Donald Trump never won the popular vote. He lost the White House to Joe Biden. On his watch, Republicans lost the House and Senate. He is the only president twice impeached and the first to face felony charges. Yet the GOP remains in his thrall.
By the numbers, 65% of Republicans believe Biden’s 2020 win to be illegitimate. Each new indictment seemingly heightens Trump’s popularity. Ron DeSantis appears to be going nowhere.
Excess Covid deaths, vaccine hesitancy and firearms homicides are hallmarks of Trump-aligned states. Arizona, West Virginia and Mississippi, in that order, led the US in per-capita Covid mortality. Collectively, they give new meaning to “pro-life”.
Enter Kari Lake, a Trump acolyte and failed 2022 Republican gubernatorial candidate in Arizona. According to reports, she too has made Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida resort, her winter home away from home, appearing there more often than Melania, and “practically liv[ing] in a suite”.
Unafraid is a grievance-packed audition in Lake’s tireless quest to be named Trump’s running mate in 2024. He wrote the book’s foreword. Donald Jr is her publisher.
The most Mark Meadows – Trump’s fourth and final chief of staff – got for his memoir, The Chief’s Chief, was a blurb. “We will have a big future together,” Trump squealed on the cover. In didn’t quite work out that way.
Meadows wrote that Trump tested positive for Covid several days before the first 2020 debate. In return for such treachery, Trump called Meadows “fucking stupid” and falsely claimed that The Chief’s Chief “confirmed” he “did not have Covid before or during the debate”.
Meadows has since testified to a DC grand jury in the special counsel investigation of Trump’s election subversion and retention of classified records. Revenge is best served cold.
Like her idol, Lake is simultaneously embittered and energized by the electorate’s rejection. The pair occupy the same wavelength. Reality is an inconvenience.
“What happened to Kari Lake on 8 November 2022 is one of the most egregious cases of ‘highway robbery’ in any state’s history,” Trump thunders on the page. “Kari Lake’s story does not end in defeat, because she is just getting started!”
Lake also harbors ambitions for the US Senate seat held by Kyrsten Sinema.
Unafraid is bile-filled and breezy. Introspection takes a holiday. Lake trashes high-profile LGTBQ+ Americans, embraces Paul Gosar of Arizona, one the most extreme and incendiary members of the Republican party … and demands national unity.
“Congressman Gosar is ‘the GOAT’. We need strong, America First Patriots like Gosar at every level of government.”
For the record, among countless controversies, Gosar has publicly defended Nick Fuentes, the white supremacist and neo-Nazi who dined with Trump and Ye, the recording artist formerly known as Kanye West.
Predictably, Lake holds the left responsible for America’s divide.
She also delivers a shoutout to Karl Olsen, her “hero and attorney”. Olsen has reportedly caught the attention of Jack Smith, the special counsel, and not in a good way. In Lake’s eyes, Olsen “is dedicating his life to saving our Republic”. According to Politico, he sits amid a rogue’s gallery: “Among those under a microscope for their roles in orchestrating a scheme of fake electors are Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, John Eastman, Kurt Olsen, Kenneth Chesebro and Jeffrey Clark, with investigators homing in on whether they ‘were following specific instructions from Trump or others, and what those instructions were’.”
In May, the Arizona supreme court fined Olsen and two other lawyers for making “false factual statements to the court”, wrote the chief justice, Robert Brutinel, a Republican. “Sometimes campaigns and their attendant hyperbole spill over into legal challenges. But once a contest enters the judicial arena, rules of attorney ethics apply.”
Lake does nothing to mask her antipathy toward Biden and gay, lesbian and transgender members of his administration. She singles out Pete Buttigieg, Biden’s transportation secretary, and Karine Jean-Pierre, the White House press secretary, for particular opprobrium.
Buttigieg, she writes, “couldn’t even fix the potholes in South Bend, Indiana”, where he was mayor, but became “transportation secretary just because he was gay”.
The fact he won the Iowa caucus in 2020 and tied Bernie Sanders in New Hampshire apparently escaped her gaze. Lake also forgets that Buttigieg’s March 2020 exit from the Democratic primary helped pave the way to Biden taking down Sanders. Buttigieg also spent seven months in Afghanistan as a navy lieutenant, by the by.
Once upon a time, Lake hosted a drag show in her own house. Her daughter attended. Consistency is not Lake’s strength. She tags Barack Obama with the birther smear, deriding him as a man with a “mysterious past” who engaged in “flirtations with Marxism”. But she omits that she donated to Obama in 2008 and reportedly campaigned for him while a broadcaster, in violation of journalistic ethics.
Indeed, Lake contributed to Obama’s campaign shortly after National Journal ranked him as the most liberal senator. His liberalism wasn’t a negative for Lake, until it was. The line between conviction and convenience is often blurry.
Lake ponders the question of whether Trump on the debate stage was an “asshole” or simply a jerk. She concludes the latter.
“Trump was an expert at walking that tightrope,” she explains.
Heading into election season, Arizona is one of four true swing states, according to the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics. Last time, Biden eked out a win in the Grand Canyon state by 0.4% and fewer than 11,000 votes. Two years later, Lake lost the governor’s race to Katie Hobbs by 0.6% and 17,000 votes.
Against this backdrop, Arizona remains a crucial battleground. Lake will do her best to stay in front of the camera.
Unafraid: Just Getting Started is published in the US by Winning Team Publishing
