Kari Lake secured the Republican nomination for US Senate in Arizona on Tuesday, her convincing primary win fueled by Donald Trump’s endorsement. But according to a new book, Trump has regularly mocked Lake over how fervently she advances his election fraud lie.
“Lake’s commitment to talking about fraud in the 2020 election would make even Trump laugh at times,” Meridith McGraw of Politico writes in Trump in Exile, an account of the former president turned presidential nominee’s years since leaving power. The book is due out in the US next week; the Guardian obtained a copy.
According to McGraw, Trump told other Republicans seeking his endorsement they should be more like Lake.
“It doesn’t matter what you ask Kari Lake about,” McGraw quotes Trump as saying. “‘How’s your family?’ And she’s like, ‘The family’s fine but they’re never going to be great until we have free and fair elections.’”
Citing Trump “friends and donors”, McGraw writes: “One said, ‘He was like, ‘You could ask her, how’s the weather?, and she’ll turn it into the election. ‘Oh, the weather in Phoenix is OK, but you can never have great weather unless the election is fair.’”
McGraw also quotes a 2022 conversation between Trump and Blake Masters – now a US House candidate but then running for US Senate – that was recorded by a documentary crew.
“I heard you did great on the debate,” Trump said, “but had bad election answers, you’ve got a lot of support and you have to stay with those people.
“If you want to get across the line, you’ve got to go stronger on that one thing, lot of complaints about it. Look at Kari. Kari is winning with very little money, and if they say, ‘How is your family?’ she says, ‘The election was rigged and stolen.’ You’ll lose if you go soft. You’ll lose that base.”
Trump claims Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election because of electoral fraud. He did not.
Trump’s lie fueled the deadly attack on Congress of 6 January 2021, but nearly four years on, Trump and candidates throughout Republican ranks still repeat it, and polls show majorities of Republican voters believe it.
In McGraw’s words, Lake has long been “one of the loudest standard-bearers for the election denialism movement”.
A former TV anchor, Lake ran for Arizona governor in 2022, in a campaign heavily reliant on repeating Trump’s claims of voter fraud in the sun belt state two years before, when a controversial Republican “audit” only increased Biden’s margin of victory.
Beaten by Katie Hobbs, Lake refused to accept defeat. She maintains the Democratic governor won through fraud.
Having switched to a run for US Senate, Lake – a former Barack Obama donor and campaigner – will face the Democrat Ruben Gallego in November, a contest that could decide control of the chamber.
Assessing Lake’s successful courtship of Trump, a man who nonetheless ruthlessly mocked her, McGraw writes: “Believing – or at least peddling – Trump’s falsehoods about the election would … become a litmus test for Trump endorsement.
“And Lake, like many of those Trump supported, went on to be one of the loudest standard-bearers for the election denialism movement.”
With Trump in Exile, McGraw offers a wide-ranging portrait of the former president’s political moves since leaving power in January 2021, from surviving a second impeachment over the January 6 Capitol attack, to capturing the Republican nomination for a third successive election despite facing 88 criminal charges (34 resulting in conviction) and multimillion-dollar fines in multiple civil lawsuits.
McGraw therefore considers the brief rises and humiliating falls of a series of would-be Trump rivals.
In describing how Trump dealt with Ron DeSantis, the hard-right Florida governor who was for some time his strongest challenger, McGraw revisits a famous campaign ad in which DeSantis was depicted eating chocolate pudding with his fingers.
The ad was based on an anecdote about a flight with a donor on which there were no utensils. McGraw writes: “The incident – gross and funny and strange – was gossiped about after the flight and quickly became part of Tallahassee lore.”
DeSantis dismissed the anecdote, saying: “They’re talking about pudding, and I’m like, ‘Is that really the best you’ve got? OK, bring it on!”
But the pro-Trump ad – which began: “Ron DeSantis loves sticking his fingers where they don’t belong” – became a viral hit.
Fewer than 100 days from the 2024 election, McGraw’s account of the sticky little episode seems surprisingly timely.
As Trump and his running mate, the Ohio senator JD Vance, face ridicule from Democrats and supporters of Kamala Harris for being “weird” in their beliefs and policies, particularly about gender and women’s rights, some in Trumpworld have complained, saying such attacks distract from a proper contest of political ideas.
But McGraw reports that staffers from Trump’s campaign and Super Pac deliberately set out to “deploy humiliating psychological warfare” against DeSantis and his campaign, leading to the pudding commercial.
“When discussing their strategy,” McGraw writes, “one Trump adviser referred to Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals”, a 1971 book influential on the political left.
Trump’s staffers, McGraw writes, homed in on “Rule number five: Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. There is no defense. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.”
The pudding ad, McGraw says, was both “disgusting and clever”, its goal “to get under DeSantis’s skin and start signaling to the public that he was, well, strange”.
As Trump and Vance are now finding out, such tactics often work.
