Kari Lake Leaving Voice of America for a Potential Role in a Future Trump Administration? | Vanity Fair

About two months ago a US district court judge ruled that Kari Lake, the MAGA firebrand and election truther, had been illegally appointed to run the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America. Lake insisted in a statement at the time that she would be staying on at the agency, but the ruling raised questions about what power, if any, she now holds at a department President Donald Trump has sought to gut since he stormed back into the White House last year.

Now, a source close to Lake says she’s planning to leave USAGM and has another role lined up. Over White House Correspondents’ Dinner weekend, Lake was heard boasting about a new position in the Trump administration. One rumor that’s been floating around is that she’s being appointed to a job at the Shield of the Americas, an alliance of Latin American and Caribbean nations that Trump formed as part of his focus on reestablishing the dominance of the Western Hemisphere in geopolitics.

When reached for comment, Lake declined to say whether she was taking on a new role. “I’m still at the Agency for Global Media,” she told Vanity Fair. “I am still currently employed there.” When asked if she would be joining the Shield of the Americas, she offered a terse reply: “I won’t be answering any questions about my future to Vanity Fair.”

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The alliance has all the hallmarks of a Trumpian scheme. Its name sounds like it was conjured up by a child who plays too much Call of Duty. Its most prominent members are hard-line Trump allies Javier Milei of Argentina and Nayib Bukele of El Salvador. Its inaugural “summit” was an event held at Trump’s golf resort in Doral, Florida. The left-wing leaders of Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia, though their nations represent more than half of the region’s GDP, were not present.

The purported mandate of the alliance is to combat “foreign interference in our hemisphere, criminal and narco-terrorist gangs and cartels, and illegal and mass immigration,” but regional experts I spoke with questioned whether the Shield serves as anything other than a promotional vehicle for its members.

The new gig wouldn’t bring Lake to Washington—she’s already here. Around town, Lake has cut an abrasive figure. She’s a regular at The Ned, the members club perched on the top floors of an Art Deco building that’s a stone’s throw from the White House and serves as a canteen for Cabinet members. Lake has often been seen working the room with Caroline Wren, a Republican fundraiser who organized the 2021 rally that preceded the riot at the US Capitol.

One Ned regular recalled an incident in which Lake got into a heated argument with Senator Ruben Gallego, the Democrat who defeated her in 2024, after he extended his hand for a cordial greeting when they ran into each other at the club last year. “How does it feel to be bought and paid for by the cartels?” Lake asked Gallego, referencing a baseless conspiracy theory she peddled about her opponent during the campaign. (In response to a request for comment on this piece, Lake responded: “You should fire your sources. They are lying to you.”)

After Trump won in 2024, he rewarded her support with a job running the US Agency for Global Media, which oversees Voice of America and other federally funded news outlets that deliver information to people in far-flung nations with limited press freedoms, including China, Russia, and Iran. The agency has been a key instrument of US soft power for the last few decades, and Lake harbored lofty ambitions to turn it into a MAGA megaphone for the world.

“I won’t be answering any questions about my future to Vanity Fair,” Lake told me.

But Trump didn’t bother to confirm Lake’s appointment with the Senate, and within months of her starting the job, he ordered that the agency be gutted. Lake embraced the new edict with the zeal of a chainsaw-wielding Elon Musk, canceling contracts and firing some 1,400 employees. But there were questions about Lake’s authority to carry out these firings given her nebulous position at the agency, and so the US government wound up spending more than $100 million to pay the fired staffers not to work.

The gutting drew criticism even from top Trump allies. Marc Thiessen, the Washington Post columnist who has reportedly been advising Trump on foreign policy, bludgeoned Lake as a “hapless ally” of Tehran for crippling the agency charged with getting decent information to the Iranian people amid Trump’s war. In a Post op-ed, Thiessen called for Lake’s ouster as head of USAGM.

In March, around the time of the first Shield of the Americas summit, and in response to lawsuits filed by the fired employees, that US district judge ruled that Lake had been illegally installed as head of USAGM and that, as such, many of her actions were illegitimate. Trump nominated State Department under secretary Sarah Rogers to take her place, though Lake insisted at the time that she would be staying on as “deputy CEO.”

In a statement in which she called the judge in her case “rotund,” Lake said: “I remain in the exact same position today as I was before: Deputy CEO—where I am even more determined to finish the job.”

Lake shows off a star-spangled clutch on the Kennedy Center Honors carpet.

But even before a judge forced an end to her VOA rampage, Lake had her eye on a job at another institution Trump was pulverizing: The Kennedy Center. She started spending a lot of time there after Trump’s hostile takeover, showing up to the Kennedy Center Honors, the premiere of Amazon’s Melania Trump documentary, and a show from worship leaders Cody and Kari Jobe Carnes.

“Kari Lake was always at The Kennedy Center for red carpets,” says one former staffer. Internally, it was suspected that she was vying to replace Richard Grenell, the former ambassador Trump appointed to run the center despite his having no experience in the arts world beyond being married to a man who danced in a few Broadway shows. The center appointed Lisa Dale, Lake’s best friend, to head up development. “There was speculation that there was a soft takeover that was happening,” the source says.

Trump replaced Dale, a former TV host with little experience in fundraising, in February. Politico reported at the time that Dale “often exaggerates financial commitments” and “has blown off meetings with top potential donors.” (In a text message, Dale told Politico, “This is all total BS.”) Lake’s husband was hired to make social media videos for the center, a job for which he was paid $10,833 a month, according to The New York Times.

But Trump never ended up giving Lake the top job. He replaced Grenell with Matt Floca, a young facilities manager, after announcing the struggling arts institution would be shut down for two years for renovations.

“Kari Lake was always at The Kennedy Center for red carpets,” says one former staffer.

As she continued her job hunt, Lake considered running for Congress, according to a source familiar with her deliberations. She bought a house in her home state of Iowa, naturally stirring some speculation, and The Atlantic reported in February that one day she milled about the White House lobby “for hours,” waiting to meet with Trump in the hope of securing an endorsement. To no avail. She ended up meeting with a “low-level aide who conveyed no enthusiasm for a third Lake candidacy.” (Lake denied those claims, calling the reporting “incorrect.”)

Since Lake broke into politics, her career has been a quixotic tale of outsize ambition. She parlayed unyielding support for Trump into social media fame but has always fallen short of true achievement. Following a long career as a local television anchor in Phoenix, she ascended in Republican politics after vigorously embracing Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2022 she ran for governor of Arizona as a self-styled “Trump in heels.”

She lost, though she would never admit it, referring to herself as “the lawful governor of Arizona” long after her opponent had settled into the actual job. Undeterred by reality, she turned her eyes to the Senate, running and losing again in 2024. Once more, she cried rigging. (She has never conceded her own races, but Lake does not question Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024, two elections that scheming Democrats forgot to steal.)

It remains to be seen whether Lake can secure another job in the Trump administration. Sources I spoke to for this piece suggested a post at the Shield of the Americas was unlikely to come to fruition. Trump did already send Kristi Noem there, an indication that the State Department shop is something of a dumping ground for scandal-plagued loyalists he’s not quite ready to cast out from the tribe. Maybe this former television host truly will put a stop to narco-terrorism.

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