Kari Lake Waited ‘For Hours’ in White House Lobby Hoping to Get Trump’s Endorsement to Run for Congress — But Failed

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

US Agency for Global Media senior advisor Kari Lake has been President Donald Trump’s wrecking ball at her agency, but has come up empty-handed in her quest to get his support for another political campaign.

Her tenure at USAGM has been heavily criticized by free speech and democracy advocates, as she has overseen massive layoffs and throttled or even outright cancelled programs that were long viewed as effectively advancing American interests by supporting broadcast networks that targeted areas of the world with restrictions on press freedom.

In 2022, Lake narrowly lost the Arizona governor’s race to Democrat Katie Hobbs, and since then paired her support for Trump’s baseless claims of fraud in the 2020 election with her own unfounded accusations that her election was stolen from her as well. In reality, a post-election analysis showed that Lake lost in large part because tens of thousands of Arizonans cast votes for other Republicans, but not her.

After she lost another statewide race in 2024, the Arizona Senate race to Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-AZ), Lake vowed she wouldn’t run for office again. That didn’t mean she was done with politics; her unwavering loyalty to Trump scored her an appointment to serve as the senior advisor for USAGM. (Lake has identified herself as the “acting CEO” of USAGM, but the legal status of that title is under dispute.)

And Lake is now considering abandoning her 2024 vow to not run again, according to a new report by The Atlantic’s Anne Applebaum and Yvonne Wingett Sanchez that offers a brutally scathing assessment of her leadership at USAGM.

The Atlantic’s report shreds Lake for her “squandering” of “hundreds of millions of dollars” of taxpayer funds, obsessive social media posts about partisan political topics, and the “profound damage [she has done] to America’s foreign broadcasters, and to America’s ability to communicate with the world,” and notes that all this havoc still seems to be “failing” to “win Trump’s favor”:

In October, she was spotted waiting in a White House lobby, hoping to see Trump, according to two GOP operatives. “Kari has been here for hours,” a White House aide told one of the operatives that day. “She’s going to run, and she’s asking for the endorsement.” Lake, who was rumored to be mulling a run for Congress in Arizona, eventually shared her pitch with a low-level aide who conveyed no enthusiasm for a third Lake candidacy, the same person said. The other Republican operative offered a similar account. When asked for comment on the episode, Lake responded in a statement that “every shred of this question is incorrect” and added, “The President has always been very gracious and generous when I have requested time with him.”

…In her statement, Lake did not directly answer a question about whether she would seek a congressional seat, saying only, “If and when I decide to run for office, The Atlantic will be the very last to know.”

Even with a Trump endorsement, third time is unlikely to be the charm for Lake attempting to win elected office, Applebaum and Sanchez noted, after she had lost twice in the state and “MAGA voters in Arizona have moved on from Lake.”

Lake grew up in Iowa and bought a condo there late last year, the report added, “perhaps to try her luck in politics there.”

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