Kari Lake Talks ‘Difficult’ Deficit Math

Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake, in an interview with National Review, said that, if elected, she would vote to extend Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cuts and avoid touching Social Security and Medicare. But despite taking the two largest government programs off of the table, she said she could still push to cut the deficit to fight off inflation.

“I mean, we’re in a dire situation,” she said on Wednesday afternoon when asked how. “I don’t think there’s a lot we can do. This is going to be difficult to pull ourselves out of this. And we’re going to have to get very creative.”

Lake was all smiles in the U.S. Capitol one day after Democrat-turned-independent Senator Kyrsten Sinema announced she will not seek reelection this cycle. Sinema’s 2024 retirement means that Lake, the Donald Trump–aligned, National Republican Senatorial Committee–endorsed GOP candidate, is likely to face Democratic front-runner and U.S. Representative Ruben Gallego in the general election in November.

The 2022 Arizona GOP gubernatorial nominee — who narrowly lost to Democrat Katie Hobbs in the general election — has insisted that she actually won. But after rising to stardom portraying herself as an enemy of the establishment, she has recently been aiming to win over her skeptics in Washington.

National Review caught up with Lake a few moments before she stepped into Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell’s office for a closed-door meeting about her candidacy.

In addition to fiscal policy, we asked her about Ukraine and China.

The full transcript, lightly edited for clarity, is below.

First question for you is a fiscal question about the Trump tax cuts — large components of them are set to expire in 2025. If you’re elected, would you support extending them as is?

I would definitely support extending them, and my opponent, Ruben Gallego, would absolutely oppose extending them, and that would be a huge burden on small businesses — primarily small businesses. I think I heard the taxes would got up 20, 25 percent on small businesses, so we have to keep those. I’m glad you brought that up. It’s one of the reasons that we have to elect Republicans all across this country and in the Senate we’ll have to take back the majority.

You’re a close ally of Donald Trump. He has opposed touching Social Security or Medicare. Do you agree with that? Do you think that they need to be reformed at all?

I do not think we should touch them. There’s so many other things that we could do. But this is something that the hard-working people of this country have paid into and earned. And to pull the rug out from under them at time when they need it most, especially as people are struggling so much — it’s wrong, it’s a promise we made, they paid into it. They never got the option to not pay into it. They paid into it and that’s the wrong place to be tinkering and moving things around, and at risk of those people not having that security blanket.

I was looking at your campaign site — one of your priorities is cutting the deficit, you also talk about inflation. If you don’t want to touch Social Security, Medicare, how do you think that could be accomplished?

Well it’s going to be difficult. I mean, we’re in a dire situation, I don’t think there’s a lot we can do. This is gonna be difficult to pull ourselves out of this. And we’re gonna have to get very creative. And I’m not going to be able to sit here in three minutes and tell you how we’re going to fix the problem. If it were a problem we can fix in three minutes, it probably would have been fixed, but we’re certainly not going to do it on the backs of the hard-working American citizens who have worked hard and paid into this. I think a lot of the things we need to do is increase revenues by bringing manufacturing, home bringing back some high-paying jobs. All of the things that Joe Biden has done have hurt American workers. He’s on the verge of sending our auto industry overseas with these EVs to China. President Trump wants to make sure we’re keeping those good jobs here. We need to bring and reshore some companies in manufacturing and get some jobs that are actually paying Americans a good living wage, where they’re able to then pay into the system and pay into taxes.

I’m glad you brought up China, I have some defense questions for you. Arizona is obviously a big aerospace and defense state. With munitions dwindling in the U.S., do you support increasing defense spending?

I think we need to build up our defense. Right now, where we’ve sent a lot of munitions over to wars overseas. We had $80 billion in high grade military equipment that was taken from us with Joe Biden’s disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan. We’ve got to make sure that we’re ready in case we have an emergency, and I don’t think we are, so I do support that kind of spending. What I have a problem with right now is while we have a wide open southern border, Americans are suffering, we’ve got crime on the rise because of that open border, and the people in D.C. seem more interested in helping Ukraine than helping out America. And I’ve got a problem with that.

Speaking of Ukraine, you’ve talked about being against what you call “blank checks” to Ukraine. Talk to me about your China policy and how it relates or contrasts with Ukraine. For example, if you’re elected and China invades Taiwan, what do you think the U.S.’s response should be?

We could sit here and look at every hypothetical and that could happen before I’m elected. We don’t know what’s going to happen. So I’m not going to sit and speak on everything that I would do. But I will tell you this: We need to take a stronger stance against China. We need to start investing in America. I support President Trump. I thought his foreign policy was brilliant in many ways and he put us on stronger footing on a global stage. Not only that, he improved our economy with what he was doing. So we had our enemies, if you want to call them that, who were afraid of him, which is not a bad thing. And we also had our our economy strengthened when he worked hard to support American companies and to bring companies back, reshoring them. You’ve got to stop punishing companies who do want to reshore to America, and we need to start encouraging that, because we’ve got to build back our economy. We’ve got to build back good, strong jobs, can’t just be all jobs in the service industry. We have young people your age, who want to actually have a shot at the American dream. And many people your age don’t have a job, probably as good as yours. And then they’re looking around: Like, how is this going to be attainable? So we need to make sure we have good strong American companies and make sure we can bring some of this manufacturing back without punishing the company who wants to reshore. And I agree with President Trump on that.

What was the biggest or hardest lesson you learned from your gubernatorial campaign? Any reflections on that campaign?

I think that we had a great campaign that was about bringing our state together and making it safer, more secure, securing the border. And we’re going to do that now in the U.S. Senate.