Arizona US Senate candidate Kari Lake had a sharp response on Thursday after former president Bill Clinton called her an “attractive” but substance-free backer of Donald Trump.
"As a middle-aged woman, I’m flattered," Lake said at a Trump rally in Tempe on Thursday. "I thought I was a little too old for him. Doesn’t he like interns?"
The comment was a reference to Clinton’s 1995-to-1997 White House affair with then-intern Monica Lewinsky, who was 22 at the time it began, 27 years Clinton’s junior.
The quip was in response to remarks from Clinton as he campaigned for Kamala Harris in Arizona.
The former president accused Lake and her campaign against congressman Ruben Gallego of being a “beautiful microcosm” of the Trump versus Harris race, which Clinton described as a contest between flash and substance.
“You’ve got a person that grew up under sometimes-challenging circumstances, who made something of his life, running against someone who is physically attractive but believes that politics is a performance art. And where, like JD Vance, she has to be prostrate before the master," Clinton said this week in Phoenix.
Lake has been a vocal campaign surrogate of Trump, and has come in for criticism that she’s adopted Trump-style denialism tactics like refusing to concede her 2022 gubernatorial loss.
Lake has filed multiple, thus far unsuccessful challenges to the state’s 2022 gubernatorial election results.
The Senate race in Arizona is attracting outsized attention nationally, as it’s taking place in one of the seven key presidential swing states.
Former President Bill Clinton calls Republican Kari Lake “physically attractive” while campaigning for Kamala Harris in Arizona pic.twitter.com/G2E9rBYpQq
— New York Post (@nypost) October 24, 2024
Trump was in the state on Thursday, and made a speech in Tempe comparing immigrants to human “garbage,” the latest in a long-running history of him describing migrants in dehumanizing terms.
Biden won Arizona in 2020, the first time a Democratic had accomplished such a feat since Clinton’s 1996 re-election.
The race was one of the centers of Trump’s attempts to overturn the eleciton results.
As we note in our Independent poll tracker, the Harris and Trump campaigns are running so closely in the swing states it is too close to call.
