huckabee sanders gov
SEE WOD4? fmrly spox
merri ok
oddly, no content 5/18, no node
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prolly neglected, she opted not to run for gov, but now she is 2022
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3 26 erika kirk
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AN 10 26
Sarah Sanders blasts 'manufactured' GOP outrage in furious Fox News interview
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rww
09/30/2026
- Jesse Leon Rogers is offering "Training for Reigning" courses to help right-wing Christians "restore rule and righteousness in the earth."
- Sean Feucht claims the people of Minnesota "have been hijacked with toxic empathy" for Muslims and LGBTQ people.
- White nationalists were outraged over an ad from Gov. Sarah Huckabee-Sanders touting the state's welfare-to-work requirement and James Fishback was eager to capitalize by rushing to Arkansas to hold a press conference.
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AN 6 26
Arkansas Business paper tears apart Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ 'performance art'
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AN 6 26
How these red state governors are trying to replace Pride Month - Alternet.org
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an 4 26
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as President Donald Trump’s press secretary before getting elected as Arkansas governor, is being slammed by one of her state’s most prominent editors-in-chief — and based on opposition from her fellow Republicans, the criticisms may challenge her rumored presidential ambitions.
“If you’re a red-state governor with an eye on 2028 and a prison you want to build has stalled, what do you say after a disappointing primary election?” wrote Arkansas Advocate editor-in-chief Andrew DeMillo on Sunday. “If you’re Sarah Huckabee Sanders, you return to your greatest hits.”
He added, “The Arkansas governor’s 52-minute State of the State address amounted to fan service highlighting stances that appeal to fellow Republicans. She also steered clear of the only proposal she’s made that’s faced serious legislative resistance.”
The proposal in question is an $825 million prison complex including 3,000 new beds in a rural area with no water infrastructure or paved roads. Despite being a Republican like Trump himself, Sanders’ prison is facing staunch opposition from fellow Republicans who say it is wasteful and inefficient. In response she moved to oust two of them, Bryan King and Ronald Caldwell, in subsequent GOP primaries. Despite Sanders’ considerable political clout, those challenges failed.
“From advocating further income tax cuts to repeating her complaints about ‘woke indoctrination’ in schools, Sanders opted against any sweeping new policy initiatives or any fights within her own party,” DeMillo wrote. “Her message to GOP lawmakers as they kicked off the legislative session was simple: Pass my budget so I can call you back to the Capitol to cut taxes.”
It is likely she will get her wish or at least something closely approximating to it, DeMillo added. Despite the scandal associated with her prison, “Sanders is far from a precarious position politically, with a Legislature that’s approved nearly every one of her agenda items,” DeMillo wrote. “Sanders is in a comfortable position for reelection with millions in the bank and avoided a primary challenger despite divisions emerging in her party.”
He added, “And her majority on the state Board of Corrections appears to be clearing the way for her to end the legal battle with the panel over who runs the state prisons.”
Yet DeMillo concluded that while Sanders has not lost Arkansas, she may have lost the White House.
“Already a national figure from her time as President Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sanders is taking the steps you’d expect from someone eyeing a White House bid,” DeMillo observed. “The governor insists that she’s focused on the job as governor. But let’s be clear: governors don’t plan to release books the week after a midterm election and two years before a presidential election just because they like writing.”
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MMA
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mma 3 26
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders — a MAGA Republican who became her state’s first female chief executive after receiving an endorsement from President Donald Trump— was kicked out of a restaurant in her own state on Friday the 13th last week.
Sanders was told to leave a Little Rock restaurant called The Croissanterie after spending more than an hour eating there with her State Police Executive Protection Detail, according to a report by the local news affiliate TVH-11. In a written statement, the restaurant’s owners explained they were "surprised and uncertain how best to respond" when they saw Sanders and her detail had entered their establishment. Because they soon ordered and started eating, they felt compelled to allow them to stay, but soon began to feel uncomfortable.
According to the restaurant, after a little more than an hour they politely asked Sanders and her guests to leave. Sanders and her detail claim they were told her presence was “making employees threatened and uncomfortable because of her political views."
"Arkansans are known for their warm hospitality, and while that restaurant certainly doesn't meet that standard, my administration will continue to focus on lifting Arkansans up, not tearing others down with discrimination and hate,” Sanders explained in a subsequent statement. The restaurant, by contrast, said that while they felt “regret” for needing to “make a difficult decision," they ultimately “stand by our choice to support our employees and guests."
They added that despite not wanting to deny her service because of her different political beliefs, allowing her to stay "risked being perceived as a lack of support for the community that makes up" the restaurant’s staff.
The Croissanterie is a pastry-based restaurant with food produced by two chefs, Wendy Schay and Jill McDonald, who are certified by the American Culinary Federation, America's premiere chef association. The website described the restaurant as “unstoppable with the savory pastry combination” and the chefs as “born and raised in Arkansas” whose menu is “not only built upon the authentic French pastries, but it also has a Southern cuisine comfort that we all crave.”
Sanders has been very controversial since assuming office as Arkansas governor, which she won following a stint as Trump’s press secretary. Her controversies include alienating conservatives in her own party by proposing an $825 million state prison, opposing local Republicans who oppose her policies, urging state high schools and colleges to open Turning Point USA chapters, spending $19,000 on a lectern and trying to circumvent term limits for her judicial picks by encouraging them to run for each other’s seats. That said, it is unclear which specific political issues upset the staff at The Croissanterie.
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AN 3 26
Democrats flip GOP seat in deep-red Arkansas after suing Huckabee Sanders to force vote
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an 2 26
Former Trump official enrages Arkansas Republicans over money pit proposal - Alternet.org
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an 2 26
Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, a former press secretary to President Donald Trump, is working with two of her judicial appointees to get around the Arkansas Constitution's term limits.
How? Instead of running for reelection to their own seats, they are running for each other's seats.
In doing so Sanders and the two judges, Nick Bronni and Cody Hiland, are undermining the “constitutional goal” behind that provision in the first place, Bolts Magazine reports.
The provision “is certainly reflective of the populist sentiments found in the Constitution of 1874 that wanted to limit gubernatorial power” Jay Barth, Hendrix College professor emeritus, told Bolts Magazine. The law was created as "a device to lessen the power of the governor" and the Sanders/Bronni/Hiland approach amounts to "something of a workaround.”
By contrast University of Arkansas law professor Joshua Silverstein, though admitting that “obviously they're running for each other's seat because they can't run for their own seats,” dismissed this fact as a “triviality.”
"You're not going to get politicians, judicial or otherwise, to not take advantage of an opportunity to stay in office,” Silverstein said. “It's not a big deal."
Bronni and Hiland are able to get away with seeking other’s seats while seeming to pursue “reelection” because, in February, the Arkansas legislature passed a bill called HB1223 that allows interim judges to brandish their new title on the ballot even when technically they are supposed to be facing voters “for the first time” for that office.
"I just don't think it was really solving a problem, and it looked like it was more maybe doing favors for people,” Representative Richard Womack, one of two Arkansas Republican legislators to vote against HB1223, told Bolt Magazine. "That was my gut reaction looking at it: This just looks somewhat likely anyway that we're trying to help certain people on the ballot."
This is not the first time that Sanders has been criticized for her seemingly casual approach to the law. In September Sanders received pushback from her own party when she scheduled a special election to fill a state senate seat in November instead of June. Arkansas law requires a governor to schedule special elections within 150 days after a legislative seat becomes vacant unless it is “impractical or unduly burdensome” to do so. In 2024 Sanders was also criticized when an audit revealed “potential legal violations” because she spent $19,000 on a lectern.
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an 11 25
The Arkansas Supreme Court denied Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ request to stay two lower court orders requiring her to set earlier special election dates for two legislative vacancies Wednesday evening.
The court also rejected a request by Attorney General Tim Griffin’s office to consolidate the two cases.
The identical orders, which did not explain the justices’ reasoning, granted the state’s motions for expedited consideration of its appeals of the orders handed down by two Pulaski County Circuit judges last month. Associate Justice Rhonda Wood would have granted the request for a faster briefing schedule, according to the order. Associate Justice Barbara Webb did not participate.
“I am disappointed by the rulings and will continue to vigorously defend the Governor and Secretary of State,” Attorney General Tim Griffin said via a spokesperson. Griffin’s office is representing Sanders and Secretary of State Cole Jester in both lawsuits.
Sanders set special elections for the Senate District 26 and House District 70 seats earlier this year, after Sen. Gary Stubblefield of Branch died and Rep. Carlton Wing of North Little Rock resigned to lead Arkansas PBS in September. However, her decision to set the special elections for June 2026 — after the Legislature’s fiscal session in April — immediately generated bipartisan criticism and lawsuits from SD 26 and HD 70 voters, as well as the Democratic Party of Arkansas, who said it would deprive them of representation for important legislative deliberations on issues like education and prison funding.
Under Arkansas law, the governor is required to schedule a special election date to fill a vacancy within 150 days unless she found it was “impracticable or unduly burdensome” to do so. Further, if the election couldn’t be held within 150 days, it had to be held on the earliest practicable date after that statutory deadline.
A June 9 election would be 252 days after Wing’s Sept. 30 resignation — or 152 days after the 150-day mark. The average number of days a special election has been held after the 150-day mark since 2011 is about 25 days, according toan unpublished Senate memo.
Judges in both lawsuits sided with the plaintiffs and ordered Sanders to schedule the elections earlier, finding that the June 2026 dates were impermissible under state law and the U.S. and Arkansas constitutions, though the reasoning varied between the cases. In the HD 70 case, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Shawn Johnson explicitly ordered Sanders to set the general special election for March 3, 2026. In the SD 26 case, Pulaski County Circuit Judge Patricia James said Sanders needed to set it “as soon as practicable” after the 150-day deadline, but did not specify when.
Sanders subsequently appealed those orders to the Arkansas Supreme Court, asking the justices to consolidate the cases into a single appeal and put the lower court decisions on hold.*Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.
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an 8 25
Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders and U.S. Secretary of Education Linda McMahon toured two Arkansas schools Tuesday as part of McMahon’s “Returning Education to the States” tour.
They were joined by Arkansas junior U.S. Sen. Tom Cotton and state Education Secretary Jacob Oliva on tours of Little Rock’s Don R. Roberts Elementary School and Saline County Career and Technical Campus in Benton.
“I wanted to be in places where I could actually see some of the things that I talked about at work,” McMahon said in Saline County. “Not necessarily everybody has to go to a four-year school. There are places like this that would be sponsored from the tech field, where students can earn dual credits, go right into community college, go right to work in the field. … This is the secret sauce.”
McMahon and Cotton both alluded to the need to rid schools of red tape and bureaucracy. President Donald Trump has said he plans on shuttering the U.S. Department of Education to give states more power over education and wants McMahon to put herself out of her own job — a plan McMahon has supported.
Sanders also touted the expansion of the state’s Educational Freedom Account program to around 50,000 students in Arkansas this year. The program, which is open to all Arkansas students for the first time this fall, provides state funding for allowable education expenses, such as private school tuition.
While Sanders and McMahon focused on the positive during their two stops, a handful of protestors outside Roberts Elementary held signs criticizing the state’s LEARNS Act and McMahon. The wide-ranging 2023 law made several changes to the state’s K-12 education system, including creating the school voucher program and raising the state’s minimum teacher salary to $50,000
“The parents of [Roberts Elementary] were incredibly upset when the letter was sent home yesterday … that she would be here,” said Courtney Jackson, a mother of two. She said she didn’t want her children to find out she just stood by while public education was under attack.
“The parents of this school do not want her here,” Jackson said.
Alison Metzler, another protesting parent, said she kept her kids home from school Tuesday because she didn’t want them to be used as “political pawns” by Sanders and McMahon.
