Kari Lake Continues to Profit from Her MAGA Celebrity Status
Over the next four months, from February to June, I have conversations with five of Lake’s former co-workers at FOX 10 – both to build a timeline of her rise and fall at the station, and to glean insight into her remarkable evolution, or “mutation,” as one former colleague archly dubs it, from journalist to candidate.
Most of them agree to talk to me only on the condition of anonymity, and some ask not to be directly quoted.
Something else happens during this four-month time span: Robson, a land-use attorney married to one of the wealthiest people in Arizona, developer Ed Robson, climbs to within a few percentage points of Lake among likely voters. With her vast advantage in campaign cash (roughly $6.4 million to Lake’s $2.5 million, according to Ballotpedia), Robson is able to pump oxygen into the narratives that most threaten Lake’s campaign – namely, that she supported Obama, secretly backs amnesty for illegal aliens and is wishy-washy on gun rights. It’s an existential threat for Lake that she wasn’t likely expecting back in October.
Lake, for the record, has disavowed amnesty and has made “God, Guns and Glory” her unofficial campaign slogan, but her support for Obama in the late 2000s is a matter of public campaign finance record – and survives vividly in the memories of some of her ex-colleagues. They remember someone who not only spoke openly and admiringly of the Democrat (“to distraction,” one remembers), but would stridently endorse his policies off-camera, and even canvassed for him.
Which isn’t to say Lake was a divisive figure at FOX 10 at the time. Quite the opposite. Though described as “odd and complicated,” she was also a gregarious and open-minded woman who was well-liked at the station for many years, and the prevailing current attitude among those I interviewed is one of perplexity and sadness – not only for the way her career ended at the station, but for the way the job itself might have manipulated her psyche. It’s not an act, they say. The “Before Kari,” as one co-worker described her, is gone, and the New Kari is the real deal.
Though her first truly controversial social media moment happened in April 2018, when she dismissed the #RedForEd fair-pay teachers’ movement as “nothing more than a push to legalize pot” on her official FOX 10 Twitter account, the ball started rolling much earlier, according to insiders. FOX 10, like every other media company in the Valley, was pushing its talent for ever-increasing digital traffic in the mid-2010s. More likes, more follows, more clicks, leading to what one former colleague called a “Hunger Games situation,” with lots of competitive pressure between on-air personalities and reporters.
And Lake was good at it, according to insiders, racking up one of the station’s highest Twitter follower counts despite working on the night side of the news operation, which was seen as less conducive to big Twitter followings than the morning broadcasts. “When she found something that garnered attention, she gravitated toward that,” one colleague says.
She also had a reckless, independent streak on social that rankled – and, perhaps, terrified – FOX 10 management, even before #RedForEd. Her colleagues recall a pronounced reluctance on the part of station managers to confront her over the “controversial random things” she’d Tweet. One recalls hearing whispers of an earlier lawsuit – over pay, possibly, or discrimination – that Lake pursued against the station: “Maybe that’s the reason… they were afraid of getting sued again. The ace in her pocket.”
None of the ex-colleagues I speak to can pinpoint precisely when her social media posts started taking on a divisive political tenor. A lifelong Republican before donating a small amount to John Kerry’s 2004 presidential campaign, she switched back to the GOP in 2012 during the Democratic primary, her infatuation with Obama having evidently run its course, but there were at least a few years of relative calm before social media activity started stirring things up. Two of the ex-colleagues I interview independently used the term “went down the rabbit hole” to describe her Trumpian awakening. “The more she drank the Kool-Aid, the more she became intoxicated with it,” says one, discussing the reward-feedback loop of social media. But one of them also notes that some in the FOX newsroom approved of the New Kari. “Some say rabbit hole, some say ‘saw the light.’”
Diana Pike was regional human resources director for FOX during Lake’s final years with the station, and did agree to go on the record with PHOENIX. A now-retired Gold Star Mother whose U.S. serviceman son died in 2013 from injuries he sustained in Afghanistan, Pike is well-known in FOX circles as someone who doesn’t particularly care for Lake, and perhaps for good reason – she’s the person who had to manage blowback from the public when her anchor went off the rails.
That would certainly describe the #RedForEd incident, which had such bad optics that the FOX mothership in New York City took note. (Unlike independently owned network affiliates, FOX 10 KSAZ-TV is owned by the network.)
“2018 was kind of her demise, the end of her relationship with the station,” Pike says. “Her thing became, ‘It’s freedom of speech, I have the right to say what I want to say.’”
