A Trust Exercise Underway in Arizona
Gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake and the politics of perspective
WHILE DRIVING DOWN a Phoenix highway this week, I saw a digital billboard promoting Kari Lake for governor. It promised lower inflation and gas prices, two things over which governors have little control. Other highlights of Lake’s platform: 2020 election denial, conspiracy theories about ballots in Maricopa County, stunts to frustrate reporters, and coyness around accepting the outcome of this year’s midterms.
Lake’s extreme politics aren’t unique. More than half of Republican candidates for the House, Senate, and major state-wide offices have questioned or outright denied the results of the 2020 elections. Many candidates – and particularly nonincumbent Republicans such as Lake – are simultaneously accusing mainstream media of bias while sharing links to unreliable news sources.
What is unique – and I suspect the reason media coverage of Lake’s campaign has been so extensive, both locally and nationally – is that she was a longtime T.V. journalist. After 22 years behind the nightly news desk at Fox 10 in Phoenix, she relinquished the anchor chair and took her warm, polished persona to hard-right politics. Much like the former president, it’s hard to look away.
The question is how one goes from respected journalist to political candidate whose fundraising page screams “The Fake News media WILL NOT stop us.” And perhaps more importantly: what happens to us as the audience when the perspective so suddenly shifts?
This kind of cognitive dissonance happens in Susan Choi’s innovative novel Trust Exercise, winner of the 2019 National Book Award for Fiction, which intentionally undermines its own plot with shocking point of view changes.
Trust Exercise begins as a seemingly straightforward coming-of-age story about two teenagers, Sarah and David, engaged in a tumultuous romance. They attend a performing arts high school where their drama teacher, Mr. Kingsley, conducts a range of bizarre-to-creepy classroom exercises. He also seems to pay inappropriate attention to some students, including Sarah, though the narrator only insinuates this. We barely notice the narrator, actually. They’re an invisible presence guiding us through the story, pretty typical stuff.
In a way, news anchors are also third person narrators. They’re reporting the news to us, telling us what’s happened in a smooth, familiar way that doesn’t draw attention to themselves. On television their narration is by turns serious and lighthearted, depending on the subject matter. Though they’re speaking directly to us, the anchors take a backseat to the news of the day. We don’t notice third person narrators, in fiction or otherwise, unless they want to be seen.
Kari Lake very much wants us to notice that her perspective has changed. She’s transformed from a third-person narrator to vociferous first person. Gone is the impartial journalist. In a video released three months before the launch of her gubernatorial campaign, Lake delivered a narrative about why she decided to resign from Fox 10:
“In the past few years, I haven’t felt proud to be a member of the media... I found myself reading news copy that I didn’t believe was fully truthful or only told part of the story, and I began to feel that I was contributing to the fear and division in this country by continuing on in this profession.
“As I close this chapter of my career, there will probably be some hit pieces written about me. Not everyone is dedicated to telling the truth. Thankfully, many of you have figured that out. I promise you, if you hear it from my lips, it will be truthful.”
Here are a few claims Lake has made about the 2020 election since launching her campaign, all of which have been debunked:
The 2020 election was “corrupt” and “stolen”; President Biden did not receive 81 million votes.
740,000 ballots in Maricopa County had no “chain of custody” and shouldn’t have been counted.
Maricopa County accepted 2,000 mail-in ballots after election day.
We’re 132 pages into Trust Exercise when the narrative is flipped. We turn the page and – boom – here’s a new narrator for part two. Karen, who uses the first person “I,” had been only a minor character in the Sarah-and-David saga. It’s now some years after the events of part one, and Karen is standing outside a bookstore where her high school classmate is giving a reading. That classmate, we come to understand, is the person we know as Sarah. Karen tells us everything we’ve read up until this point – spoiler alert! – was fiction. It was a novel Sarah wrote. But this story, Karen tells us, is reality. She’s going to give it to us straight.
Lake is essentially saying the same thing. That news I reported to you – it wasn’t real. Now that I’ve freed myself from the media – the “enemy of the people,” the “right hand of the Devil” – what I’m saying to you is real. (Never mind that she also no longer must operate under a journalistic code of ethics that prioritizes openness to evidence or collaborate with copyeditors, fact checkers, or a human resources department.)
In Trust Exercise, as with most first-person narrators, Karen is persuasive. She gives us new information. She says she knows the real story behind Sarah’s novel. And we’re inclined to believe her. Why? We’re confused and want someone to explain what’s going on. Our friend Karen isn’t hiding behind the supposed impartiality of the first section. And – critically – we have no other voices to indicate otherwise.
In the Arizona race, we do have other voices, though none with the same poise or enviable eye makeup. At a McCain Institute event in Tempe, Rep. Liz Cheney campaigned against Lake, saying, “If you care about the survival of our republic, we cannot give people power who will not honor elections.”
Katie Hobbs, the Democratic candidate and current Arizona Secretary of State, called the race “sanity versus chaos.” But she also refused to debate Lake, saying she didn’t want to give her opponent the platform; this lack of Hobbs’ voice has turned into its own campaign issue.
I hope it doesn’t spoil the end of Trust Exercise to say that there’s a third act, one even more disruptive than the second, and it gets the last word. There is, in the world of the novel, truth to discern. It’s complicated, and it requires some work on our part, but it’s there if we’re willing to see it.
Back in Arizona, a reporter introduced herself to Lake before a scheduled interview – presumably with hello, I’m Ruby Cramer, a reporter with The Washington Post – and this happened:
“Is this paper owned by — who is it owned by?” [Lake] asks.
Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, owns The Washington Post.
“Oh, I thought so,” she says, her voice turning hard.
“You don’t give anybody fair coverage, unfortunately.”
She walks away, and a gaggle of Lake staffers are waiting, laughing.
“That was gonna happen. That was gonna happen,” one of them says.
“She’s actually like that all the time. She’s real!” says another.
“It’s not staged,” he added. “It’s real.”
After a 30-year career as a journalist, during which she interviewed multiple presidents, it is virtually impossible that Lake didn’t know who owns the Post.
It was almost certainly staged. It wasn’t real.
In Arizona, Lake is conducting her own trust exercise. Will it succeed? As of October 28, FiveThirtyEight has her slightly favored to win.