“Sarah Huckabee and McMahon are actively trying to dismantle public education, and they do not care about public education. This is all for show, and it’s, it’s just disgusting,” Metzler said. “If Sarah Huckabee really stood with public education, her kids would go to public schools. Instead, they go to the private school a mile down the road, and she’s defunding these exact schools.”
Metzler also criticized Sanders and McMahon for visiting the “whitest affluent school in the Little Rock School District, a top school in the state.” She said she loved the school as a parent with a child who attended, but that if Sanders was really committed to public education, she would be visiting struggling schools in other parts of Little Rock.
“[Roberts Elementary] is not a representation of what the whole district is as a whole,” she said.
Arkansas Advocate is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Arkansas Advocate maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Sonny Albarado for questions: info@arkansasadvocate.com.
it’s just disgusting
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an 4 25
Denied: Sarah Sanders begs Trump to reconsider federal disaster aid
AN APRIL 2025
Arkansas Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders — who was once President Donald Trump's White House press secretary — is now urging him to reverse his administration's denial of her disaster relief request.
Rolling Stone reported Wednesday that Sanders' initial request for assistance from the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) following severe storms in her state was denied. She's since written a separate letter begging her former boss to intervene and reverse the denial.
“The severe storms and tornadoes that occurred on March 14 and 15, 2025, produced catastrophic impacts across the state. The sheer magnitude of this event resulted in overwhelming amounts of debris, widespread destruction to homes and businesses, the tragic loss of three lives and injuries to many others. Less than three weeks later, Arkansas was once again devastated by a second wave of severe storms, tornadoes, and a generational flooding event,” Sanders wrote.
READ MORE:(Opinion) Wall Street seems to have decided Trump is mentally unstable
“Without the support of a Major Disaster Declaration, Arkansas will face significant challenges in assuming full responsibility and achieving an effective recovery from this event," she continued. "I have determined that the severity and magnitude of these storms exceed the capabilities of the State and affected local governments to respond adequately. As such, supplemental Federal assistance is crucial.”
Obtaining federal disaster relief may be difficult for even ruby-red states like Arkansas during Trump's second term. He has previously floated getting rid of FEMA entirely, following the destructive wildfires in Southern California earlier this year. And a recent report found that his administration's cuts to FEMA have since put hurricane-prone red states like Florida and Texas in a perilous position as hurricane season begins in June.
FEMA found itself embroiled in politics even before Trump's victory last November. After Hurricane Helene devastated much of the South in October, agency personnel found themselves under attack following threats from local residents in North Carolina. Misinformation about FEMA first responders proliferated after the storm, and resulted in aid being temporarily paused while the agency made efforts to keep its employees safe.
The Heritage Foundation's Project 2025 manifesto called for FEMA to be gutted and eventually privatized, in addition to privatizing the National Flood Insurance Program (NFIP) which was authorized by Congress in the 1960s.
READ MORE:'Alito sounds nervous': Even notorious Trump enablers are sounding the alarm
Click here to read Rolling Stone's full report (subscription required).
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rww
04/18/2025
by
- David and Tim Barton were on hand when Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed a bill mandating the display of the Ten Commandments in every public school classroom in Arkansas.
- Intercessors for America is so elated by the White House's Easter message that they are encouraging activists to send President Donald Trump a note of thanks: "Please know that I am regularly praying for you, Mr. President--and also for your family, staff, and the rest of your administration. Like you, I believe that God spared your life to use you to accomplish His godly purposes in our nation."
- Jackson Lahmeyer says that attending the Easter dinner at the White House was the "TIME OF MY LIFE."
- Rep. Mary Miller explains why she approves of Trump's deportation policy: "He loves and cares about our country like a father and he wants to protect us."
- Finally, Shane Vaughn wants to see Sen. Chris Van Hollen prosecuted for violating the Logan Act by traveling to El Salvador to meet with Kilmar Abrego Garcia.
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an 10 24
dad just did trump thing?
Gov. Sarah Sanders drags Arkansas State Police into her politics
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an 10 24
60 min says not aspire to humble not 50’s
// childless cat lady?
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an 9 24
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), 2024 GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump's running mate, has been drawing widespread criticism for his "childless cat ladies" comments of 2021 and 2022 and for attacking prominent Democrats — including Vice President Kamala Harris, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-New York) and Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — for not having biological children.
Many of Vance's critics, however, have reminded him that Harris has two stepchildren via her husband Doug Emhoff and that Buttigieg and his husband are adoptive parents.
Now, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders is drawing criticism for echoing Vance's rhetoric. And some of the criticism is coming from a Never Trump conservative and former GOP congressman: MSNBC host Joe Scarborough.
READ MORE:Vance asked an ex-professor to delete his 'scathing rebuke' of the GOP from the internet: report
Sanders, during a speech in Flint, Michigan, told the MAGA crowd, "Not only do my kids serve as a permanent reminder of what's important — they also keep me humble…. So, my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn't have anything keeping her humble."
During MSNBC's Wednesday morning, September 18 broadcast, host Mika Brzezinski commented, "What is their obsession with women without (biological) children?" — adding that Sanders' comments are offensive to many women. And Scarborough responded, "It's just cruelty…. They are playing for a very small subset that relishes the cruelty…. It's so patently obvious that it's just to be hateful. They just do this to be hateful."
Scarborough pointed out that Harris often speaks lovingly about her stepchildren, arguing, "They know the truth. They have heard Doug's children's mom say time and time again that they are all part of a blended family."
The Never Trump conservative, who is supporting Harris in this year's presidential election, sarcastically added, "You know, not everybody, I guess, is perfect like Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Donald Trump. I guess, Donald Trump and JD Vance — maybe they're just perfect in this respect."
READ MORE:House Republican in swing district distances himself from Trump's 'unfounded theories'
*Watch the full video below or at this link.
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jason Rapert Says Members of the Arkansas State Library Board ‘Probably Should Be Tarred and Feathered’
[ | August 26, 2024 rww
In 2023, Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointed Christian nationalist activist and a zealously anti-LGBTQ and anti-choice former state senator Jason Rapert to the state library board. Predictably, his tenure on the board has been anything but smooth, with Rapert regularly lashing out at his fellow board members for refusing to support his far-right agenda and complaining that he’s been experiencing a “hostile work environment” because he is “a Christian white male.”
During a recent episode of his “Save The Nation” program, Rapert’s frustrations boiled over as he called on the state legislature to abolish the library board entirely, declaring that his fellow board members “probably should be tarred and feathered.”
“The Bible says, ‘Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord,'” Rapert said. “Well, when you have leaders that are not allowing the nation to be blessed of God, they’re not doing godly things, you need to replace them, get rid of them, get them out of office, put people back in there that will. You’ve got schools where they’re fighting over allowing homosexual, LGBTQ material to be utilized to groom children. … There needs to be people that will take up and sue anybody that is allowing that sort of thing to go on in our school districts and in our libraries.”
“I serve on the Arkansas Library Board,” Rapert continued. “I cannot get those other board members to take a stand to stop some of the smut that is in those libraries. It’s ridiculous. I’ve made motions trying to do it, and I am at a point now where it’s going to take so long to get new board members on there, if I were the legislature, I would run a bill just to abolishing the Arkansas State Library Board and let it be reconstituted. Put new people in there, or maybe they just need to call on people to resign if you’re not going to do your job.”
“When you don’t protect children in America, you have no business serving in a public official’s role,” Rapert griped. “You have no business serving on a board, you have no business serving in a state legislature, you have no business being an elected official at any level if you’re not going to protect children. When you get to a point that you’re so confused and you’re so completely jaded that you cannot make a decision to keep smut or pornographic stuff [away from] children, you’ve lost your ever-loving mind and you need to be replaced. You need to be taken out. Some people say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about violence.’ No, I’m not talking about violence. You need to be run out on a rail. You probably should be tarred and feathered. That’s what they used to do in America is they would tar and feather those kind of folks. Get rid of them. Teach them a lesson. Get them out of office.”
Jason Rapert Says Members of the Arkansas State Library Board 'Probably Should Be Tarred and Feathered' from Right Wing Watch on Vimeo.
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an 5 24
republican Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the second of former White House press secretaries in the Trump Administration, made the transition from federal to state government when she was elected governor of Arkansas in the 2022 midterms.
Huckabee is a major name in that state: her father, Mike Huckabee, served as Arkansas governor before hosting a show on Fox News.
But according to Politico reporter Dana Liebelson, some of Sanders' local critics believe Sanders is focused on national politics to the point of neglecting Arkansas.
READ MORE:Sarah Huckabee Sanders under fire after audit reveals 'potential legal violations' on $19K lectern
In an article published on May 17, Liebelson stresses that the 41-year-old Sanders "has brought her experience in Trump's Washington back with her."
"She shows little trust in the media," Liebelson explains. "She cruises between events in a black SUV with tinted windows, accompanied by a state police detail in suits and a comms director who worked for Trump and his 2020 presidential campaign. At open-press events, she takes so few questions, Arkansas reporters are fatalistic about the idea of asking many."
Liebelson continues, "Instead, as befits a national figure with national ambitions — she's shown up on lists as a possible running mate for Trump — she reaches her audience on her terms, including on Fox News, or Instagram and Elon Musk's X, where she has over 2.3 million collective followers."
One of the Arkansas Republicans who is raising concerns about Sanders is someone her father knows well.
READ MORE:Sarah Huckabee Sanders evades questions on who paid for her 6-figure Super Bowl VIP trip
Rex Nelson, who served as communications director for Mike Huckabee when he was governor, said he has observed a growing frustration with Sanders among Arkansas residents.
Nelson told Politico, "We are in a weird position of having a governor in this state who doesn't seem to have much interest in governing Arkansas."
READ MORE:Sarah Huckabee Sanders appointee resigns after documents reveal he had sex with a minor
*Read Politico's full report at this link.
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date?
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https://boingboing.net/2023/05/25/state-lawmakers-want-children-to-work-in-bars-on-school-nights-to-fill-labor-shortage-caused-by-people-refusing-to-work-for-a-pittance.html
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an raw 4 23
writing for the Arkansas Times, Austin Bailey and Lindsey Millar trashed thestate's new "MAGA" governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, once former President Donald Trump's press secretary, and the GOP-dominated state legislature, saying that they "stomped on the poor" and disadvantaged groups without solving any real problems for their constituents.
"Supercharged by a mountain of MAGA money and an even bigger ego, Gov. Sarah Sanders called all the shots," they wrote. "The supermajority Republican legislature raced to do her bidding. Their rubber stamp on all of Sanders’ priorities (vouchers, prison expansion, tax cuts) marked a vast departure from the last administration, when Asa Hutchinson’s pro-gun, pro-life record failed to impress an increasingly insane right-wing extremist legislative branch.Where Hutchinson recoiled from drama, Sanders pursued it, eager to throw Trumpian blows of staggering cruelty if it landed her on Fox News. Her foot soldiers didn’t seem to mind Sanders’ obvious bid to get out of Arkansas and back on the national stage as soon as possible. It wouldn’t have mattered if they did. Republican lawmakers knew to expect a primary challenger to knock them out of office if they dared veer out of lockstep."
"Saying it’s the worst session ever feels trite, too flip to capture the brutality heaped on all but the wealthiest and most insulated," they continued. "Not only did lawmakers do nothing to protect Arkansans from our chart-topping gun death rates, they voted instead to protect the gun companies from us. A new law passed this session bars state entities from investing with firms that eschew the industry profiting off our homicide epidemic. Protecting children got lots of lip service, but no real action. Requiring proof of age and identity to get a social media account or view online porn, laws passed allegedly to protect kids, will be a boon for identity theft but won’t likely shield many innocent eyes. Threatening librarians with jail time if they allow young people to view or check out books about sex is not only a direct assault on free speech, but also a surefire way to maintain Arkansas’s spot as the state with the most teen pregnancies."
