced perspective on the decade — including the circumstances that kept her family hovering around poverty despite her public school teacher father’s strong work ethic.
“I was raised that if you work hard, you can get ahead. Conversely, if you don’t work hard, life will be difficult and you will struggle. It’s your choice,” Lake writes. “Our parents gave us life. It’s our job to take that gift of life and do something with it. It is sink or swim. That was the environment I grew up in.”
A teenage Lake certainly didn’t sink, graduating from high school and heading off to college at the age of 16. She graduated from the University of Iowa with degrees in journalism and mass communication in 1992, but you’d barely know it listening to her describe her own background. Absent from her recent autobiography are any mentions of her college studies. Instead, she argues over and over again that education was only worthwhile before some unspecified time when “victim mentality” took over.
“Modern journalists live in a bubble,” Lake writes. “They think their journalism degree gives them the moral standing to decide what Americans living throughout the country have the right to know. They refuse to challenge themselves. They hold fast to their preconceived notions.”
While she often encourages older politicians to step aside and let fresh figures step up, Lake has a clear disdain for new journalists. “Most are young, childless, and liberal and — like it or not — that affects how they see the world.”
“It’s really not the fault of these young ‘journalists.’ Think about it, since the time they are five years old and enter kindergarten, they’ve been brainwashed and indoctrinated into liberal/progressive ideology at school.”
“It’s political grooming, and it works.”
She advocates for deregulating the Department of Education and funneling as much public education funds into private schools as possible, believing that “spending more on public schools [has] resulted in poorer education.”
And, of course, she wants Critical Race Theory and “gender ideology” banned — popular Republican priorities that have led to confusing state laws and messy book-banning campaigns in Iowa and across the country.
“Instead of scientists or builders, we have Gender Studies majors and Critical Race theorists, ready to take their grievances out into the American workforce and make us suffer for it,” she complains.
At some point in her life, Kari Lake decided the education system that prepared her for a successful career in broadcasting is too obsessed with equity, and “Equity is just clumsily packaged consultant jargon for Communism.”
‘I wasn’t telling the news, I was the news’
Lake may not discuss college much, but she does like to recall a job she had at the time working as a janitor at a drug treatment center.
“I found myself building a storyline about people I encountered while they were going through rehab and I was cleaning. I’d imagine the who, what, where, when, and why of how they ended up there. And I always made the ending of their story (since I got to choose it) successful.”
“That love for storytelling led me to my first ‘real’ news job at KWQC-TV in Davenport,” and eventually WHBF-TV in Rock Island.
“I didn’t care if I was forecasting the weather, doing a human-interest piece, or delivering hard-hitting news,” Lake writes. “All that mattered was that I had a clear line of communication into American families’ homes.”
She said she was following in the footsteps of Ronald Reagan — literally and figuratively.
“He too must have had a God-moment. Some divine inspiration that led him on the path from small-town Dixon, Illinois, to Davenport, Iowa, where he took his first sports announcer job at WOC radio (it eventually became KWQC TV where I got my first job in television news) and then to WHO radio in Des Moines…”
Lake’s own career in media led her to Phoenix, Arizona’s FOX10 station in August 1994, when she was 25. She divorced her high school sweetheart Tracy Finnigan, marrying Phoenix videographer Jeff Halperin in 1998. She climbed the ranks at FOX10 until she was anchor, making a salary upwards of $400,000.
However, the job came with pressure to change. Her FOX10 colleagues told Phoenix Magazine there was an “‘intense scrutiny of appearance’ endured by TV news talent – especially female personalities – in the social media era.”
“The things they read and hear every day… what they look like, their breast size, getting older. People are always coming after you,” one former coworker said. “And you get entrenched mentally.”
Lake switched her party affiliation from Republican to Independent to Democrat and back to Republican between 2006 and 2012. But her admiration for Trump seemed to pull her even further right.
“A wise man once told me there’s a fine line to walk between being a jerk and an asshole,” Lake writes. “Trump was the expert at walking that tightrope. He would bully his opponents on stage, but he was so damn funny while doing it that you couldn’t help but be charmed.”
After the Access Hollywood tape was leaked in 2016, Lake defended Trump’s comments about sexually assaulting women, as well as Trump’s choice to disparage John McCain’s status as a POW. (“He is a war hero because he was captured. I like people that weren’t captured.”)
