Kari Lake’s transformation from beloved TV host to Trump’s ‘killer’ in Arizona

For two decades, Kari Lake’s throaty voice and pixie cut were a fixture on Fox 10 in Phoenix, providing the kind of comforting presence common on local news channels across the country: the introduction of cooking shows shortly after reporting details of gruesome murders.

That all seems like a long time ago.

Now she’s running for Senate as a Trump loyalist who, like him, parlayed TV name recognition into a political career that rose to national prominence and infamy after refusing to accept election defeat.

“She’s a killer,” Trump told DailyMail.com aboard his plane last year, as the 55-year-old was regularly suggested as a potential running mate.

She has held fundraisers at Mar-a-Lago, Trump’s Florida home, and some of the world’s top MAGA insiders have worked on her run for Senate.

The downside is that she is a figure of hatred on the left. And two weeks before Election Day, her campaign office was evacuated when a package labeled “anthrax” was delivered.

It comes after an extraordinary metamorphosis.

Lake grew up in rural Iowa, the youngest of nine children, in a family where it was normal for them to do chores to buy their own shampoo and toothpaste.

She studied communications and journalism at the University of Iowa and joined a local station after graduation.

She bounced around stations, working as a production assistant, reporter and even weather forecaster, before landing as an evening anchor at Fox 10 in 1999.

Former colleagues remember a friendly, gregarious presence, a registered Republican who was open-minded enough to donate to Democrat Barack Obama and talk about his policies off camera.

Things changed when Trump came to power and Lake’s social media presence began to drift into territory that poorly suited her role as a trusted local news voice.

It culminated with Lake having to apologize on air for a tweet claiming that #RedForEd, a local political effort to increase public school funding and teacher salaries, was in fact a front to legalize marijuana.

“#RedForEd is nothing more than an attempt to legalize marijuana. Look at this,” she said with a photo of a T-shirt with the slogan #GreenForEd.

‘T-shirts are already printed!! This is a big push to legalize pot and make it more palatable by giving teachers a bone with a substantial raise.”

Diana Pike, regional director of human resources for FOX during Lake’s final years at the station, told PHOENIX magazine: ‘2018 was kind of her downfall, the end of her relationship with the channel

‘Her thing became, “It’s freedom of speech, I have the right to say what I want to say.”

She left the station a day after video emerged of her attending the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference, raising questions about whether she was there as a delegate or a reporter.

Later that year, she announced her run for governor and won Trump’s support in a primary that pitted mainstream conservatives against the Trumpers.

After winning the nomination, she suggested she was willing to build bridges with the rest of the party, but quickly aped Trump by belittling the memory of Senator John McCain, one of the biggest names in politics.

“We drove a stake through the heart of the McCain machine,” she said, also suggesting he was a “loser.”

Lake ultimately lost to Democratic candidate Katie Hobbs by just over 17,000 votes.

Several audits by election experts and the Associated Press found that thousands of Republicans had voted for Hobbs or simply stayed away.

Lake saw things differently and launched a series of legal challenges, claiming that thousands of her voters were unable to vote because of long lines or problems printing ballots.

The irregularities were concentrated in Republican-leaning areas of Maricopa County, the most populous part of the state, she said.

This was the “most unfair election in Arizona history,” she said in a video on Trump’s Truth Social media platform.

“These failed elections should not be certified,” she said.

Her challenges failed. But taking a step straight out of Trump’s playbook, she earned a place in the spotlight alongside the former president.

For a time, she was a near-ever-present figure at Mar-a-Lago, appearing regularly at Trump rallies.

He provided the foreword and title of her memoir: ‘Unafraid: Just Getting Started.’

“What happened to Kari Lake on November 8, 2022 is one of the most egregious ‘instances of ‘freeway robbery’ in the history of any state,” he wrote. ‘Kari Lake’s story does not end in defeat, because she has only just begun!’

A year later, after a vacation in the Bahamas with her family, she announced she was running for the U.S. Senate.

However, her election-denying rhetoric and close allegiance to Trump mean she has apparently struggled to convince voters that she has moved to the center in her race against Democrat Ruben Gallego.

Her current position that she opposes a federal cap on discharges sits uncomfortably next to her 2022 assessment that abortion was “the ultimate sin.”

And while Trump has a narrow lead over Kamala Harris in the state, Lake is polling well below him and her Senate rival. The latest surveys show that she is about seven points behind Gallego.

Republican strategist Barrett Marson of Arizona said Lake had proven to be a “one-trick pony” and that voters were tired of that trick.

“They want to move on in life,” he said.

And while you could say that Donald Trump hasn’t necessarily distanced himself from his election denial, Trump is a unique individual in American politics, and No one, not Kari Lake, nor any other politician in America, can match Donald Trump’s success. even though they try to imitate his behavior.”