Through all of this, they noted, the state also rolled back child labor laws and refused to compromise on one of the most extreme abortion bans in the entire country — while planning to erect a "monument to the unborn" with taxpayer money.
Sanders has faced personal embarrassment throughout the session; previous reporting detailed how a job application to the state required people to describe something they admired about her, which was quickly walked back as soon as it was reported.
"Arkansas’s wealthy and its businesses are safer than ever, having easily secured tax cuts by simply pointing fingers at transgender children and woke librarians, then grabbing the cash when no one was looking," they concluded. "Most of us didn’t get much of anything beyond the insult that the schools we send our children to — schools that anchor our communities — are hotbeds of inadequacy and indoctrination that anyone with the means should flee at their first opportunity. Is this really what Arkansas voted for?"
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https://boingboing.net/2023/04/05/sarah-sanders-demands-socialist-federal-money-to-pay-for-tornado-damage.html
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an 2 23 child labor
https://www.alternet.org/sarah-huckabee-sanders-2659557134/
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an raw 3 23
a group of quick-witted teenagers managed to insert their objections to an Arkansas education bill over the repeated attempts by a Republican legislator to shut down their arguments.
The state Senate ultimately approved Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' education bill, known as the LEARNS Act, which would implement school vouchers that opponents say would "usher in a new era of segregation" in Arkansas schools, and students from Little Rock Central High School found a way to speak out against the wishes of state Sen. Jane English, reported the Arkansas Times, which described the students' maneuvering as having successfully "outwitted" the legislator.
“I’m sorry, you just don’t get to talk on the bill," English told the students. "If you want to talk on this amendment, specifically things that are in this amendment, you’re free to do that, but you cannot speak on the bill.”
The students had missed two previous hearings on the measure that were held during school hours, and English told them the bill had already passed both chambers so they could only comment on a six-page amendment that had been sent back to the education committee for debate.
“I’d like to speak on the amendments, and how they do not go far enough to tear down and decimate this bill,” said student Ethan Walker, over repeated interruptions by English. “These petty little wording rearrangements don’t do anything to address how bad this bill actually is."
Another student, sophomore Rhone Kuta, worked around English's objections by referencing a specific line on a specific page, as the Republican chair repeatedly interrupted him.
:{:{"Where it deletes ‘and’ and substitutes ‘or,' the reasons I believe this amendment is bad is, this should actually say we are deleting the voucher program on section 63 because the voucher program absolutely reallocates resources from the working class Americans and Arkansans and reallocates it to the upper class," Kuta said.}:
}:
He was able to work in criticism of a ban on teaching anti-racism content before English sent him back to his seat, and other students who followed managed to roll through English's objections by pointing to specific passages and calling for more sweeping amendments to the bill.
"The amendment that says page 90 line 3, delete ‘and’ and substitute ‘or,’ is insufficient because there’s nothing that amends the clause that is talking about having school choice policies that will make it so that students who are minority groups will be left in public schools while privileged students go to private schools," said senior Gryffyn May.
The adults who followed the students were given their full two minutes of public comment without much trouble from English, and Little Rock School Board member Ali Noland told the committee chair she had inadvertently given the teens a much larger platform by attempting to silence their criticism.
“By talking to them and cutting them off in this way, believe me, you are giving them much more of a platform than you would have if you had just listened to their criticism of the amendment in the first place," Noland said. "They showed up after school on their own time to tell you these amendments do not satisfy their concerns.”
an 2 23
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President Joe Biden has yet to say whether or not he plans to seek reelection in 2024. But during his 2023 State of the Union address on Tuesday night, February 7, Biden focused heavily on his economic record, bragging that unemployment in the United States is lower than it has been in more than half a century and calling out Republicans who want to "sunset" Social Security and Medicare.
Biden’s speech was followed by a GOP rebuttal from Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was the Trump Administration’s second of four White House press secretaries (Sanders came after Sean Spicer and before Stephanie Grisham). While the economy dominated Biden’s speech, Sanders’ rebuttal was clearly aimed at MAGA culture warriors. And liberal economist Paul Krugman, in his February 9 column for the New York Times, argues that the dramatic contrast between Democrat Biden’s speech and Republican Sanders’ response speaks volumes about the priorities of the United States’ two main political parties.
"President Biden was evidently feeling feisty on Tuesday," Krugman writes. "In particular, he kept baiting Republicans with the suggestion that a number of them are threatening Medicare and Social Security — which they are. Delivering the Republican response, Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed that the United States is divided between two parties, one of which is mainly focused on bread-and-butter issues that matter to regular people, while the other is obsessed with waging culture war. This is also true. But she got her parties mixed up — Republicans, not Democrats, are the culture warriors who’ve lost touch with ordinary Americans' concerns."
Sanders’ speech, according to **Krugman, was quite "revealing" — and not in a way that made the Republican Party look good.
"Sanders’ speech was a diatribe against wokeness," the New York Times columnist observes. “This is standard GOP fare these days and exactly what you’d expect in, say, an address at the Conservative Political Action Conference. But this wasn’t a CPAC speech; it was meant to address the nation as a whole and rebut the president of the United States…. Focus groups suggest that most people don’t know what 'wokeness' means, or why they should fear it.”
Krugman continues, "But wait, it gets worse. Sanders seemed to say — although her syntax was a bit garbled — that woke policy was responsible for 'high gas prices' and 'empty grocery shelves.' So, first of all, how does that work? How did critical race theory cause a global spike in crude oil prices, which raised prices at the pump all around the world? How did it snarl supply chains and cause a worldwide shortage of shipping containers?"
Comparing Biden and Sanders’ February 7 speeches, Krugman stresses, one saw a contrast between a Democratic president who got into concrete specifics on the U.S. economy and a Republican who didn’t.
"Just to be clear, there are culture warriors on the left, and some of them can be annoying even to social liberals," Krugman notes. "But few have significant power, and they certainly don’t rule the Democratic Party, which isn’t locked into a closed mental universe, impervious to inconvenient facts, whose denizens communicate in buzzwords nobody else recognizes. Republicans, however, do live in such a universe — and what Sarah Huckabee Sanders showed us was that they can’t step outside that universe even when they should have strong political incentives to sound like normal people and pretend to care about regular Americans’ concerns."
READ MORE: 'Insulting': Right-wingers torch Sarah Huckabee Sanders' State of the Union response
Read Paul Krugman’s full New York Times column at this link (subscription required)
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oops 2x
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an 2 23 igor salon
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Prominent supporters of former President Donald Trump on Wednesday criticized Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders' response to President Joe Biden's State of the Union address.
Sanders, who served as Trump's White House press secretary, delivered a rebuttal to the president's speech that largely focused on Republican culture war issues and accused Biden of surrendering his presidency to a "woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is."
"Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn't start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with Big Tech to strip away the most American thing there is—your freedom of speech. That's not normal. It's crazy, and it's wrong," Sanders said, later adding that the "dividing line in America is no longer between right and left — it's between normal or crazy."
Former chief Trump strategist Steve Bannon lit into Sanders' speech on his "War Room" podcast on Wednesday, criticizing her for failing to mention Trump's name.
"It was an insult to President Trump. She does not exist politically if it was not for President Trump," he said.
Bannon called Sanders' speech "terrible."
"If you're gonna give a counter speech, you gotta talk about important issues," he said. "Don't get me wrong. The wokeism is very important. But it's not quite the heart of the matter right now, right? It's not the heart of the matter. She is not–and the reason is she's just not–she's not intellectually capable of going to the heart of the matter, right? Let's be blunt."
Bannon made the comments while speaking to longtime Trump booster Lou Dobbs, who was fired from the Fox Business Network for spreading false election claims.
Dobbs said the speech was a "great insult" to Trump, complaining that Sanders did not even mention his name when she discussed going on a Christmas visit to Iraq with the former president and the first lady.
"It looked like the Governors Association had written that speech and aligned themselves with Ron DeSantis. It was a shame," Dobbs complained.
"You are right this was like written by Ron DeSantis and the entire RGA," Bannon agreed.
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\u201cLou Dobbs tells Bannon that Sarah Huckabee Sanders speech tried to undermine Trump in favor of Desantis: \u201cI think that was a great insult to Trump - not mentioning his name. To not mention his name, to talk about \u2018new leadership\u2019 .. it was a shame.\u201d\u201d
— Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6 (@Ron Filipkowski \ud83c\uddfa\ud83c\udde6) 1675883535
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Sanders also drew criticism from her hometown newspaper over her "snarling about wokeness and the radical left."
"It got pretty dark and weird," Austin Bailey wrote in an editorial at the Arkansas Times. "A word salad of talking points and name calling, with some attempts at folksy relatability thrown in, Sanders' rebuttal to Biden's State of the Union address was light on policy, heavy on menace."
Conservative commentator Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, contrasted Biden's speech focused on "the economy and concrete issues" with Sanders' "deep plunge into dystopian culture wars."
"These annual canned rebuttals usually come off as tone-deaf," she wrote in an editorial at the Bulwark, "but with Sanders, there was an additional, unexpected contrast with Biden. She spoke for a dreary 15 minutes — all scripted according to teleprompter, with no audience. Biden spoke for more than an hour, with a teleprompter in front of plenty of hostile Republicans. Biden, 80 years young, rolled with it, tackling every tough subject on his agenda, inviting Republicans to join him at every turn. Sanders, 40 years old, droned on, her entire speech devoted to demonizing Biden."
Former Republican strategist Steve Schmidt accused Sanders of "abusing" viewers with "MAGA lies."
"Sarah Huckabee Sanders positioned herself as the voice of a rising generation of Americans. No thank you," Schmidt said on his
. "It was stale. It was old. It was an ugly speech from a lying governor who is unfit for any type of public service."
https://www.mediamatters.org/fox-news/gop-rebuttal-bidens-state-union-address-was-indistinguishable-fox-news-monologue
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arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ Tuesday night rebuttal to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address shows that Republican politicians seem completely unable to deliver a message aimed at audiences beyond the party’s Fox News base.
Sanders opened and closed her speech with personal anecdotes, and peppered it throughout with the sort of false and misleading claims about the Biden administration’s record and policy agenda that typify GOP State of the Union rebuttals. But she devoted the spine of her speech to themes that might be incomprehensible to those not steeped in the narratives of the right-wing press.
In Sanders’ telling, Biden’s surrender to the “woke mob” is the greatest threat the country faces. She criticized the president for “weakness” and declared him “unfit to serve as commander in chief.”
“While you reap the consequences of their failures, the Biden administration seems more interested in woke fantasies than the hard reality Americans face every day,” she said. “Most Americans simply want to live their lives in freedom and peace, but we are under attack in a left-wing culture war we didn’t start and never wanted to fight. Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols.”
Unhinged denunciations of Biden and depictions of the nation — and conservatives in particular — as under siege by all-powerful leftists are familiar fodder for fans of Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, and Laura Ingraham. Fox hosts loved the speech for reflecting back their own talking points, and viewers watching on the right-wing network might have been nodding along.
But Republican politicians can speak to them anytime via a friendly interview with one of the network’s prime-time stars. This was a chance for the party to reach beyond its base to people who do not reflexively support GOP candidates, and Sanders fumbled it.
Biden, meanwhile, used his address to speak to the whole country. He opened by congratulating the Republican leaders of the House and Senate and highlighting his administration’s past bipartisan successes with the help of his “Republican friends.” Biden pointed to potential areas of common ground over the next two years, even as he vowed to oppose the Republican Party’s most extreme positions. “We have to see each other not as enemies, but as fellow Americans,” he said toward the end of the speech. “We’re good people, the only nation in the world built on an idea.”
