Recent articles by Marc Thiessen and Anne Applebaum have heavily criticized Kari Lake, the former Arizona GOP Senate candidate who is now CEO of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. They say she has broken that agency. Thiessen, in particular, argues that Lake’s actions have greatly weakened U.S. messaging to the Iranian people amid looming conflict. Lake says otherwise — that she was simply doing what the president tasked her to do.

Still, this disagreement encapsulates the tensions between President Donald Trump’s domestic and foreign policy agendas.

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In a March 2025 executive order, Trump directed cuts to perceived waste and anti-Trump bias within USAGM supervising organizations such as Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty. When Lake became CEO last July, she didn’t hesitate, quickly taking a sword to the heart of these agencies by slashing their workforces and operations to the bone. This earned praise among Make America Great Again supporters and bolstered Lake’s credentials as a Trump loyalist. As Trump put it in late 2025, “Kari........

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