Kari Lake starting over in Jamaica as political, legal losses mount

It hasn’t been as inviting for many others whose political or professional lives revolved around her ambitions.

The two biggest beneficiaries of Lake’s political career are unquestionably Gov. Katie Hobbs and Sen. Ruben Gallego, the Arizona Democrats who defeated her in 2022 and 2024, respectively.

For Republicans, the post-Lake landscape is littered with what-ifs.

From the possibility of different electoral outcomes to a string of legal losses claiming but never proving election fraud, Lake supercharged politics in Arizona and beyond. But few outside her closest supporters can see durable success in a five-year run of grievance-fueled activism.

On May 11, President Donald Trump nominated the former Fox 10 Phoenix newscaster to be the U.S. ambassador to Jamaica, ending her rocky run with the U.S. Agency for Global Media.

The Senate needs to confirm Lake to the relatively low-visibility diplomatic post in Kingston. If her June 2025 appearance before the House Foreign Affairs Committee or her conduct throughout a series of lawsuits against her are any guide, expect hostility, not diplomacy, before the Senate.

A Lake spokesperson referred questions about her to the State Department, which did not respond to an Arizona request for comment.

Lake leaves a trail of disappointment surrounding her post-television career.

“I don’t think she brought new people into the party. She certainly hasn’t won elections,” Republican consultant Barrett Marson said. “What Kari Lake has brought to the Republican Party is a spate of losses in otherwise winnable races.”

Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said Lake offered what seemed to be performative politics intended to appeal to Trump and his most diehard supporters. It spawned copies from others offering similarly hard-line politics that voters have rejected, he said.

“I think Kari Lake is a symptom of this complete takeover by an extreme part of even the MAGA universe. Until they can unravel that I think they’re going to struggle to win statewide elections more than they should,” Cani said.

“Now she’s being cast off to Jamaica and she’s going to have to pretend like that’s some sort of promotion from when she had people privately pushing that she should be vice president not too long ago. It’s a big fall from grace, for sure.”

The 2022 governor’s race was entrée into politics

Lake burst into politics in 2021 with a gubernatorial campaign that commanded attention, including from Trump.

She quickly shed the neutrality of TV journalism and emerged as a stridently pro-Trump voice that had the subtlety of a sledgehammer. She notably leaned in on the baseless election denialism that Trump embraced as well, following his 2020 loss. Trump’s narrowest loss came in traditionally red Arizona.

He acknowledged her early appeal to conservatives at a July 2021 event in Phoenix when she received sustained, boisterous applause.

“Wow,” he said from the stage. “This could be a big night for you.”

Businesswoman Karrin Tayor Robson and former Rep. Matt Salmon, R-Arizona, who narrowly lost the 2002 governor’s race to Democrat Janet Napolitano, struggled for attention that moved to Lake’s magnetic campaign.

Lake won 48% of the vote in the five-way race. Taylor Robson came closest to Lake but still fell 40,000 votes short.

Brash and blunt, Lake aggressively brought a Trump-like starkness to state politics and hectored Hobbs for refusing to debate her.

Also like Trump, Lake opted for intraparty division by making supporters of the late six-term Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona, feel unwelcome in a refashioned GOP.

“We don’t have any McCain Republicans in here, do we? Get the hell out!” she said at a political event. She told conservative attendees at a Dallas event, “We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine.”

In the end, Lake lost to Hobbs by 17,000 votes, or 0.6 percentage points.

Lake never conceded.

The aftermath of 2022

Lake’s loss was plainly owed to her unpopularity with a sliver of conservative voters.

Republican state Treasurer Kimberly Yee collected 58,000 more votes in Maricopa County in her low-profile race than Lake did, topping the GOP ticket.

Rachel Mitchell, Maricopa County’s Republican prosecutor, received nearly 23,000 more votes than Lake in that county, even though 79,000 fewer people voted in Mitchell’s race at all.

Unchastened, Lake instead focused on problems with Maricopa County’s ballot tabulators that failed to count some Election Day votes at the time they were cast.

The votes were counted that day, but the delays only added to suspicions from Lake and her supporters about a jurisdiction they viewed as hostile to Trump and his allies.

Even before Lake lost, she filed suit in April 2022 in a bid to block Arizona from using electronic voting machines. She lost that case, and it led her lawyers to be sanctioned $122,000 in July 2023 for filing a frivolous suit.

In May 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court fined Lake’s lawyer Bryan Blehm $2,000 for falsely claiming it was an undisputed fact that Hobbs’ win happened when an election vendor injected 35,000 bogus votes to her total.

“Not only is that allegation strongly disputed by the other parties, this Court concluded and expressly stated that the assertion was unsupported by the record,” the court wrote.

Lake could have argued that it was possible to infer election tampering, “the representation that this was an ‘undisputed fact’ is … unequivocally false.”

The court also suspended Blehm’s law license for 60 days over the matter.

In between those cases, Maricopa County Recorder Stephen Richer, a Republican, sued Lake for defamation stemming from her unfounded claims that he sabotaged her 2022 run by inserting 300,000 bogus ballots in the race, leading to threats against him and his family.

Lake’s lawyers effectively conceded the case without challenge in March 2024. She reached a confidential settlement with Richer days after losing the 2024 Senate race to Gallego.

After her gubernatorial loss, Lake went to court to overturn the results. Most of her claims were quickly dismissed. In 2023, the Arizona Supreme Court sent one claim back for further review, which eventually failed as well.

But before the appeals courts again rejected her claims, Lake was in the awkward position of running for the U.S. Senate while maintaining she was the state’s lawful governor.

Lake was mocked on “Saturday Night Live” over her election complaints. Even a judge ridiculed the extent of her claims of voter fraud.