Given what will likely be his biggest audience of the year, Biden tried to reach people outside his base. The Republicans didn’t respond in kind.
It is perhaps unsurprising that, offered the opportunity to reach the entire country, Sanders instead seemed focused on stroking the pleasure centers of Fox viewers. She was a fixture on the network as Donald Trump’s White House press secretary, then provided the same pro-Trump analysis from the network’s payroll as a Fox contributor. Following the example of her father, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who worked as a Fox contributor in between GOP presidential runs, Sanders built her profile at the network, then ran successfully for his old job.
But Sanders’ address is part of a broader sickness in the Republican Party. Its leadership has become increasingly subjugated by Fox hosts and other right-wing propagandists who win ratings and money with crude demagoguery aimed at keeping viewers from dropping off during commercial breaks.
Trump honed his political brand with a regular weekly segment on Fox & Friends, then relied on Fox hosts as his White House kitchen cabinet. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, his most prominent likely challenger for the 2024 presidential nomination, owes his political ascension to the network and has courted its hosts and viewers.
Every Republican politician, from the Republican National Committee chair to congressional leaders to would-be candidates, needs to manage their relationship with the network. Republican congressional investigations are aimed at Fox-friendly topics like Hunter Biden,while its members use hearings to parrot the white supremacist conspiracy theories frequently heard on the network.
It is not good for the Republican Party that Fox’s stars are presidential advisers and party kingmakers with international influence. Its focus on keeping the party’s most vitriolic elements happy keeps it from making appeals to the rest of the country. That’s fine if you govern a red state like Arkansas, where the greatest threat to your political future likely comes from a challenger who’s even further to the right. But it’s why the party keeps losing winnable elections in swing states.
related of course fox hired sarah
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promo for potus run? an 2 23
On Tuesday night, February 7,
was fired up when he gave his 2023 State of the Union address. Biden, with Democratic Vice President Kamala Harris and Republican House Speaker Kevin McCarthy standing behind him, vigorously defended his economic record. The president took some shots at far-right MAGA extremists yet called for bipartisanship and made it clear that he wasn’t attacking all Republicans.
Biden’s SOTU was followed by a rebuttal from Republican Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who served as White House press secretary under former President Donald Trump. Never Trump conservative Amanda Carpenter compares Biden’s speech and Sanders’ rebuttal in an article published by The Bulwark on February 8, and she has nothing good to say about the rebuttal.
Biden’s speech, Carpenter explains, “boiled down to this: economy, economy, economy,” and “was a little raucous.”
READ MORE:Read: President Joe Biden’s 2023 State of the Union Address
“That’s not to say Biden didn’t stumble a little in his delivery,” Carpenter observes. “He did, as he typically fumbles somewhat over his remarks — a fact often attributed to his longtime stutter. But Biden — who, at 80, is older than any previous president — parried with the hecklers in the chamber during his hour-plus speech in what, at times, felt like an impromptu, interactive performance. He almost seemed to enjoy it, too…. Theatrics aside, Biden accomplished his biggest task: showing everyone he’s still got it.”
The conservative pundit adds, “He did it mainly by touting his record — ‘Unemployment rate at 3.4 percent, a fifty-year low’ — and exhorting Congress to help him ‘finish the job.’”
Carpenter goes on to say that while Biden focused heavily on “the economy and concrete issues,” Sanders’ rebuttal was a “deep plunge into dystopian culture wars.”
“These annual canned rebuttals usually come off as tone-deaf,” Carpenter argues, “but with Sanders, there was an additional, unexpected contrast with Biden. She spoke for a dreary 15 minutes — all scripted according to teleprompter, with no audience. Biden spoke for more than an hour, with a teleprompter in front of plenty of hostile Republicans. Biden, 80 years young, rolled with it, tackling every tough subject on his agenda, inviting Republicans to join him at every turn. Sanders, 40 years old, droned on,her entire speech devoted to demonizing Biden.”
READ MORE: Lauren Boebert slams Marjorie Taylor Greene for bringing a white balloon to Biden’s SOTU address
Read Amanda Carpenter’s full Bulwark article at this link.
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an 2 23 badash
trump White House press secretary turned Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders has been chosen by Speaker Kevin McCarthy and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell to deliver the Republican response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address next week.
Speaker McCarthy hailed Huckabee Sanders, 40, as the nation’s “youngest governor” on Thursday afternoon in remarks to reporters (below).
the former press secretary was quickly endorsed by Trump, ran a campaign carefully crafted away from the press, and has no relevant experience to run a state.
“Can Sarah Huckabee Sanders be elected governor without ever taking questions or talking specifics about public policy?” Arkansas Times’ senior editor Max Brantley asked rhetorically last summer, calling her campaign “stealth.”
READ MORE: ‘Absolutely Repulsive’: Some House Republicans Are Now Wearing an Assault Weapon Lapel Pin
“Her inauguration marks the first time in 42 years Arkansas will have a governor without any experience in elected office,” the AP noted last month.
“She clearly has some national aspirations,” University of Arkansas political science professor Janine Parry told the Associated Press last month. “In order to fulfill those, it’s likely she’ll have to show some capacity for governance.”
According to Speaker McCarthy, she has already accomplished a lot in her first 23 days as governor.
Although McCarthy did not offer any specifics, CNN did: “Within 48 hours of being sworn in as governor, Sanders signed a flurry of executive orders, with one targeting critical race theory ‘to prohibit indoctrination’ in schools and another banning the use of the term ‘Latinx’in official state documents.”
After the announcement was made, Huckabee Sanders tweeted, “I’m honored to have the opportunity to address the nation after the State of the Union on Tuesday. What America needs – and what Republicans are offering – is a return to common sense and a commitment to the ideals that made America the land of the free and home of the brave.”
But in a joint statement with McCarthy and McConnell, Huckabee Sanders took a much different tone.
“I am grateful for this opportunity to address the nation and contrast the GOP’s optimistic vision for the future against the failures of President Biden and the Democrats. We are ready to begin a new chapter in the story of America – to be written by a new generation of leaders ready to defend our freedom against the radical left and expand access to quality education, jobs, and opportunity for all.”
Responding to the news, critics online pointed to Huckabee Sanders’ history that was fraught with controversy and false claims in the Trump White House.
Indeed, conservative critic Charlie Sykes on MSNBC pointed to Huckabee Sanders’ ties to Trump, telling Andrea Mitchell that Huckabee Sanders was “a firehose of misinformation and disinformation” during the “Trump era,” and noted she has been “prioritizing the culture war” in her short tenure as governor.
“Yet another data point about the Republican party not moving on from the Trump years,” he added.
watch the videos above or at this link.
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no lnx
Washington — Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders on Tuesday sought to draw distinctions between her fellow Republicans and President Biden following his State of the Union address, characterizing the differences between the GOP and Democrats as extending beyond policies, but rather a choice between "normal and crazy."
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Sanders, who in November was elected as Arkansas's first female governor, delivered the Republican response to Mr. Biden's speech from the governor's mansion in Little Rock. She ran for governor after serving as White House press secretary under former President Donald Trump.
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"The dividing line in America is no longer between right or left," Sanders said. "The choice is between normal or crazy. It is time for a new generation of Republican leadership."
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Sanders claimed Mr. Biden and his Democratic colleagues have "failed" the American people, and declared that it's "time for a change."
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[Sarah Huckabee Sanders Delivers GOP Response To State Of The Union
Arkansas Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivers the Republican response to President Biden's State of the Union address in Little Rock, Arkansas, on Feb. 7, 2023.]
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"America is the greatest country the world has ever known because we are the freest country the world has ever known, with a people who are strong and resilient," she said.
Sanders focused her response on many of the "culture war" issues that have motivated conservatives, and largely bucked the message of unity and bipartisanship that wound through Mr. Biden's address. Instead, she attacked the president as the "first man to surrender his presidency to a woke mob that can't even tell you what a woman is."
"In the radical left's America,Washington taxes you and lights your hard-earned money on fire, but you get crushed with high gas prices, empty grocery shelves, and our children are taught to hate one another on account of their race, but not to love one another or our great country," she said.
Sanders criticized Mr. Biden for his border policies, claiming they have led to a flood of fentanyl crossing the border, and accused the administration of being beholden to "woke fantasies."
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"Every day, we are told that we must partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship their false idols, all while big government colludes with big tech to strip away the most American thing there is — your freedom of speech," she said. "That's not normal. It'scrazy and it's wrong."
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Declaring Mr. Biden "unfit" to serve,Sanders sought to contrast Republicans' agenda with that of Democrats, and vowed the GOP will resist political correctness to "do what's right." She went on to preview an education package to be unveiled Wednesday that will increase Arkansas teachers' starting salaries.
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"It's time for a new generation to lead.This is our moment. This is our opportunity," she said.
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Sanders concluded her speech by claiming that Americans' freedom is "under attack" and again declaring that it's time for a change in the nation's leadership.
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"A new generation of Republican leaders is stepping up, not to be caretakers of the status quo, but to be change-makers for the American people," she said. "We know not what the future holds, but we know who holds the future in His hands. And with God as our witness, we will show the world that America is still the place where freedom reigns and liberty will never die."
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Those who are selected to deliver the response to the president's State of the Union are generally viewed as rising stars in political circles. GOP Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, who is mulling a presidential run, delivered the response in 2021 and former U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley, who is expected to announce her White House bid next week, delivered it in 2016.
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Rep. Juan Ciscomani of Arizona delivered the Republican response in Spanish.
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https://www.alternet.org/the-right-wing/sarah-huckabee-sanders-2659264308/
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Arkansas Republican Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders delivered the Republican Party’s official response to President Joe Biden’s State of the Union Address and was panned from all sides.
Many on the left were angered and outraged as she attacked LGBTQ and Black Americans in a lengthy speech that was tall on culture war rhetoric and extremism and short on policy or vision.
But even those on the right seems exasperated with her remarks.
Lou Dobbs, the far-right-wing culture warrior and former Fox Business anchor, told former Trump White House chief strategist Steve Bannon that Huckabee Sanders’ speech was “unacceptable,” and, “an insult to President Trump” for “not mentioning his name,” as Media Matters reports.
“Sarah Huckabee went to Iraq with the President,” Dobbs recalled, which the former White House press secretary spent an unusually large portion of her remarks discussing, “and the First Lady in the dark of night, for Christmas, with our troops.”
“To not mention is name, to talk about ‘new leadership’ – it looked like the Governor’s Association had written much of that speech, and aligned themselves with Ron DeSantis,” Dobbs lamented, calling it a “lack of respect to POTUS.”
Bannon, convicted on two federal criminal contempt charges, agreed that her remarks were “an insult to Trump.”
“She does not exist, politically, if it’s not for President Trump,” Bannon continued. “I thought the speech was terrible.”
“If you’re going to give a counter speech, you’ve got to talk about important issues. Don’t get me wrong, the wokeism is very important. But it’s not quite the heart of the matter right now, right? It’s not the heart of the matter. She is not — the reason is she’s just not — she’s not intellectually capable of going to the heart of the matter, right? Let’s be blunt.”
“This was like written by Ron DeSantis and the entire RGA,” Bannon said, referring to the Republican Governors’ Association.
Watch below or at this link.
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DeSantis’ critics fear that Sarah Sanders will 'import' his 'bad education' policies to Arkansas
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In Arkansas, Gov.-Elect Sarah Huckabee Sanders is turning to the Ron DeSantis playbook for public education,
announcing that she will be nominating Florida education official Juan Oliva to head the...
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an 721
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/07/sarah-sanders-vaccine/
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blames biden and harris?!
