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It’s been more than a year since Arizona’s favorite broadcaster-turned-MAGA lapdog Kari Lake lost handily to now-Sen. Ruben Gallego, bringing her statewide campaign record to 0-2 and solidifying her status as a veteran political loser. And while much of Arizona seems to be over Lake, she apparently can’t get over her own defeat.
Despite taking a position in the Trump administration, Lake continues to try to pick fights with Gallego, buzzing like a vexatious fly around his ear. This past weekend, the pair renewed their feud with some good, old-fashioned social media sniping.
On Saturday, Gallego criticized President Donald Trump for announcing that he would give a full pardon to former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who was convicted of drug trafficking last year and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Hernandez was found guilty of conspiring to traffic 400 tons of cocaine into the United States, and the Justice Department found that he was “at the center of one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”
While the Trump administration is letting one drug trafficker off scot-free, the president and his Secretary of Defense are blowing up suspected drug smuggling boats off the coast of Venezuela willy-nilly, without providing any proof that those boats are actually carrying contraband, much less affording those on the boats any due process.
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“So we are illegally killing drug runners in the Caribbean on boats that will never make it to the US and pardoning cartel kingpins that a US jury has convicted for drug running?” Gallego asked on X. “Anyone else see how this doesn’t make sense?”
No one asked Kari Lake to chime in and make the discourse dumber, but she did anyway.
“This scumball LOVES drug runners because his dad is a convicted felon drug runner (also known as trafficker) for the Mexican cartels,” Lake wrote.
Lake did not respond to a request for comment from Phoenix New Times about whether Trump also LOVES drug runners (also known as traffickers), given that he just pardoned a notorious one.
Gallego shot back at Lake on X, painstakingly educating her on his point.
“No Kari, I’m glad my dad went to jail for drug running,” Gallego wrote. “What your simple mind doesn’t understand is that we shouldn’t kill people without a trial. Also, as a nation we look like hypocrites when Trump pardons drug runners at the same time.”
Gallego ended the missive with a personal dig. “Lastly, I beat you soundly in the 2024 election,” he wrote.
It’s no secret that Gallego’s father had a criminal background. Gallego has not run from it, as much as Lake and other right-wing ghouls have attempted to tar him with his father’s offenses. As Gallego wrote in his 2021 memoir, “They Called Us Lucky,” his father left his family when he was young and Gallego hasn’t had much to do with him since.
A spokesperson for Gallego declined to comment.
One would think Lake would have more pressing matters than beefing with the guy who slammed the door (at least for now) on Lake’s aspiring career as an elected official. Since losing the Senate election in 2024, Lake became Trump’s wrecking ball at the U.S. Agency for Global Media, which oversees programs like Voice of America that deliver journalism to parts of the world without a robust, free press.
Despite not being appointed by Congress to lead the agency, court documents show that she seems to have promoted herself first to deputy CEO of USAGM and then began to call herself the acting CEO, which may have been against the law. While serving in that “position,” she’s also attempted to fire thousands of USAGM workers, triggering a series of lawsuits.
