In a series of White House personnel announcements made Monday, former President Donald Trump has tapped his close political ally Kari Lake to serve as the next United States Ambassador to Jamaica, while also nominating Cameron Hamilton to take the helm of the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA).
Lake, a former local television journalist who built her political profile around embracing Trump’s unsubstantiated 2020 election fraud claims, most recently led the Trump administration’s push to restructure the federally funded international broadcaster Voice of America (VOA), part of the U.S. Agency for Global Media (USAGM). If the U.S. Senate confirms her nomination, the appointment will bring an end to her tenure as the top official overseeing USAGM, the agency that supervises VOA’s global operations.
During her time at USAGM, Lake acted under a presidential executive order to initiate layoffs for hundreds of employees at the 83-year-old international broadcaster. Trump has long positioned himself as a outspoken critic of VOA, repeatedly claiming the outlet holds a systemic left-wing ideological bias. Founded in 1942, VOA currently distributes news content across the globe in nearly 50 different languages.
Shortly after the White House made the nomination public, Lake issued a statement of gratitude on social media, emphasizing her existing familiarity with the Caribbean nation. “Jamaica is a country I know very well, full of incredible people,” she wrote, adding that if confirmed, she looks forward to advancing three core priorities: deepening the bilateral partnership between the United States and Jamaica, advancing U.S. national interests in the region, and expanding the longstanding people-to-people friendship between the two nations.
Lake’s path to the nomination is rooted in her rise in Republican politics following a 22-year career as a anchor at a Phoenix-based Fox News affiliate. She left journalism in 2021 to launch a Republican bid for Arizona governor, a race she ultimately lost. During that campaign, she gained Trump’s backing by aggressively repeating his false claims that the 2020 presidential election was marred by widespread fraud. After her own gubernatorial defeat, she similarly refused to accept the results, filing multiple unsuccessful lawsuits to overturn the outcome and making fraud claims that led to a high-profile defamation lawsuit against her. She later mounted an unsuccessful campaign for an Arizona U.S. Senate seat before being tapped to lead VOA shortly after Trump returned to office in 2024.
Alongside Lake’s nomination, Trump also announced his pick of Cameron Hamilton to lead FEMA, an agency that has faced significant internal turmoil in recent months. Hamilton’s return to the top FEMA post comes roughly one year after the Trump administration removed him from the same role, after he pushed back against discussions of potentially closing the agency and defended its core function. Currently, FEMA is still recovering from the fallout of a 75-day partial shutdown of the Department of Homeland Security, which concluded on April 30, and has already seen a large-scale exodus of departing employees in recent months.