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fox replaces huckabee run for governor
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https://www.alternet.org/2021/03/kayleigh-mcenany-fox-news/
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https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/article/disappearing-data/#introduction
used flawed CALCULATIONS TO ARGUE THAT CURTAILING GREENHOUSES GASES WASN'T WORTH THE COST
02.04
The U.S. government has a calculation for the “social cost of carbon,” which measures the environmental, economic and public health damages associated with emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Federal agencies use this figure to evaluate the costs and benefits of new climate regulations. At the end of President Barack Obama’s tenure in office, that figure was $40 per metric ton (a number environmental groups argued was too low). The number is expected to increase as the planet experiences rapid global warming.
But shortly after taking office, President Donald Trump signed an executive order that scrapped the Obama-era calculation, putting the economic harm of emitting climate-warming carbon dioxide far lower, at between $1 and $7 per ton. A July report by the Government Accountability Office determined that Trump’s calculations of the social cost of carbonare about seven times lower than previous federal estimates. And while Obama-era estimates placed future climate damages at $82 per ton of carbon by 2050, Trump’s calculation put it at just $11, the report found.
The lower figure allows the administration to argue that the upfront costs of reining in greenhouse gas emissions outweigh any future benefit to property, agriculture, coastal ecosystems and human health.Trump's EPA has used the number to justify weakening environmental safeguards and to roll back Obama-era regulations that slashed carbon pollution from power plants and new vehicles. For example, the EPA claims that rescinding the Clean Power Plan would save the U.S. $33 billion in “avoided costs” by 2030, a calculation it came to by looking only at the domestic costs of carbon pollution and by downplaying the impact that emissions will have on future generations.
Meanwhile, the Trump administration has led a campaign to undermine the validity of climate modeling so it can ignore possible environmental threats when evaluating new infrastructure, such as pipelines, power plants, highways and airports.When more than a dozen federal agencies published a sobering 1,600-page report in November 2018 that warned of the dire threat of global climate change, then-White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders claimed the assessment was “based on the most extreme model scenario” and “not data-driven.” Trump flatly denied the science: “I don’t believe it,” he told reporters.
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an 121
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Watch: Sarah Sanders busted live on-air for lie claiming Trump personally conducts military death notifications
David Edwards / Raw Story September 8, 2020
Former White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders was forced to backtrack on Tuesday after first claiming that President Donald Trump personally informs the family after military service members are killed…
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Professional liar’ Sarah Sanders shredded for defending Trump over comments disparaging military: ‘No credibility’
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement September 7, 2020
Many Americans pushing back against former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and her ardent defense of President Donald Trump amid multiple news reports he has disparaged America’s military service members, veterans, and…
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trump urged Sarah Sanders to ‘take one for the team’ after Kim Jong-un winked at her
Travis Gettys / Raw Story September 2, 2020
President Donald Trump urged Sarah Huckabee Sanders to “take one for the team” after North Korean leader Kim Jong-un appeared to wink at her during a 2018 summit. The former…
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mma 720
- Carlson told his audience,“You will need a protector. That protector must be the Republican Party.” Carlson also called Black Lives Matter protests a disease: “Minneapolis was our Wuhan.”
- There are now 10 QAnon-supporting congressional candidates who have made it to the November elections -- and every indication is that more are on the way.
- Sarah Sanders said that Trump doesn't get credit for his COVID-19 response: “He got government out of the way."
- Ben Shapiro claimed that the hit movie Get Out is racist against white people. Shapiro also said that Trump tweeted a video with his supporter shouting "white power" because the sound was off on his computer.
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Despite supposed Fox policy, contributor Sarah Huckabee Sanders preps future political run with GOP events
02/03/20 1:21 PM EST
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1119 an
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders: ‘I’ve been called’ to run for office — but ‘I don’t like being called a liar’
David Badash / The New Civil Rights Movement
Huckabee Sanders may get a home in the governor's mansion, despite her well-documented lies.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/10/furious-former-white-house-official-blasts-trump-video-of-church-slaughter-mass-shootings-are-not-jokes/
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former White House official blasts Trump video of church slaughter: ’Mass shootings are not jokes!’Tom Boggioni / Raw Story
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no lnx
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Furious former White House official blasts Trump video of church slaughter: ’Mass shootings are not jokes!’
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Written by Tom Boggioni / Raw Story October 14, 2019
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A CNN panel was equally appalled and furious about a video that was shown at the conservative conference held at a hotel owned by Donald Trump that showed the president slaughtering church worshipers who represented CNN, NPR, MSNBC and Black Lives Matter in the “Church of Fake News.”
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Speaking with hosts John Avlon and Alisyn Camerota, former President Bill Clinton communications director Joe Lockhart seemed visibly angry that it was shown at a conservative sanctioned event that featured Sarah Sanders and Don Trump Jr. as speakers.
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Asked by Avlon, “Has there been anything remotly like this in American political history or something truly new and dangerous?”
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“This is something truly new,” Lockhart responded. “We haven’t had the internet for that long of time, if you’re going over the sweep of history. that’s what allows this to be distributed widely. But we’ve had presidents who have denounced the media. We’ve had every president in the history of the country who has at times wanted to denounce them and probably had thoughts in their head about what they’d like to do.”
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“But kept them inside their head,” Avlon prompted.
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“This isn’t a case where some over-enthusiastic supporter did something,” Lockhart continued. “This is Nixonian in the sense that the campaign was sanctioning dirty tricks like Nixon did. Here the president is not blameless — he has retweeted these people’s memes. He has retweeted memes with things hitting CNN reporters in the head — they’re not funny.”
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“What struck me from this video is this all happened in a church. The president — probably the biggest part of his base are churchgoers, evangelicals,” he added. “And they are now making fun of someone coming in and committing vicious murders in a church. I don’t care what the president does, he’s already lost his credibility on this. People who went to church yesterday who are going to wake up this morning and wake up and see the president and his supporters think it’s funny to commit violence in a church. ”
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Watch below:
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pension plan?
Department of Agriculture launched an absurd pro-Trump podcast; the first guest was Fox contributor Sarah Sanders.
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Sarah Huckabee Sanders argues the solution to mass shootings is to stop kicking her out of restaurants
Former Donald Trump press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders wants the conversation about the epidemic of mass shootings in America to be “less about guns."
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Huckabee Sanders lands new gig as a Fox News contributor
David Badash / The New Civil Rights MovementAugust 22, 2019
Huckabee Sanders has been weighing a run for governor of Arkansas.
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stopped holding press conf?
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resigning?
https://www.alternet.org/2019/06/stephanie-grisham-has-an-extensive-history-of-lying-to-reporters-that-makes-her-the-perfect-choice-for-trumps-new-white-house-press-secretary/
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Stephanie Grisham has an extensive history of lying to reporters. That makes her the perfect choice for Trump’s new White House press secretary
Stephanie Grisham has an extensive history of lying to reporters. That makes her the perfect choice for Trump’s new White House press secretary CNN
written by Alex Henderson June 27, 2019
President Donald Trump has found a replacement for outgoing White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders: Stephanie Grisham, who has been serving as First Lady Melania Trump’s communications director since March 2017. British journalist Mehdi Hasan, who now lives in Washington, D.C., asserts in a June 26 article for The Intercept that Grisham is ideal for the position — and he doesn’t mean that in a good way. Grisham, Hasan stresses, will fit right in with the Trump Administration because she is a “demonstrable liar.”
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The U.K.-born Hasan is known for not pulling punches, but he is also known for offering plenty of evidence to back up his assertions. And he explains, in detail, why he considers Grisham untrustworthy.
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Hasan recalls Grisham’s statements when Melania Trump visited migrant children who were in detention in McAllen, Texas in June 2018 and boarded the plane wearing a jacket that said, “I really don’t care. Do U?”
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Grisham, Hasan recalls, insisted, “It’s a jacket. There was no hidden message.” But in October 2018, the first lady acknowledged that the jacket “was kind of a message, yes” — and that message was meant “for the people and for the left-wing media who are criticizing me. And I want to show them that I don’t care.”
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Hasan emphasizes that “what matters is that Grisham was willing to so brazenly lie about such a trivial issue — and has never acknowledged it or apologized.”
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Today’s visit w the children in Texas impacted @flotus greatly. If media would spend their time & energy on her actions & efforts to help kids – rather than speculate & focus on her wardrobe – we could get so much accomplished on behalf of children. #SheCares #ItsJustAJacket
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— Stephanie Grisham (@StephGrisham45) June 21, 2018
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Hasan also recalls that in July 2018, President Trump “falsely claimed that he had arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016, the day of the Brexit referendum, and had predicted the outcome of the vote.” That was a false statement, Hasan notes, because “the president had arrived in the country the day after the referendum, on June 24” — and Grisham went along with the lie by insisting to a BBC reporter that Donald Trump arrived in the U.K. on June 23, 2016 rather than June 24, 2016.
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Grisham tweeted, “I was there. June 23.”
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He did. It actually is true. I was there. June 23. https://t.co/5xrbSks1Xd
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— Stephanie Grisham (@StephGrisham45) July 13, 2018
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Grisham’s history of blatant dishonesty, Hasan writes, makes her “the perfect appointment to an administration of pathological liars.” And he includes Sanders in that generalization, asserting that during her two years as White House press secretary, the daughter of former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee has told “lie after lie after lie.”
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“There don’t seem to be any consequences for Trump advisers who tell lies or break the law,” Hasan writes, stressing that dishonesty is considered a virtue — not a liability — in the Trump Administration. And considering that dishonesty is encouraged rather than discouraged in the Trump Administration, Hasan writes, Grisham will be the ideal successor to Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
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https://www.alternet.org/2019/05/the-white-house-enacts-a-mass-purge-against-journalists-access-and-subjects-reporters-to-sarah-sanderss-whims-report
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Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders has quietly implemented a new standard that has resulted in what one journalist calls “a mass purge” of “almost the entire White House press corps.”
Huckabee Sanders revoked the press credentials, known as a “hard pass,” for all Washington Post reporters assigned to cover the White House, and many others. That would be six correspondents, and Dana Milbank, a veteran journalist who writes an opinion column at the Washington Post, and is the first to report this story.
“After covering four presidents, I received an email informing me that Trump’s press office had revoked my White House credential,” Milbank writes in The Washington Post Wednesday evening.
“It was part of a mass purge of ‘hard pass’ holders after the White House implemented a new standard that designated as unqualified almost the entire White House press corps, including all six of The Post’s White House correspondents,” Milbank continues. “White House officials then chose which journalists would be granted ‘exceptions.’ It did this over objections from news organizations and the White House Correspondents’ Association.”
It is not known which reporters or news outlets were granted exceptions.
“The Post requested exceptions for its six White House reporters and for me, saying that this access is essential to our work,” Milbank adds. “The White House press office granted exceptions to the other six, but not to me. I strongly suspect it’s because I’m a Trump critic. The move is perfectly in line with Trump’s banning of certain news organizations, including The Post, from his campaign events, and his threats to revoke White House credentials of journalists he doesn’t like."
What is this new standard the White House has concocted?
Milbank reports it is “a clear — if nearly impossible — standard: No credentials to any journalist who is not in the building on at least 90 out of the previous 180 days — in other words, seven of every 10 workdays. The White House wouldn’t provide numbers, but it appears most of the White House press corps didn’t qualify for credentials under the new standard, including regulars for The Post and the Associated Press.”
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press dinner michele eye makeup from ashes of burned books?
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oh, she IS gone (cf steve miller on TV b/c no one else will defend baby jails etc)
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https://www.alternet.org/2018/12/sarah-sanders-has-struggled-to-find-a-new-job-as-the-white-house-press-office-becomes-night-of-the-living-dead-report/
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Back in June, CBS reported that White House Press Secretary Sarah Sanders and her deputy Raj Shah were already planning to leave the administration by the end of the year. Sanders never denied the report. But with January just around the corner, no official announcements of their departures have been made, even as other top officials are shown the door or scramble for the exits of their own accord.