“Ms. Lake regards the electoral process much like the villagers in the famous fable regarded the goose that laid the golden egg, except that her goose failed to lay the egg she expected,” Hannah wrote in November 2023 ruling. “She insists that something must have gone wrong.”

The 2024 Senate race

In October 2023, Lake announced she was running for the U.S. Senate seat held by Kyrsten Sinema, the one-time Democrat who quit the party in 2022 amid sinking support with the political left.

Trump provided Lake a videotaped endorsement to kick off a campaign many had expected long before it happened.

If Sinema had run for reelection as an independent, Lake might have had a path to winning a three-way race on the strength of the state’s Republican base, which is the largest single bloc of voters in Arizona.

But Sinema never took serious steps to seek reelection, reducing the race to the usual two-party dynamic.

Following the successful examples of Sinema in 2018 and Sen. Mark Kelly, D-Arizona, in 2020 and 2022, Gallego moderated his rhetoric on border and immigration issues in an effort to reach the political middle.

Lake, meanwhile, mostly offered the same uncompromising rhetoric that delighted her GOP base but turned off the state’s crucial independent voters. When she changed tone on the issue of abortion rights, some conservatives felt betrayed, while others remained cool to Lake.

Republican leaders saw where Lake was taking the party.

In March 2023, Jeff DeWit, then the chair of the Arizona Republican Party, met Lake at her home and told her there were “very powerful people who want to keep you out” of the Senate race.

DeWit asked her to name her price to not run. Lake refused what she characterized as a bribe, and a recording of the conversation released 10 months later toppled DeWit as party chair and deepened a sense that Lake battled fellow Republicans as much as Democrats.

In meetings before Lake entered the Senate race, the National Republican Senatorial Committee urged Lake to stop talking about election denialism and instead talk about inflation and border security.

Lake tried doing so, but her lawsuits over 2022 spurred questions about that election and Lake usually weighed in when asked.

With little money and no Trump endorsement, then-Pinal County Sheriff Mark Lamb won 40% of the Republican primary vote against Lake in July 2024.

Afterward, Mitch McConnell, R-Kentucky, who was then the Senate minority leader, and his financial allies provided Lake no campaign help. Democrats showered the Gallego effort with millions.

Lake, the Republican who cast herself as “Trump in heels,” and crisscrossed the state with a bus-sized photo of her and Trump, drew a smaller fraction of Trump’s 2024 vote than any other Republican in a swing state with a Senate race.

Joining the second Trump administration

Even before her Senate loss, Lake indicated she wouldn’t sue over the matter. With Trump headed back to the White House, she didn’t need to do so.

Trump tapped her for the usually obscure post of heading the U.S. Agency for Global Media. It’s an agency within the State Department that oversees the government’s taxpayer-funded media organizations, most notably the Voice of America.

In February 2025, Lake walked into her new job projecting an optimistic tone.

“I’m hoping that the journalists at VOA are looking forward to having me there because I believe we will accomplish great things together,” she said in a social media post at the time.

Weeks later, however, Trump signed an executive order seeking to dismantle USAGM, among other agencies. It was a plan outlined at length in the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 blueprint for a second Trump term that he disavowed on the campaign trail in 2024 but followed closely upon his return to office.

Lake’s public comments about her workers instantly curdled.

“This agency is not salvageable,” she said after the executive order.

During her testimony to Congress in June 2025, Lake said her agency “was incompetent and mismanaged and deeply corrupt, politically biased and, frankly, a serious threat to our national security.”

Lake put more than 1,000 journalists around the world on administrative leave and moved to quickly sell VOA’s Washington, D.C., studios.

In March 2025, VOA effectively went dark for the first time in its history. The organization began in 1942, intended as a U.S. counterbalance to authoritarian propaganda. Lake reduced its operations to skeletal and dismissed it as taxpayer-funded, leftist propaganda.

Her agency’s workers sued in a see-saw legal battle that remains unresolved.

The former workers had several wins, lost on appeal and filed new cases.

But Lake’s own standing within USAGM plummeted in March when U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth said Lake could not continue as CEO because she had not been confirmed to her job by the Senate.

Days later, Trump named Sarah B. Rogers, the under secretary of state for public diplomacy, to head USAGM, with Lake’s changing role ill-defined. It made clear her days at USAGM were numbered.

Lamberth further erased her from the agency when he invalidated all her decisions as CEO, ruling she improperly held that position. During her tenure, Lake ignored federal orders on programming requirements, such as broadcasting in Iran, he noted.

“Lake has repeatedly thumbed her nose at these statutory requirements, testifying that she has no opinion about which countries censor and repress their people — or even the basic question of which regions of the world qualify as significant, as would be required just to feign compliance with” federal law, Lamberth wrote.

There is at least one political loose end involving Lake’s political career: unpaid campaign debts.

Entering April, Lake’s Senate campaign owed more than $1 million to four companies. It’s a continuation of a problem that first surfaced in her first quarter in the Senate race, when she owed $308,000, and has continued ever since.

Lake’s campaign disputes two of the company's debts, totaling $400,000. That still leaves $607,000 in debts she has not disputed. Lake had $472,000 in cash entering April.

While she headed USAGM, rumors swirled about another run for office.

There was speculation about running in her home state of Iowa, where she bought a condo, or a congressional run in Arizona. The Atlantic reported she waited for hours at the White House in October in hopes of another Trump endorsement that never came.

Instead, her tenure ended with a White House news release announcing her nomination as ambassador to Jamaica.

It was squeezed in between a nomination to the Surface Transportation Board and a nomination for ambassador to Slovakia.

In Arizona, many greeted Lake’s political climbdown with a shrug.

“As I am fond of saying,” Marson said, “Kari Lake is the world’s problem now.”