In Georgia, at the Republican state convention, Kari Lake, who refused to concede the Arizona election for governor in 2022 and who is an ardent defender of [Donald] Trump, emphasized that many of Mr. Trump’s supporters owned guns.That's horrifying to decent people -- which is why it's catnip to Republican voters.
“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you,” Ms. Lake said. “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”
The crowd cheered.
Ms. Lake added: “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”
The conventional wisdom is that Ron DeSantis will lose the nomination in 2024 and then be first in line for it four years later, but I think Trump will rough DeSantis up so badly that Stochastic Terror Evita will be outpolling him by this point in 2027. DeSantis tells voters he's stripping liberals, LGBTers, and other enemies of conservatism of their civil rights through legal means. That's swell, but Lake is saying: Forget trying to pass laws. Just shoot the bastards. She's suggesting that the real counter-revolution will be participatory, which probably sounds like much more fun to non-college-educated rage addicts in the GOP base than DeSantis's coup-by-bureaucrats.
Please note that Lake didn't just make an appearance at the Georgia Republican convention -- she was the keynote speaker. On the surface, that seems crazy: She's from out of state, she lost her 2022 race, and Georgia is supposed to be one Republican-dominated state where Trumpist madness was kept at bay. Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger may have resisted Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in their state and then easily prevailed in the 2022 primary and general election, but the rage endures. Kemp and Raffensperger both skipped the convention. Lake and Trump attended.
The people who put together "Justice for All," a recording of January 6 prisoners singing the national anthem accompanied by a Donald Trump speech, have now interwoven Kari Lake and a country-rock band called the Truth Bombers in an anti-Biden song called "81 Million Votes, My Ass."
The song is currently at #21 on the iTunes Top 100 and, bizarrely, #1 on the iTunes Top 100 Alternative Songs chart. (I'm not sure who still uses iTunes, but it might be the generation that votes heavily in Republican primaries.)
Maybe that doesn't seem terribly impressive, but hey, no one's asking Tim Scott, or even Ron DeSantis, to make a godawful fist-pumping right-wing protest record.
Lake, of course, lost her race for governor in 2022, and she might lose a Senate race in 2024. But Trump is blamed for GOP electoral losses in 2018, 2020, 2021 (the Georgia Senate runoffs), and 2022, and he's the GOP's presidential front-runner now. It's been said that Democrats embrace "superstar losers" like Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke. I think Lake could be the GOP's top superstar loser -- and besides, even if she fails again next year, most of the party will insist that she really won. So I think it'll be her race to lose.
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