So why are they hanging on? According to Yahoo News, Sanders and Shah are struggling to find work elsewhere.
A stunning development, given the low unemployment rate.
Sanders reportedly declined to respond to specific questions about her plans but said she is currently “traveling.”
Yahoo News pointed out that Sarah has all but stopped delivering press briefings. What were once called “daily” briefings have now essentially become “monthly” briefings — with emphasis on the “brief.”
The outlet also observed that Shah has removed the title “deputy white house press secretary” from his Twitter bio.
Meanwhile, it seems the press shop itself has been nearly abandoned. This is not much of surprise — Trump has long considered himself to be his best spokesperson, and he has proven incapable of sticking to any coherent media strategy. And part of the problem, an anonymous source told Yahoo News, is that no one credible wants to work for the White House press office.
“No professional in good standing will even interview for a job,” the source said. “It’s a zombie comms shop. Night of the living dead.”
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/sarah-huckabee-sanders-out-heres-look-6-her-most-egregious-lies-2018
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Fact-Checking the Attacks
The administration and its allies appear to be repeating one main talking point in their effort to discredit the National Climate Assessment: They claim, inaccurately, that the report represents only a worst-case scenario. It actually reflects a broad range of possible future outcomes—along with an enormity of direct, present-day observations of the impacts of global warming.
The naysayers are trying to build that falsehood on a number of misleading assertions:
- :{:{White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders said "even Obama's undersecretary for science didn't believe the radical conclusions of the report that was released."}::{ This appears to be a reference to Steven Koonin, a former chief scientist for BP, who spent 18 months as an undersecretary in the Obama administration's energy department.Koonin has long maintained climate science is not "settled," and has argued the government should have a red-team/blue-team debate—an idea championed unsuccessfully by former EPA Administrator Scott Pruitt.}:
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- :{:{Sanders also said that the National Climate Assessment "is based on the most extreme modeled scenario, which contradicts long-established trends." But in fact the report considered the full range of climate scenarios set out by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, looking at what will happen if carbon emissions decline, if they stabilize, and if they continue to grow unabated. As Hayhoe noted inher Twitter thread, "the observed increase in global carbon emissions over the past 15–20 years has been consistent with higher scenarios.}::{"}:
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- :{The :{Trump EPA put out a news release it called a "fact check" on Wednesday, citing an article on the conservative website The Daily Caller to try to bolster an assertion by Wheeler that Obama administration's science adviser John Holdren instructed the report's authors in 2015 to look at worst-case scenarios. "Mr. Wheeler's insinuation is absolutely false," Holdren, now at Harvard, responded in a statement. "Assertions by high officials of the Trump administration that these are 'worst case' reports are nothing more than a flimsy attempt to discredit the careful and comprehensive work of some of the best climate scientists in the country, inside and outside of government," Holdren said.}:
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- :{:{Wheeler, a former coal industry lobbyist, said the administration might intervene in future climate reports. "Going forward, I think we need to take a look at the modeling that's used for the next assessment," Wheeler said. But the report underwentseveral rounds of technical and policy reviewby the 13 federal agencies involved. There was a series of regional engagement workshops that reached more than 1,000 people in over 40 cities, with listening sessions, webinars and public comment. Anexpert external peer review of the whole report was performed by a committee of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine.}:
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- Roger Pielke Jr., a political scientist at the University of Colorado at Boulder, Colorado, took issue with the reportfor including a figure that was widely quoted in the media: that U.S. GDP could take a 10 percent hit by 2100 due to climate change. The estimate was derived from an innovative, cutting-edge modeling of climate impacts on the U.S. economy published in the journal Science. Pielke, who often says he agrees with the core science on global warming but disputes how it is applied, argued this headline-grabbing data point should not have been included, since it reflected a scenario of more global warming than is commonly reckoned in modeling. Robert Kopp, a climate scientist at Rutgers University and co-author of the Science paper, said the team purposefully took into account the unlikely—though not impossible—scenario at the end of the charted curve because of its potentially large consequences. "We were deliberately trying to include tail risks, not just 'most likely' outcomes, because consideration of tail risks is crucial to sound risk management," Kopp said in an email.
The arguments of the Trump administration have been amplified in media coverage in the aftermath of the report's release.
Danielle Pletka of the conservative think tank American Enterprise Institute prefacing her remarks with the caveat, "I'm not a scientist," before delivering a blizzard of inaccuracies on Sunday's "Meet the Press" on NBC aimed at undermining the report's credibility. Pletka said the last two years have been the coldest on record, when in fact they have been among the warmest. She said the U.S. "is not using dirty coal anymore," when in fact about 30 percent of U.S. power is still generated by coal and only one U.S. coal plant has technology in place to capture some of its carbon emissions.
Hayhoe pre-taped an appearance on CNN's Anderson Cooper 360 show to talk about the National Climate Assessment on Tuesday, but her appearance—though posted online—was bumped from the TV broadcast. CNN instead aired a segment with paid contributor Rick Santorum, a former Republican U.S. senator from Pennsylvania, who accused climate scientists of stoking alarm to make money.
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Sarah Sanders Will Lie for Trump Because She Thinks She's 'Defending God's Chosen Leader': Ex-Baptist Pastor
lengthy New Yorker profile of White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders tries to answer why someone who is a devout Christian can justify repeatedly lying on behalf of President Donald Trump.
In part, the profile concludes that Sanders is willing to lie for the president because he has actually kept the promises he made to evangelical Christians, especially regarding the appointment of hard-line conservative judges.
The piece cites Washington Post religion reporter Michelle Boorstein, who says that evangelicals are happy to have a president who will do what they say -- a stark contrast to past politicians who "have broken promises to Christian conservatives."
It then quotes former Baptist pastor Brian Kaylor, who believes most evangelicals see Trump's 2016 election victory as a divine intervention that justifies excusing almost any kind of immoral behavior by the president.
"It’s more than you are defending a politician or even a President," he explained. "You are defending God’s chosen leader for this time."
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https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/09/24/sarah-huckabee-sanders-trumps-battering-ram
ref no lnx
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A Reporter at Large
September 24, 2018 Issue
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Trump’s Battering Ram
What does the press secretary believe in—other than defending the President’s every word?
By Paige Williams
President Donald Trump, who accuses the media of being “the enemy of the people,” has urged his staff to “fight” with journalists. In Sanders, his press secretary, he has found an eager pugilist.Photograph by Mark Peterson / Redux for The New Yorker
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, says that she never set out to be “the face of anything.” Most of her thirty-one predecessors came from careers in journalism or communications, but Sanders’s background is in Republican campaign management and strategy. A conservative Christian, she worked only with similarly minded candidates, such as the Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty and Senator Tom Cotton, of Arkansas. The other Arkansas senator, John Boozman, also hired Sanders, and he told me that she was adept at turning complex policy material “into words that people can understand without falling asleep.” These words were often pointed—Sanders whittled political messages into shivs.
In 2010, she ran Boozman’s successful Senate campaign. He is pro-life, but when his opponent, the Democratic incumbent Blanche Lincoln, suggested, inaccurately, that he believed abortion is immoral even for pregnancies resulting from sexual assault, Sanders staged a blistering counterattack. Within hours, Boozman had declared that Lincoln, in a “preposterous” and “shameful” move, had framed him as an “advocate for rapists’ rights.” Patrick Creamer, Boozman’s longtime flack, told me, “Sarah had a keen understanding that you can’t let someone else tell your story. She knows the other side is going to paint you in the worst light, and that you have to dictate the terms.”
Some of the campaigns she worked on were accused of stoking fears about immigrants. Cotton, speaking at a town hall in 2014, declared, falsely, that “groups like the Islamic State collaborate with drug cartels in Mexico,” and warned, “They could infiltrate our defenseless border and attack us right here in places like Arkansas.”
Sanders, who is thirty-six, is what is sometimes called a P.K. —a preacher’s kid. She is also a politician’s kid. Her father is Mike Huckabee, the former governor of Arkansas, who, as a teen-ager, wrote in a Baptist newspaper that the “Christian youth of today are searching for real answers to real problems presented in a blunt manner.”
Huckabee became a pastor, and in 1989, when Sanders was seven, he was elected president of the Arkansas Baptist State Convention. After Joycelyn Elders, at that time the head of the Arkansas Department of Health, remarked that abortion opponents needed to “get over” their “love affair with the fetus,” Huckabee decided to run for the U.S. Senate, as a Republican. His wife, Janet, and their children—Sarah, John Mark, and David—handed out flyers at rallies and county fairs. Huckabee lost. The next year, he ran for lieutenant governor and won, and then he became governor, a post that he held for a decade. In 2008 and 2016, he ran for President.
Sanders worked on all seven of her father’s political campaigns. When Huckabee appeared at the Hope Watermelon Festival or the Gillett Coon Supper, she went along. “I’m a total daddy’s girl,” she once said. Huckabee opposed gay marriage and condemned abortion. Yet for some Republicans he wasn’t conservative enough. As governor, he created a health-care program for children, and favored legislation allowing high-achieving immigrants, regardless of their legal status, to apply for a state-funded college scholarship. But, whereas Democrats attributed crime and poverty to inequality and to educational failures, Huckabee blamed “the selfish decision to ignore God’s standards of integrity.”
During high school, in Little Rock, Sanders served as an officer of the Arkansas Federation of Teenage Republicans. As a senior at Ouachita Baptist University, in Arkadelphia, she led the student senate. She met her future husband, Bryan Sanders, a Republican pollster and strategist, in Iowa, before the 2008 caucuses. The godfather of the first of their three children, Chip Saltsman, oversaw Huckabee’s first Presidential campaign. Huckabee has said that, while other kids were watching cartoons or jumping rope, his daughter was learning about cross-tabulation tables—a method for breaking down polling data. The political consultant Dick Morris, who worked on Huckabee’s campaign for lieutenant governor, once recalled, “Sarah would listen intently, and I found myself sometimes briefing her as much as Mike.” Sanders has said, “I wanted to be in the middle of the heart of it all.”
In 2007, Sanders, then twenty-five, moved temporarily to Iowa, to prepare her father’s campaign for the state’s Presidential caucuses. To compensate for a shortfall of funding, Huckabee appeared on everything from “The Colbert Report” to “The Tyra Banks Show.” Although he made it clear that he was a conservative Christian, he avoided the divisive tone of a Phyllis Schlafly, saying that if voters wanted a leader with a “mean spirit” he wasn’t “their guy.” Huckabee won Iowa, but his campaign sputtered, and, when John McCain won the nomination instead, evangelical voters embraced the angry nationalism of his Vice-Presidential choice, Sarah Palin.
Sanders went back to Little Rock and kept working as a political consultant; Huckabee began commuting to New York City, where he hosted a show on Fox News. His rhetoric grew bitter. He declared that citizens who put “faith and family first” were “American outcasts,” and wrote that “city slickers who are more afraid of guns than of the criminals who might use them have a serious mental condition.” By the time he ran for President again, in 2016, with Sanders as his campaign manager, he’d adopted what one reporter described to me as a “dark populism—all ‘us versus them.’ ” But another candidate—Donald Trump—went even darker, and dominated the race. Huckabee dropped out.
Soon afterward, in February, 2016, Trump invited Huckabee and Sanders to meet him at the Atlanta airport. There they boarded Trump’s private jet. He was sitting in a white leather club chair, with a few advisers, including Hope Hicks and Corey Lewandowski, nearby. When Trump asked Huckabee for an endorsement, Huckabee instead suggested that he enlist his daughter.