“Was what Donald Trump said tactless and boorish? Absolutely. But in the context it was given — as an impassioned defense of the Republican voters that McCain had ridiculed and failed time and again — it made complete sense,” Lake writes in Unafraid. “But the media didn’t want to take it in its context and make sense of anything.”
It didn’t help that FOX10 allegedly fostered a “hunger games” atmosphere around employee’s social media engagement, incentivizing controversial posting. In 2018, Lake tweeted that a movement to increase teacher pay was “nothing more than a push to legalize pot.” She apologized and deleted the tweet.
In 2019, for the sake of “free speech,” Lake joined Parler, a new social network popular with far-right figures. Some viewers complained about this, and Lake was caught on a hot mic complaining about the complaints to her co-anchor John Hook. Hook said the bosses were worried about “blowback” from local publications like the Phoenix New Times, an alt-weekly.
“Fuck them,” Lake said. “They’re 20-year-old dopes. That’s a rag for selling marijuana, and it used to be a rag for selling sex.”
Hook points out they have to be able to “explain” her use of Parler to viewers.
Lake replies, “I’m reaching people.”
“That’s when all of this started going downhill,” Diana Pike, the former human resources director at FOX10 and a 20-year colleague of Lake, told the Washington Post.
The leaked comments stirred some national headlines. “Suddenly, for the first time in my life, I wasn’t telling the news,” Lake writes, “I was the news.”
In 2020, FOX10 quietly took Lake off the air for a couple months. In her book, Lake describes this “cancellation” as the darkest stage of her life. She started wearing a cross necklace “for protection.”
“If you see somebody speaking out, you need to support them,” she writes. “If you see somebody getting canceled or doxxed on Twitter or otherwise, step in and have the courage to say, ‘Hey, I support you.’ It will make a big difference if people start to see that.”
Meanwhile, Lake was still a household name in Arizona, and her blunt comments earned her admiration from the Trump set. “You are literally the only reporter in Arizona I trust,” one fan encouraged her on Twitter during Lake’s leave. “Hope everything works out and you get back to us soon.”
Conservative narratives became a currency in the COVID-19 era, and Lake’s new brand “brought her power and recognition that she had never felt before,” former FOX10 anchor Marlene Galán-Woods told the Post. “It’s intoxicating. The Kool-Aid is the power and all these people fawning over you — you forget what the truth is anymore.”
At the same time, she experienced a religious “epiphany” while joining her best friend Lisa Dale at an Evangelical church in Scottsdale. Lake used to describe herself as “a lapsed or lazy Catholic”; some former coworkers claim she even had a Buddhist streak. “But Covid changed all that.”
“I looked at the Bible: this was the TRUTH,” she writes in Unafraid. “I looked at the news script: these were the lies.”
Separation of church and state, she continues, “forgets the fact that Republican Democracy is uniquely American. It’s not just a system of principles and structures, but it’s in the basic DNA of the country. The same blood that flowed through our Founding Fathers when they built this nation is still flowing through OUR veins.”
On March 2, 2021, she announced her resignation from FOX10, and the journalism profession. Within three months, she launched her first campaign for office.
“The newswoman-turned-politician was a hell of a story,” Lake discovered.
Trump in heels
This next chapter of Lake’s life “would be an action-adventure, history and political saga, suspense-thriller and true-crime story all wrapped up in one with too many twists and turns to imagine.”
Her built-in name recognition and off-the-cuff speaking style — not to mention her willingness to demonize her former profession and give fuel to conspiracy theories — earned her quick praise among conservatives.
“People have said Kari Lake is ‘Donald Trump in heels,’ but really, she is Donald Trump with media training and polish,” wrote Ruby Cramer in the Washington Post.
It doesn’t hurt that her husband Jeff Halperin, a videographer with his own production company, keeps his lens trained on Kari, and installed a professional studio in their home. (“The way to a woman’s heart is through lighting and photography!” she wrote in a post on Facebook.)
Lake took every opportunity to go “Ultra MAGA” on an audience, which ultimately caught the president’s eye at a July 24, 2021 “Rally to Save our Elections” in Phoenix.
“When President Trump saw how popular she was with the grassroots here in Arizona, arguably one of the most important target states, it was like, how do you deny that?” said Tyler Bowyer, one of the rally’s organizers.
Lake won Trump’s endorsement, which read in part: “She is a fantastic person who spent many years working as a highly respected television anchor and journalist. Because of this, few can take on the Fake News Media like Kari.”
Lake still has the endorsement pinned to the refrigerator at home. She describes Trump as a friend and confidant, and even gave him a special ringtone in her phone, “Hail to the Chief.”
