Trump dashes Kari Lake's VEEP hopes? Nooooo

Fresh from his victory in Iowa, Donald Trump took to the stage and … kicked Arizona smack in the teeth.

Or more specifically, his No. 1 fangirl, Kari Lake.

“She’s terrific,” Trump told his supporters. “She’ll be a senator — a great senator, I predict, right? You’re going to be a great senator.”

Oh, the disappointment, the disloyalty, the utter unfairness of it all.

Kari Lake has long had Trump's back

Here is a woman who has done literally anything and everything to market herself as Trump’s No. 2.

A saavy politician who has had Trump’s back from the start — no matter the cost to her political prospects or her dignity.

She lauded Trump as a hero of 9/11 and dubbed Trump fav Steve Bannon a “modern-day George Washington.”

She defended Trump’s decision not to debate his opponents, even as she lambasted her own 2022 opponent, Katie Hobbs, for refusing to debate her.

She turned on the McCain family, saying all the right things (from a Trump perspective, anyway) about Sen. John McCain — “Boy, Arizona has delivered some losers, haven’t they?” — and more recently, remained silent when it would have helped her Senate campaign to decry Trump’s latest taunting of the dead senator she once called “a war hero, icon and a force to be reckoned with.”

She has stood resolutely by Trump’s side as he stands accused of falsifying records to hide hush money paid to a porn star, risking national security by keeping highly sensitive classified documents at his Mar-a-Lago estate and entering into a conspiracy to steal the 2020 election.

Trump should reconsider his VP choice

She has marched forth on the campaign through Iowa, through Georgia and Michigan, and frequently through Mar-a-Lago … in a blatant audition for the No. 2 spot on the Trump ticket.

And this is what she gets? This is what Arizona gets?

“She’ll be a great senator”?

Lake goes all in: On 'Great Replacement Theory'

Arizona put Donald Trump on the political map during his first presidential campaign, drawing literally thousands of his faithful followers to one of his early 2015 rallies, just a few weeks after he announced he was running for president.

Yet here he is, consigning a state he claims to love to another 10 months — or more, given her history when she loses — of the most delusional candidate this state has ever seen.

President Trump, sir. Please reconsider.

Kari Lake checks all the boxes

If Lake’s credentials — two decades of reading the news and one failed campaign for governor — aren’t enough to qualify her for the second highest office in the land, consider the many ways in which she checks all of your vice presidential boxes:

• Embrace conspiracy theories about 2020 election fraud? ✔

• Embrace conspiracy theories about 2022 election fraud? ✔

• Attack John McCain? Anthony Fauci? Former Gov. Doug Ducey? The FBI? ✔

• Rant about the media and a stolen election and Joe Biden’s border “invasion” and a stolen election and the “uniparty” and a stolen election and did I mention a stolen election? ✔

Surely, President Trump, there is no one more loyal to you — no one better suited to carry on your campaign of grievance and retribution than Arizona’s reigning MAGA queen.

Who else but Kari Lake would kiss your … portrait?

Reach Roberts at laurie.roberts@arizonarepublic.com. Follow her on Twitter at @LaurieRoberts.

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This article originally appeared on Arizona Republic: Trump dashes Kari Lake's hopes to be vice president