Trump needed a stronger link to evangelicals and women, and Sanders was happy to provide one.Despite the differences in their family backgrounds—Mike and Janet Huckabee grew up poor; Trump didn’t—the candidate felt familiar to her. Huckabee was an economic populist; Trump claimed to be one, too. Huckabee had campaigned on a promise to “restore America’s greatness”; Trump’s slogan was “Make America Great Again.” Huckabee wanted to ban abortion; Trump had vowed to appoint pro-life advocates to the bench. Like Huckabee, Trump enjoyed ad-libbing while giving speeches.
Sanders relished the idea of helping an outsider like Trump defeat the people she viewed as the ultimate Washington insiders: the Clintons.She appreciated Hillary Clinton for advancing the cause of female candidates, but loathed her politics. “She has shown her utter contempt for anyone that doesn’t support her and doesn’t think like her, and I think that’s a really scary thing to have in a President,” Sanders said, on a talk-radio show. On another program, she said, “I grew up in Arkansas. I lived under the Clinton machine. My dad fought against it his entire political career.”
Compared with Trump’s advisers, Hicks told me, Sanders “had real political experience.” She’d volunteered for George W. Bush’s reëlection campaign, in 2004, and worked for two years in Washington, as a legislative-affairs staffer in the Department of Education. More important to Trump was the fact that, under Sanders’s direction, Boozman had trounced Lincoln, a popular senator, by twenty-one points. Sanders had also shown an uncanny ability to adopt the voice of the person she was representing: Boozman was gentlemanly and never ranted, and so she had modulated her tone in public appearances. With Trump, she would need a more bombastic approach.
Trump offered Sanders a place in the campaign, and she started representing him on television. She spoke with confidence and didn’t suppress her strong Arkansas accent. After watching her TV clips, Trump sometimes told aides, “Give me Sarah’s number, I want to call her,” because he found her “amazing” on camera. An observer close to Sanders told me, “If you’re not on TV, you don’t really exist as far as Trump is concerned.”
On Fox News, an interviewer noted to Sanders that Trump needed to make “inroads” with the “white suburban professional woman—normally, a mother, college-educated.” The interviewer told her, “You fit that description,” and asked, “What is Trump’s best argument for that particular voting group?”
“Real simple,” Sanders replied. “The things that keep most of the moms—myself included—that I’ve talked to up at night are: Who’s gonna change America? Who’s gonna make it safer? Who’s gonna create jobs? Who’s gonna make education better? Who’s gonna make life better for my kids?”
Sanders declared that she opposed abortion and supported the Second Amendment, tax cuts, and “more localized government.” After the final Presidential debate, she told the host of a North Carolina radio program that Trump offered the strongest “pro-life position that any Republican nominee has given in my lifetime.” She called it “a pivotal moment” that “should give every Christian and every evangelical, every Catholic, reason to support Donald Trump and reason to vote for him, because that is the difference between right and wrong, good and evil.”
After Trump won the election, Sean Spicer, his first press secretary, hired Sanders as his principal deputy. Spicer began his tenure by perpetuating Trump’s lie about the size of the crowd at his Inauguration, and never recovered. He made endless gaffes, such as calling Nazi concentration camps “Holocaust centers.” By late February, 2017, Sanders had become a “key confidante” of the President, Hicks told me. Sanders had little mastery of policy, but Trump considered her frank, and a proxy for Christian voters.
By May, he was slotting Sanders into live press briefings. As elsewhere in the Administration, the communications department was having serial personnel convulsions: the hiring and firing of Anthony Scaramucci; the resignations of Spicer and Hicks. Sanders filled the void. No one had expected her to become press secretary, least of all Sanders herself. But, as a former White House adviser told me, “there wasn’t anybody else.”
Sanders’s surprise ascendance meant that a campaign operative, not a media-relations professional, was in place as press secretary as the President engaged in ever more outlandish behavior, including embracing leaders of authoritarian regimes and repeatedly calling journalists “the enemy of the people.” A publicist tends to describe even controversial events in bland, soft language; an operative is skilled at provoking outrage.
A press secretary who had an abiding respect for First Amendment freedoms likely would have resigned once it became clear that Trump intended to steamroll his way through the Constitution. But Sanders stayed, even after Trump praised Vladimir Putin and condemned his own federal intelligence agencies; even after he publicly considered handing over Michael McFaul, the former U.S. Ambassador to Russia, to Putin’s regime for “interviewing”; even after Trump announced his intention to revoke the security clearances of former national-security officials who had criticized his leadership; and even after Trump joked at a rally that Greg Gianforte, the Montana representative who body-slammed a reporter, had “fought—in more ways than one—for your state.” The Arkansas Times, an alt-weekly, recently declared, “If the Huckster spawn had a soul, she’s sold it.”
Officially, the White House press secretary’s job is to represent the President and the executive branch before the press and the public, and to relay media inquiries to the White House. Acrimony among these various parties isn’t unusual: Ronald Reagan once muttered, “Sons of bitches,” after reporters questioned him. But the Trump Administration’s relationship with the press transcends ordinary discord. The President’s toxic relationship with the media demands that a press secretary behave, at least publicly, less as a source of information than as a battering ram—especially during a moment of crisis, like now.
On September 5th, the Times published an anonymous Op-Ed, by a senior Trump official, claiming that some members of the Administration, appalled by the President’s “amorality,” have been secretly working to counter “his worst inclinations.” The claim is echoed by the Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward, whose new book, “Fear,” describes an ongoing “administrative coup d’etat,” and notes that White House officials “had joined to purposefully block some of what they believed were the president’s most dangerous impulses.”
Sanders has labelled “Fear” a work of “fiction,” and attempted to trivialize its celebrated author by noting that she hadn’t read his books. The day that the Op-Ed appeared, she convened her staff, then launched a counterattack questioning the mystery author’s honor, deploying such Trumpian keywords as “pathetic” and “coward.” On Twitter, she urged Americans to call the “failing NYT”— Trump’s favorite (and erroneous) characterization of the newspaper—and demand the unmasking of the “gutless loser” who’d written the piece. Her tweet included the paper’s main phone number.
Two former White House ethics chiefs declared that Sanders’s tweet had violated federal law. One of them, Richard Painter, who worked in the Bush Administration, told Newsweek that Sanders was “using her official position to interfere with the freedom of the press.” This wasn’t the first abuse-of-power complaint. In June, Sanders was accused of employing the @PressSec account to target the Red Hen—a restaurant in Virginia that, when she went to dine there, asked her to leave.
When Sanders holds a press briefing, Trump often watches it live on TV in a dining room next to the Oval Office. “It’s like having the theatre critic-in-chief sitting there, and you’d better believe he’ll tell you about it afterward,” a White House reporter told me. (Spicer once said that Trump expects his messages to be delivered “verbatim.”) Another reporter said that, under Trump, no press secretary can say anything “even somewhat nuanced,” and must constantly “praise the boss as a spotless king.”
For Sanders, each press briefing is preceded by a styling session with a White House production assistant, who fixes her dark, straight hair and applies TV-grade makeup to her face. She pairs monochromatic dresses with a strand of pearls. Last August, her mother tweeted, “What do you call @PressSec with her pearl necklace at press briefing? Pearls before swine!” (“Not very ‘Christian’ Janet,” someone tweeted back.)
Briefings take place in the West Wing’s James S. Brady Press Briefing Room. A bright-blue pocket door slides open, disgorging Sanders and an entourage of aides. At the podium, she faces forty-nine seats, each assigned to an individual news outlet. Sanders told me, “The odds are stacked against you. I like it, though. Nervous adrenaline is good.” (Sanders may accept that she can’t control the questions she is asked, but she nevertheless tries to take control of every exchange. In her interactions with me, she took this approach to extremes, saying that almost everything was off the record.)
“Once he invented the wheel, it was only a matter of time before he came up with the food truck.”
From the start, Sanders was more competent than Spicer; she didn’t ramble or sweat, and seemed relatively at ease at the podium. The New Republic observed that she was “not so obviously a shrieking propaganda mouthpiece.” (When White House reporters talked to me about Spicer, they used words like “laughingstock” and “vindictive.”) Several times, Sanders tried to give briefings a folksy touch by reading a letter from a Trump supporter, including one from a boy in Virginia, Frank Giaccio, who had offered to mow the White House lawn. The letter-reading tradition went awry after Frank visited the White House, and a photograph of Trump yelling at the child as he mowed became a meme.
Sanders’s briefings have now become as tense as Spicer’s. As she fields questions, her eyebrows twitch in irritation. She has a sarcastic streak, and some jokes sound defensive. At one briefing, a reporter misstated a date; when his peers corrected him, Sanders said, “If only they had that same politeness when correcting us.” After she noted that all Presidents have flaws, a reporter asked her to name Trump’s. “Probably that he has to deal with you guys on a daily basis,” she replied.
Perhaps Sanders’s greatest asset at the podium is her embodiment of the Trump voter. The supposedly populist President is tremendously wealthy, as are many top Administration figures: Ivanka Trump, Jared Kushner, Betsy DeVos, Wilbur Ross, Steve Mnuchin, and Kellyanne Conway. Like Sanders, Vice-President Mike Pence is also a heartland Christian, but he’s rarely on TV, and he lacks the combative instinct that she shares with Trump. Sanders’s briefings offer repeated confirmation to Trump’s base that the U.S. government is being run by Christians standing up to condescending Beltway insiders. In a characteristic flourish, Sanders defended immigrant-family separations by noting that “it is very Biblical to enforce the law.”
In the Obama Administration, press briefings happened almost daily, and regularly exceeded an hour. Sanders’s have become sporadic and typically last about twenty minutes. (Olivier Knox, the president of the White House Correspondents’ Association, has complained to Sanders about the infrequency of briefings.) According to the Washington Post, Sanders “manufactures urgency”—exuding a righteous impatience that simultaneously limits her exposure to difficult questions and makes her appear determined to keep reporters in their place. In previous Administrations, most press briefings were low-key affairs in which journalists downloaded policy details; reporters were allowed many follow-ups, and sometimes asked dozens of them. Sanders grumbles if someone asks more than two questions. A Post analysis showed that, in her first year, she spent less time informing the public than Spicer had done in half that time. When C-span asked Sanders why her briefings were so short, she said, “I don’t think I take as long to get to the point.”
Spicer had trouble channelling Trump and understanding what he wanted in a press secretary. Sanders has no such difficulty. After Trump referred to undocumented gang members as “animals,” a reporter asked her, “What did the President mean when he said some immigrants are non-people, they’re ‘animals’?” Sanders claimed that Trump was referring only to MS-13 gang members, and defended his harshness: “Frankly, I think the term ‘animal’ doesn’t go far enough.”
Reporters complain that Sanders’s briefings almost never involve substantive disclosures. Instead, she deflects questions and returns to the same talking points: “stock market, at an all-time high”; “isis, on the run.” A White House reporter told me, “I’ve never learned a single thing in that briefing room that’s been helpful to me. It’s the part of my job that I dread most. You’re either being spun or gaslit.” Mike McCurry, a press secretary under Bill Clinton, has lamented that, in the Trump era, live briefings have devolved into an “entertainment product.” More and more, Sanders presents a televised reënactment of Trump’s Twitter feed. This enrages Democrats, but Republican voters admire Sanders’s performances: according to a Gallup poll, eight out of ten view her favorably.
Sanders has repeatedly said that she doesn’t lie when at the podium. But many of her public statements have later proved false: Trump did know about his lawyer Michael Cohen’s payoffs to various women; Trump did know in the summer of 2016 about a meeting that his son Don, Jr., had with a Russian lawyer offering “dirt” on Hillary Clinton. (Sanders says that, at the time, she believed these statements to be true.)
