In recent years, few names have been more synonymous with the highs and lows of Arizona politics than Kari Lake.
Lake, who once billed herself as “Trump in heels,” has tried and failed twice to win high-profile races — first for governor and most recently for the U.S. Senate. And in late 2024, after her most recent loss, with Trumpism arguably at its apex, Lake found herself in a bit of a political wilderness.
She immediately set about trying to rehabilitate her image, and the twists and turns in her story since then have been both intriguing and puzzling.
Yvonne Wingett Sanchez recently chronicled a few of them in a piece for the Atlantic, along with fellow reporter Anne Applebaum.
As Wingett Sanchez told The Show, she and Applebaum started with a simple but provocative question: What does Kari Lake actually want? The story begins with her somewhat quixotic quest to take over the U.S. Agency for Global Media — or USAGM.
Full conversation
YVONNE WINGETT SANCHEZ: So USAGM essentially runs Voice of America, and it gives grants to entities like Radio Free Asia, the Open Technology Fund, and that helps people access information in places like Russia and Iran. And she felt as though this was a space that she really understood, given her long tenure in the news industry, she had the skill set to be able to do it.
But then, of course, that is before the president's allies began calling for Voice of America and some of these other entities to be, you know, reimagined at a far lesser import than what they had served.
SAM DINGMAN: Right. And this was in connection with Elon Musk's efforts with the Department of Government Efficiency. Correct?
WINGETT SANCHEZ: Yes.
DINGMAN: And then, interestingly, right, if I followed the twists in this correctly, once Kari Lake seemed to realize that that was where the prevailing political winds were headed, she sort of pivoted, right? And said, like, "Well, I also think this agency should be severely restricted and we should shut down various things that we're doing." Sort of advocating for the curtailing of her own remit.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: That's exactly right. So you saw her really embrace this mandate to strip it down. And so it led to layoffs, it led to limitations in what these various entities could do — and whether they would exist at all. And we have to remember that, like, she didn't have any experience working with any of these institutions before, and there didn't really seem to be a willingness on her part to really learn about what these journalists were actually doing.
Like, she kept her distance, according to multiple current and former staffers that we talked to. One person thought that she wasn't in the building more than a couple of times over a half-year stretch.
DINGMAN: As you were mentioning earlier, part of the work that USAGM does is work to provide information that counters state media coming out of places like Russia. But it seems like through a lot of the cuts that she has kind of pivoted to support, that has ended up kind of strengthening the influence of those state media outlets, because there's less U.S. media to counter their version of things.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: Yep. And more recently, she's sort of sought to play up what Voice of America and some of these other entities are doing in this space, especially in the wake of American intervention in Venezuela. I don't know that it has necessarily had as much of an impact as the previous year has had under her tenure. I don't think that that sort of damage, according to staffers, has been undone.
DINGMAN: I wanted to ask about two, what I thought of as sort of eye-popping moments in this reporting. One is the amount of money being paid to USAGM and VOA staffers to not work.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: So, a minority report from the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, they estimated that from March 15 of last year through July 18 alone, so that's just, you know, several months, that USAGM paid hundreds of people more than $69 million to not work. And that cost, obviously, has continued to grow.
As of last summer, more than 500 people were still on administrative leave, and they were still receiving salaries and benefits. And they were still barred from doing their work. So those costs are going to continue to grow along with a whole other set of costs.
DINGMAN: Yeah. Which leads me in a way to another one of the really striking moments in the piece, which is this scene that you paint of Kari Lake last fall trying to get a meeting with President Trump.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: That scene really was something, wasn't it?
DINGMAN: Yeah.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: So last fall she arrives at the White House. And as it's described to me, showed up without an appointment and wanted to see the president. And an aide walked over and spoke with her and said, "Hey, what do you want to talk to him about?"
And she simply said that she was there and that she wanted to talk to the president. ... Well, a lot of time passed was described to me as hours. And finally they come back to her again and they're like, ... "He really can't see you. He's not going to see you. What do you want to see him about?"
And she said that she wanted to talk to him about running for office. You know, the person said, "What office?" And she said she wanted to run for Congress and she was interested in, in Congressional District 1 here in Arizona currently held by Rep. David Schweikart. And that sent this person sort of in a scramble. And the aide made clear that the president was not down with the third Lake candidacy. And it set off an extraordinary attempt to try to box her out of running for office.
If you recall the timeline of all of these things, Gina Swoboda, who is now the former chair of the Arizona Republican Party, she jumped into the race for that seat on a Sunday afternoon. It was a very weird rollout for a congressional campaign for one of the most hotly competitive seats in the country.
DINGMAN: Right. This is before she decided to run for secretary of state instead.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: And she launches on a Sunday afternoon. And so the timeline of all of that is very interesting to me. And, believe me, it was something that we asked a lot of questions about. But ultimately, you know, she could not, Lake could not get this meeting with the president. And in our piece, we note that she disputes our account of, of what happened. I will note that it was backed up by a second source.
And at least so far, she has not announced a run for Congress in Arizona. She has, however, purchased a place in Iowa where she grew up. And that led to speculation that perhaps she was very serious about potentially running for office in that state at some point.
DINGMAN: Well, it will be fascinating to see what the next twist in this narrative is. I have been speaking with Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, staff writer at the Atlantic, who reported on the question of what Kari Lake is trying to achieve with her colleague Anne Applebaum. Yvonne, thank you for this conversation.
WINGETT SANCHEZ: Thanks so much for having me.
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