Donald Trump’s MAGA ecosystem just openly embraced state coercion. Kari Lake, the twice‑failed candidate Trump rewarded with a federal gig, didn’t tweet or whisper her latest demand. She broadcast it on Newsmax: her political rivals should be put in “effing handcuffs… for the rest of their lives.”
According to Lake, the FBI targeted Trump allies unfairly, calling out Mar‑a‑Lago law enforcement actions and the indictment of Roger Stone, and therefore her enemies deserve life sentences.
“They dragged Roger Stone out of his house. “They raided Mar-a-Lago. They attacked President Trump,” she said. “There’s not a damn person in handcuffs,” she complained, for what she called corruption inside the federal bureaucracy, The Daily Beast reports.
Lake isn’t a fringe fluke. She’s the CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM), installed by Trump after she lost statewide elections and parlayed conspiracy peddling into political capital. Her Newsmax rant wasn’t “colorful language,” it was a call for political repression — lock up your opponents for the crime of dissent. That’s something you hear in banana republics, not from a senior American government official.
This isn’t accidental. Kari Lake built her brand by amplifying election denialism and culture‑war grievances. Her current rhetoric — equating political opposition with criminality — is the logical endpoint of that trajectory.
Her position as head of USAGM — an agency technically responsible for global broadcast journalism — adds a layer of irony and danger. Instead of defending press freedom and the flow of information abroad, she’s telegraphing a domestic crackdown on dissent.
This Is Not Normal
Democrats get attacked from the right all the time. That’s politics. But calling publicly for opponents to be jailed for life because they disagree with you. Lake’s comments signal a faction that sees incarceration as a legitimate tool of political competition.
In any functioning democracy, such rhetoric from a government appointee would prompt investigations, ethics reviews, and broad condemnation. Instead, Lake’s MAGA backers cheer; Republican leaders are silent; the media industry shrugs. That tells you everything about where the GOP establishment’s priorities really lie.