The next three years essentially became a litigious, soul-dragging scrum between Lake and the station. In July 2019, speaking with her co-anchor Hook, Lake unwittingly dropped an f-bomb on camera while defending her right to appear on the right-wing social media platform Parler, which critics accused of catering to anti-Semites, QAnon conspiracy theorists and other far-right figures. She also Tweeted a debunked COVID-19 conspiracy video in 2020 and, after the election of Biden, began clashing with producers over phrases like “president-elect,” believing his election to be illegitimate, according to sources.
After the #RedForEd incident in 2018, Lake took an unexpected month-long leave, according to Pike. “That’s when she really lost a lot of the newsroom. People had to cover for her. Vacations were canceled, schedules were changed. She thought she’d walk back triumphant into an applauding newsroom. No, people were mad.”
This incident illustrates Lake’s shortcomings as a potential state executive, Pike says. “To have such poor emotional intelligence, [to be] so clueless to a working environment and you want to be governor? What are you going to do when a real crisis hits?”
The other FOX 10 sources who speak to me are also skeptical about her temperament for governor but, in some cases, more sympathetic to her personally. One discussed the “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. And you get entrenched mentally.”
A few of the sources lamented the loss of Lake’s friendship – and were sad to see her lose other friendships. This proves to be a recurring theme with Lake late in the primary. In May, The Arizona Republic runs an interview with James “Jimmy” McCain, the son of late U.S. Senator John McCain, whom Lake has posthumously lambasted on the campaign trail. “John McCain may be dead, but he’s reaching up from the grave trying to keep power on Arizona,” she said in a podcast interview in early May. “And it was never about power to help the people of Arizona.”
Though straightforward MAGA talk, there is dissonance in those words coming from Lake. After his passing in 2018, Lake issued an admiring Tweet calling McCain a “war hero, icon and force to be reckoned with.” According to the Republic article, as late as 2019, she visited Jimmy McCain and his wife, Holly, to deliver baby clothes.
“I’m not trying to hurt anyone,” the younger McCain told the Republic, explaining his decision to speak out after Lake’s critical comments about his father. “I’m just trying to say I don’t understand where this person came from, because back then, we were thick as thieves.”
Two of Lake’s ex-colleagues specifically mention her relationships with the LGBTQ+ community. “She had good relationships with people [at the station], especially with LGBT,” one says. “Now they’re horrified by the stuff coming out of her mouth.”
Following a haiku-like Tweet by Lake in June deriding drag queens (“They took down our Flag and replaced it with a rainbow”), a prominent Valley drag artist named Rick Stevens, who has performed for more than a quarter of a century under the name Barbra Seville, came forward in the Republic to reveal an alleged two-decade friendship with the candidate, backed up with photos and text messages, claiming that he once performed – a PG-rated show, he maintains – at a house party with Lake’s teenage daughter in attendance. (A critical detail, given recent legislation in several states to make it illegal for minors to attend drag performances.)
Back in September 2021, early in the interview process with Lake, I was eager to interview a Valley artist we once profiled in PHOENIX, who was friends with Lake and sold her some of his brash, surrealist canvases. It would show a different side to the candidate, I remember thinking, and maybe shine some light on her sensibilities. Through a mutual friend, however, I later learned that the artist posted a friendly Tweet about his friendship and working relationship with Lake and received a torrent of anti-Lake backlash so severe that he removed the post.
I don’t even bother calling him. If he can’t be associated with her on Twitter, why would he want the friendship frozen for posterity in a magazine?
Meanwhile, a few months away from the primary, many moderate Republicans seem to be embracing the same notion that occurred to me back in October at the Cave Creek rally – that Lake might be a friend to Democrats and leftists, after all. Her fiery MAGA rhetoric, while music to the ears of the choir, may alienate too many in Arizona’s greater, politically independent congregation to make her viable as a general election candidate in November.
“Kari Lake is struggling with resources and her narrative is very narrow,” Republican strategist Chuck Coughlin, who closely advised Governor Jan Brewer and is closely linked to the old guard of Republican power in Arizona, told the Republic in June. “It only appeals to a very, very hardcore traditional primary voter that is caught up in Trumpland. There’s a whole bunch of Republican and unaffiliated voters out there that you can appeal to.”
In short, instead of arresting Hobbs, Lake – who still leads Robson by anywhere from 4 to 12 percentage points, depending on what poll you’re looking at – might ultimately propel her to the governor’s office.
Before Trump was elected president, there was an unproven but persistent theory that he really didn’t want the job, that he enjoyed the attention and competition but had a more appealing plan B – to leverage his massive political celebrity and start a TV network built around his personality.
