For Kari Lake, whose brand is bonkers—as in, bonkers is her brand—stepping back from the brink takes a level of skill and aplomb she simply doesn’t have.
The erstwhile news-reader, onetime gubernatorial candidate, and perpetual whiny loser is running to replace Kyrsten Sinema in the U.S. Senate. It appears Lake now wants Arizonans to ignore her conspiracy-peddling past—a past that suggests the chip George Soros implanted in her head eventually synced with her Dell desktop and has been alternately running Frogger and Flying Toasters for decades now.
In a Monday interview with Phoenix radio station KTAR, Lake claimed she doesn’t know who stole the election that she’s confidently stated innumerable times was definitely stolen. Lake also insisted that she prefers to look forward, even though her previous backward-looking—to Donald Trump’s 2020 loss and her own in 2022—has consistently sown chaos and undermined faith in our elections.
Arizona Republic:
The interview shifted to Lake’s ongoing efforts to overturn her loss in the 2022 gubernatorial race. Lake was asked who stole the election from her and how they did it. She noted that she wasn’t the one raising the issue, then conceded she lacked the details of the “rigged” election she has widely discussed.
“I don’t want to sit and look backwards,” Lake said. “These lawsuits are meant to make sure that going forward our elections are strong.”
Pressed again on her baseless allegation of theft, Lake said the elections “are run very poorly.”
“I don’t know who exactly stole the election, but there are a lot of people who are running elections poorly and we’ve seen the result,” Lake said. She noted that elections have featured long lines and Election Day tabulation problems.
Really? Long lines? Do tell. Of course, if every election featuring long lines were automatically presumed to have been stolen, America would have a fuckuvalot of mulligans to mete out. But that seems unlikely now, doesn’t it?
A little more than a year ago, Lake was quite confident about who’d stolen the election from her. It was … everyone! Not just the Democrats but also crooked members of her own party as well.
Lake now appears to understand that, unless you’re Donald Trump—who could campaign with an incontinent parrot on one shoulder and Lindsey Graham on the other, and still cruise to the GOP nomination—you can’t be a total kook and hope to win a statewide election in this country. So she’s attempting to de-kookify herself in real time.
In fact, this appears to be a deliberate strategy born of her previous pratfalls.
According to a new NBC News report, some of Trump’s biggest lie-scream clones—including Lake, U.S. House candidate Abraham Hamadeh, and Arizona state Senate candidate Mark Finchem—are slowly backing away from the Big Lie they once aggressively touted, having realized that relitigating the past is a hopeless election strategy.
“That message didn’t work,” Republican strategist Alex Conant told NBC News. “Republicans want to win in 2024. They know they’re not going to win in 2020—there’s nothing we can do now to change what happened.”
Well, nice try, but when you literally attempt to end American democracy by brazenly lying about our elections, you need to be held accountable. And the Big Lie is one refulgent Chernobyl turd that’s far too bulky to be flushed down the American memory hole.
NBC News:
Lake had made her support of Trump’s unfounded claims that the election was stolen from him a centerpiece of her failed run for governor in 2022 — a race she still hasn’t acknowledged she lost.
But her 2024 Senate campaign has not focused on election denialism. Rather, Lake, who was endorsed by both Trump and the Senate GOP campaign arm, has emphasized issues like border security and the economy, while also, periodically, pushing for the importance of “honest elections.”
Asked if Lake still believed the 2020 election was stolen from Trump and whether she’d moved away from talking about it, as well as her claims about her own gubernatorial race, her campaign spokesperson Alex Nicoll told NBC News that the campaign website was “a good reference point” for “the issues that we are focusing on.” Lake’s website does not mention election integrity or election security.
Meanwhile, as recently as November, Lake was still flogging the stolen-election nonsense, even after she’d appeared to pivot away from conspiracy land in the wake of her Senate campaign launch in October.
Axios:
Yes, but: She sidestepped the issue in her Senate announcement speech, only saying she will work to “restore honest elections,” which sparked a barrage of speculation that Lake was trying to reinvent herself to appeal to a broader base and establishment fundraising.
The intrigue: At public events since her campaign launch — many of which have been out of state — Lake has appeared with election deniers, including the filmmaker behind the debunked conspiracy documentary “2000 Mules.” And she’s reverted to more dramatic rhetoric.
What they’re saying: “People will say to me, “Oh, you’ve given up on the election now.” And I say … No, I haven’t, but I’m a multitasker. I can do more than one thing,” Lake said at Walk-A-Con, an event in Florida celebrating “individuals walking away from the Democratic Party.”
Even if Lake is now attempting to downplay her anti-democracy bona fides, it’s clear she’s still cribbing from Trump’s playbook.
Just as Trump often tries to claim the piquant bons mots wafting from his mellifluous methane mind are just “sarcasm,” Lake is now saying her past disrespect and criticism of Arizona native son and longtime Sen. John McCain was just a really funny joke that, somehow, the deceased McCain would get, even if no living person does.
During a November 2022 campaign event, Lake said, “We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!” She also claimed the GOP was once “the party of McCain. It was bad. Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?”
“It was said in jest,” Lake now says of the insults. “And I think that if John McCain, who had a great sense of humor, would have heard it, he would have laughed.”
Lake is also fully on board with Trump’s laissez-faire attitude toward Russia and Ukraine, even after Trump said Russia should feel free to “do whatever the hell they want” to allies that don’t meet NATO’s military spending benchmarks.
“I think that everyone needs to pay their fair share in NATO,” said Lake, betraying a stunning—and very Trumpian—lack of understanding of how NATO works. “We can’t protect the entire world. We can’t even protect our own country right now. If you look what’s happening on our southern border, we have an invasion. … Every country has to pony up and pay for their own defense.”
Well, since NATO’s Article 5—which requires all NATO allies to defend any other ally that’s been attacked—has been invoked only once, on our behalf, it makes more sense to say we owe them money. But why get in the way of a fun applause line just because it could permanently destabilize an entire continent?
In other words, Lake may be trying to turn over a new leaf, but the other side is just as gross.
But good luck to Kari in her bid to clean up her reputation. Luckily, she appears to have some experience with that kind of thing. Remember this photo op?
Oh, Kari. Dear, dear Kari. He’s just not that into you. Try groveling harder. Or maybe come join the rest of us in the real world. It’s not that bad. Honestly.
Campaign Action
Check out Aldous J. Pennyfarthing’s four-volume Trump-trashing compendium, including the finale, Goodbye, Asshat: 101 Farewell Letters to Donald Trump, at this link.