“Our calls became more frequent, his advice more focused,” she recalls. “I could tell he had taken a personal interest in my campaign.”
“Trump taught me that a debate could be won off the strength of an unrestrained, dominant personality … when you take up all of the oxygen in a race, all the rest of the candidates would struggle for air.”
Lake won the GOP primary, and recalls that Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds, a “class act,” was one of very few Republicans who called to congratulate her. Meanwhile, Lake’s Democratic counterpart Katie Hobbs refused to debate her opponent. “I have no desire to be a part of the spectacle that she’s looking to create,” Hobbs told CBS.
Lake’s campaign’s attempts to get Hobbs on the debate stage ultimately failed, and while portraying Hobbs as a chicken got her some points, Lake had trouble winning over swing voters.
“Kari Lake is struggling with resources and her narrative is very narrow,” Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin told the Post ahead of the election. “It only appeals to a very, very hardcore traditional primary voter that is caught up in Trumpland.”
Democratic strategist Eric Hyers agreed. “You have bomb throwers like Kari Lake win congressional offices all the time, but it’s much tougher for someone who thrives on chaos and who thrives on controversy to get elected governor.”
On Election Day in Arizona, nearly 34,000 Republican voters in the crucial Maricopa County picked Hobbs over Lake, while Lake only flipped 8,541 Democrats.
Lake disputes these results, of course, but some in her own campaign expressed relief.
“I’m glad she lost,” a former Lake staffer told the Christian Science Monitor. If she runs again, “I’d work for free against her, that’s how I feel about her being in leadership.”
“It was all Trump, Trump, Trump,” recalls a former campaign consultant. “She didn’t want to be governor. She wanted to be Trump’s running mate.”
Lake herself had an odd reply when asked about her VP ambitions in May, claiming Trump “doesn’t really need” a running mate; “He’s that powerful.” If he does pick one, she continued, she hopes it’s someone “the media fears more than they fear him.”
This is a real photo of Kari Lake vacuuming the red carpet before meeting Donald Trump.
— Benny Johnson (@bennyjohnson) October 10, 2022
A member of Kari team told us she insisted on personally making sure the carpet was spotless out of “respect for the office of the President of the United States.”
This is servant leadership pic.twitter.com/FNzduy223x
One early poll in the state showed she was the top vice presidential pick among Republican voters in the state next to Gov. Nikki Haley. At one point or another, she was likely on Trump’s VP shortlist as well, competing in a “death race” against fellow Trump surrogate Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene.
But more recently, unnamed sources have claimed Trump is getting tired of Lake. There’s significant doubt, Rolling Stone reported last month, that the 91-times-indicted former president would benefit from sharing a ticket with a firebrand like Greene or Lake in the general election. He’s more likely to go with someone who won their race for governor, like South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem or Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders. (If Kim Reynolds ever had a chance with Trump — and it seemed she did through most of 2021 and 2022 — it fell apart when the Iowa gov began campaigning with DeSantis and trading jabs with Trump on social media this year.)
But God’s big plans for Lake’s political career may still be on track. Major outlets have reported she will launch a campaign for U.S. Senate as early as mid-October. According to a report in the New York Times, Trump recently called up Blake Masters — the last GOP Senate nominee in Arizona, who lost to then-Democratic incumbent Kyrsten Sinema in 2022 — to say he’d prefer to see Lake for Senate in 2024.
If her recent memoir/manifesto is any indication, Lake will be a MAGA candidate no matter what.
“We must win the culture war at home,” Lake writes. “That’s where the battlefield is. MAGA helps. The iconography, the attitude. It’s transformational. It’s actually countercultural in this culture of globalist rot.”
Her own transformation is still hard for some former associates to swallow, but not Lake’s best friend Lisa Dale, also a former news anchor.
“It’s always funny to me when people say, ‘Oh, Kari’s changed,’” Dale told the Post. “I’m like, ‘I’ve known her for 30 years. She didn’t change. You just didn’t really know her.’”
Emma McClatchey is a graduate of the University of Iowa’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, and is always puzzled when fellow alumni (Kari Lake, QAnon’s Liz Crokin) and former Iowa journalists (Benny Johnson, Ashley Hinson) take the red pill. Unable to find a free copy of ‘Unafraid’ to read, Emma followed her $30 book purchase with a $50 donation to the Emma Goldman Clinic in honor of Kari Lake.
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.