Does Lake have a similar escape hatch? Given her national notoriety, it seems likely she could score a hosting gig on a conservative TV network should her gubernatorial ambitions fail. She’s still great in front of the camera, and now she has a national fan base. Pike, the former HR director, says it couldn’t happen at FOX. “Once you cross a line over there, you’re done. They have very long institutional memory. But I think that’s a possibility at one of the other ones. Newsmax, maybe.”
I wonder how Lake would respond to this theory. It’s a solid journalistic take, but is there enough of the Before Kari left in there to consider the question without going on the offensive, per the MAGA playbook?
Around the same time, in attempting to build a case study of Lake as a person and candidate, I find an old yearbook from her high school days in Eldridge, Iowa, where she was a plucky, motivated baby-of-the-family who managed to graduate from North Scott Senior High a year early, at 16 – presumably because she was accustomed to buying her own shampoo, anyway, so why not get this adult thing started? She was a member of both the yearbook staff and a politics club, which seems on the nose, given her adult CV.
So, I reach out to her one last time, via email, leading with the nugget about her high school career and childhood, hoping it disarms her for a more serious discussion of her campaign, or a real sit-down interview. “How do you think [being the youngest kid in a large family] might have shaped you, as someone who pursued a career in front of the camera? I’ve read that young kids in big families sometimes have to fight for recognition and attention.”
To her credit, she answers quickly, and bats aside the soft-toss psychoanalysis: “We had to fight for food, not recognition.”
She continues: “[The] biggest thing being from a large family taught me was work ethic. Because my father was a public school teacher who taught history and U.S. government, we weren’t rich and didn’t have a lot of material possessions, but we learned to treat people with respect and work hard. It’s pretty obvious when you see me on the campaign trail how hard I work. No other candidate can [out] work me. I will take that same work ethic into the governor’s office and we will accomplish many good things for the people of Arizona.”
I also ask her about her mysterious evolution, or mutation, if you prefer, from an Obama-supporting, drag-queen-befriending journalist into a MAGA firebrand – while conceding the point that people do change: “As we all know, Trump was a Democrat at one point, too.”
Lake’s response confirms what a few of her ex-colleagues speculated to me privately: that she likes a revolution. Likes being swept away by things. And Trump was the nearest revolution handy as she dived into social media.
“I voted for the first black president of the United States because I thought he might end the endless war in Iraq and bring this country some unity,” she writes back. “Unfortunately, he did neither. Thankfully so many people are waking up to the lies of the Democratic party and [their] dead-end policies and joining the America-first Republican Party. I welcome each and every one of them and I ask for their vote.”
So, there it is. Meet the New Kari, definitely not the Before Kari.
Kari Lake has never won an election — but she’s quickly become one of MAGA’s biggest stars. In just the last five months, she made $20,000 from one paid speech and $27,000 from book sales. The GOP’s hopes of retaking the Senate rest in part on Kari Lake, the former TV broadcaster and 2022 gubernatorial candidate who’s poised to become the party’s Senate nominee in Arizona. But Lake keeps spending lots of time outside the state, much to the chagrin of Republicans — including former President Donald Trump. As it turns out, she’s making some extra money by doing it. Lake was paid $20,000 by to appear at the the St. Joseph County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day Dinner in South Bend, Indiana, according to a financial disclosure filed at the end of June. The Arizona Republican previously filed a disclosure in January, revealing that she had given several paid speeches, totaling $75,000, in the year before she announced her campaign in October 2023. The new April payment appears to contradict her campaign’s previous statement that Lake “doesn’t [charge] a speaking fee.” In the five months since filing her January disclosure, Lake also brought in an additional $27,738.77 from sales of her book, “Unafraid.” Her June disclosure also included further details of her agreement with the agreement she made with right-wing publisher Winning Team Publishing in 2023: a $100,000 advance, plus $25% of net profits beyond that. The candidate’s assets are largely the unchanged from January, aside from one notable addition to her stock portfolio: Between $1,000 and $15,000 in stock in Trump Media & Technology Group, the company that run’s the former president’s “Truth Social” platform. Lake’s campaign did not respond to Business Insider’s request for comment. The GOP candidate is all but certain to face Democratic Rep. Ruben Gallego this fall in what will be a key race for determining control of the Senate. Plenty of politicians in both parties have found ways to cash in on their celebrity brands, most often through book sales that can sometimes exceed their official salaries. But Lake has yet to win an election, and some Republicans have grumbled about the fact that she’s spent a significant amount of time out of state.
Source: Business Insider, PHOENIX
