While introducing Donald Trump at his Flint, Michigan, town hall Tuesday, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R) appeared to take a swipe at Vice President Kamala Harris for not having her own biological children.
The jab came in the form of a brief anecdote that Sanders, who served as press secretary in Trump’s administration, shared about tearing up while helping her daughter get ready for a dance.
″‘It’s okay, mommy, one day you can be pretty too,’” Sanders said her daughter told her. “So my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
She continued: “You would think after four years of straight failure, she would know a little humility. Unfortunately, she doesn’t.”
Sanders has faced criticism for at least one major policy move affecting children: Last year, she signed a bill rolling back numerous child labor protections across Arkansas, including wiping out a requirement that employers obtain work certificates for children under the age of 16. Her office called it an “arbitrary burden on parents.” The month before she signed the bill into law, a food sanitation business was fined $1.5 million for employing minors in dangerous meatpacking jobs, including in Arkansas.
While Harris is a stepmother of two children with her husband, Doug Emhoff, Republicans have attacked her for not having biological children. In 2021, Ohio Sen. JD Vance, now Trump’s vice presidential nominee, questioned Harris’ ability to lead. In a segment on Fox News that’s since gained widespread attention, he called her one of the Democratic Party’s “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made, and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Though he’s since claimed his comments were misinterpreted, childless adults have been one of Vance’s favorite rhetorical targets for years. In another example, during an appearance on a podcast in 2020, he claimed that being childless “makes people more sociopathic and ultimately our whole country a little bit less mentally stable.”
In fundraising emails, he’s also brought up “radical childless leaders” and “childless Democrats who are miserable in their own lives and want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”