Other Sanders statements have been dubious, if not bald-faced lies. After Trump fired the F.B.I. director James Comey, she contended that “countless” Bureau employees had contacted her to voice support for the dismissal. She has insisted that “the President doesn’t support violence against anyone,” even though Trump once told his supporters at a rally to “knock the crap” out of protesters. She reiterates Trump’s characterization of the special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation into Russian electoral interference as a “hoax.” She has denounced legitimate questions from reporters as “disgraceful,” “inappropriate,” “pretty ridiculous,” and “completely ridiculous.” After reporters asked John Kelly, the White House chief of staff, to clarify a statement, she said that it was “highly inappropriate” to question the word of a four-star Marine general.
Sanders believes that the media’s White House coverage focusses too much on staffer intrigue and not enough on Trump’s “substantive issues.” In February, at a White House Correspondents’ Association panel discussion featuring Sanders and McCurry, she complained, “Ninety per cent of the coverage about this President is negative.”
“That’s because ninety per cent of what he’s done the people have questions about,” McCurry said.
Peter Baker, who covers the White House for the Times, also appeared at the event, and noted that Trump has made more false statements than any other President. (Since taking office, he has publicly lied, or made misleading claims, more than five thousand times.) “If he’s gonna say things that aren’t true, we’re gonna have to say they’re not true,” Baker said.
When McCurry chastised a reporter, he generally did so off camera. But Trump thrives on bullying antagonists in public, and has urged his staff to “fight” the press. In Sanders, he has found an eager pugilist. After Trump tweeted that Senator Kirsten Gillibrand used to beg him for contributions at Trump Tower—and “would do anything for them”—a reporter asked Sanders if this had a sexual implication. “Only if your mind was in the gutter would you have read it that way,” she retorted. Sanders prefers short, tough interviews to “soft,” one-on-one encounters in which she might drop her guard and say something that she will regret. In public, she tends to handle reporters with the sort of eye-rolling derision that Fox News’ Tucker Carlson levies against liberal guests. In one notorious exchange, Sanders told CNN’s Jim Acosta, who she thinks performs for the cameras, “I know it’s hard for you to understand even short sentences.”
Sanders often appears to mistake journalism for stenography or cheerleading—she sometimes tells the media what to “celebrate,” such as the state of the economy. Sometimes, when confronted with the fact that reporting is often adversarial, she reflexively mentions courtesy, seemingly not understanding that journalism is an exercise in democracy, not etiquette.
Despite her complaints about rude reporters, Sanders might not actually be hoping for more decorousness from the press corps. The campaign strategist in her surely realizes that heated exchanges generally work to Trump’s advantage. The more aggressive the press’s questions, the more loudly the President cries “fake news,” and the more tenaciously his base supports him. It’s also been good for Sanders’s job security: the more ferociously she responds to the media in public, the more Trump admires her.
The contentiousness that Sanders projects in public is not on display in private. The reporters and the White House officials who consistently work with her outside the briefing room like her personally, and find her to be helpful and reliable. If a reporter has uncovered a fact, she’ll confirm it. If a reporter is on the right track, she may say, “I can’t wave you off of that.” She’ll give reporters a heads-up on a development in a story they’ve been covering. If she feels that she has been too rough on a reporter during a briefing, she sometimes calls the person afterward and, without quite apologizing, smooths things over. One reporter told me that Sanders had “saved our bacon” by catching inaccuracies. Another said, “She has said things that aren’t true from the podium, and she, at times, has deflected my questions in a way that was misleading. But I’ve never caught her in a lie, one on one, where she told me that X didn’t happen and I found out later that it did.” The reporter added, “You sit in Sarah’s office and she can be remarkably decent and charming, and then she can be obfuscating and ridiculous at the podium. Both of those things are true at the same time.”
Brian Karem, the executive editor of Sentinel Newspapers, told me that, at the podium, Sanders “deflects when she doesn’t need to.” He said, “Because of her inexperience, and because she’s a true believer, she sees things that aren’t there. She anticipates traps that don’t exist. She’s creating more of a mess than she’s cleaning up.” Another White House reporter, who deals with Sanders almost daily, said, “For all of Sarah’s rhetoric, I don’t think she says half of what Trump wants her to say. And the way she treats the press is probably not even a third as bad as others in the White House would like us to be treated. In some ways, I see her as a force pushing back on some of the worst tendencies in the President.”
Initially, Trump’s communications team had what Raj Shah, Sanders’s principal deputy, called a “mishmash of a process.” He explained, “We’d have, like, twenty people in there, advising Trump. It was totally disorganized.” Each day, Spicer’s staff assembled a voluminous briefing book, which Spicer attempted to absorb overnight. Sanders’s staff, on the other hand, winnows preparatory information to a concise packet with a top sheet printed “press guidance.” Talking points are developed throughout the day. Sanders “internalizes” them, Shah told me, and then her staff “murder-board” her. The term, which originated at the Pentagon, refers to subjecting someone to questions that he or she is likely to be asked in a press conference or a debate.
I sat in on the murder-board session for the July 2nd briefing, in Sanders’s office, in the West Wing. Shah and another deputy, Hogan Gidley, were there, along with several staffers, as well as Adam Kennedy, the White House director of research, and Bill Shine, the former Fox News executive, whom Trump was about to hire as his deputy chief of staff for communications.
Sanders was sitting at her desk, which faces a round oak meeting table, a bank of televisions, and a working fireplace. Built-in bookshelves were decorated with an Arkansas license plate, photographs of her children, and, for display, bottles of bourbon.
“Trade?” someone said. Shah tossed Sanders a practice question about Canadian tariffs. “How do we phrase it?” she said. Shah ultimately suggested saying “trade reform,” not “trade war.”
At the time, Trump was pondering nominees to replace Justice Anthony Kennedy on the Supreme Court. “Do you guys have a list of candidates already lined up?” an aide asked. In fact, Trump had solicited Sanders’s opinion about Brett Kavanaugh, the eventual nominee, and she had said that Kavanaugh could both get confirmed and excite the evangelicals in the President’s base. But Trump hadn’t made his final decision yet, and the Administration wasn’t ready to air names in public. Sanders joked that she should say, “It’s me! No further questions! Thanks, guys!” (She delivered a variation on this response at the podium, to tepid laughter.)
Staring at the press-guidance packet, she said, “Is this pronounced ‘El-_ee-_na’?”
“Ah-lay-nah,” Gidley told her. They were talking about Elena Kagan, whom Barack Obama had appointed to the Supreme Court.
“Can we just say ‘Kagan’?” Sanders said. “Is that rude? I don’t want to screw it up.”
“Justice Kagan,” someone recommended.
The next question was about how many families had been reunited after being separated at the border. “Last week, you said over five hundred—can you tell us exactly?” an aide said. As Sanders scanned her reading material, someone asked if separating families was in the children’s best interest. She replied with a talking point: bringing them here in the first place, and breaking U.S. law, wasn’t in their best interest.
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Gidley brought food from the White House mess and handed Sanders soup in a paper container. Staring at a spoonful of it, she said, “I hate olives. Pretty sure this is an olive. Is this an olive?” She held it toward Gidley, who said, “Green pepper.” Sanders said, “If I eat an olive, it’ll ruin my whole day.”
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What about Senator Susan Collins’s declaration that she would not vote to confirm any Supreme Court nominee who was “hostile” to Roe? “We need to pull the exact language President Trump used during the campaign,” Sanders told everybody. “Roe v. Wade—they want to zero in and make the Supreme Court’s whole history about that.”
..paste fail, missing?
hey moved on to a question about nato spending. “We’re lookin’ at you, Germany,” Sanders said. She was drinking a Cherry Coke Zero and taking notes. She wanted to “clean up” the White House’s message about Democrats’ calls to abolish Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ice. After absorbing a prepared statement, she said, “That’s not a very clean hit.” (By the time of the briefing, she’d honed her language, answering a question about green cards with “The President has talked many times about fixing the over-all system.”)
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It had just been announced that LeBron James had signed a four-year contract, worth a hundred and fifty-three million dollars, with the Los Angeles Lakers. The Trump Administration has repeatedly tried to counter charges of racism by highlighting a rise in African-American employment. At one point, Shine told Sanders that she should say, “If you don’t think the economy’s doing well, ask LeBron James how he’s doing under President Trump.” Sanders declined, saying, “I’ve got enough problems without bringing LeBron into it.” A month later, Trump posted a tweet insulting James’s intelligence.
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In 1992, the year that Mike Huckabee lost his first run for public office, Bill Clinton was elected President. Jim Guy Tucker, a Democrat and the lieutenant governor, became Arkansas’s governor, and, in a special election, Huckabee won Tucker’s vacated seat. At the time, the legislature was eighty-six per cent Democratic. The state capitol was so hostile toward Republicans that Huckabee arrived to find that some Democrats had nailed his office door shut.
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In May, 1996, Tucker was convicted of fraud and conspiracy; he announced that he would resign, making Huckabee the governor. But, minutes before the scheduled exchange of power, Tucker backpedalled. Huckabee supporters gathered in the capitol, chanting, “We want Mike!” A staffer later said, “It wasn’t storming the Bastille, but it felt pretty close.” Aides and relatives scrummed around Huckabee; the only child present was Sarah, then thirteen. Wearing a navy top, striped shorts, and flats, with her shoulder-length hair pinned back with a barrette, she listened closely, pinching her lips, as the drama escalated. Rex Nelson, Huckabee’s then communications director, told me, “It was probably exciting and scary for her at the same time.” Late that afternoon, Tucker relented, and resigned.
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Sanders had just finished eighth grade. The Huckabees had been living in Texarkana, where Sarah had made the cheerleading squad and the basketball team, and she didn’t want to move. She later said, “Fourteen’s an awkward age, anyway—everything so dramatic, down to what color shoes you’re wearing.” Janet Huckabee told me, “She was so miserable, so mad.”
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The Huckabees moved into the governor’s mansion, a gated Georgian residence in Little Rock. The city was overwhelmingly Democratic, and Sanders’s neighbors displayed anti-Huckabee banners. The family received hate mail, and newspapers ran articles joking that the Huckabees would barbecue goats on the front lawn. Huckabee later said that people told him, “You don’t have enough class to be in the governor’s mansion.” For Sanders, it was a preview of some of the establishment sneering that accompanied Trump’s arrival in Washington.
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The mansion was a place where tourists and staff were always present, and, initially, Janet found it awkward to be shadowed by state troopers. She’d tease them by announcing, “I’m fixing to go to Victoria’s Secrets. Who wants to go?” She told me, “I’d do it for meanness. I didn’t no more want to go to Victoria’s Secrets than a hill of beans.”
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Sanders was given Chelsea Clinton’s former bedroom, overlooking the back yard. One afternoon in May, I toured the house where, as Janet put it, Sanders had lived “for the whole of her molding.” Janet came along. She is tall and slightly stooped, with chin-length reddish hair and hazel eyes. She limps from a double knee replacement. We had just sat down in the living room when Susan Hutchinson, Arkansas’s current First Lady, wearing a floral-print dress and heels, came in to say hello. Janet, who had on cargo pants, sneakers, and a plaid shirt, joked, “I dressed up for the event.”
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“Not until you’ve arranged your pillows.”
A bit later, Janet took me past the guardhouse, where Sanders used to hang out with the troopers, and the driveway, where her daughter played basketball with prison trusties who worked at the mansion. Sanders once said, “It was important to our family to make sure that we didn’t treat them any differently.”
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Local residents and journalists mocked the Huckabees as rubes. Columnists wrote about Mike’s fondness for Velveeta; Janet was criticized for chewing gum during a TV appearance, and for having the azaleas trimmed too soon. A writer for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette referred to her as Jethrine. The Huckabees complained about the ribbing, but they also exploited it. During a renovation of the mansion, the family, though they could have rented a house or stayed in a hotel, lived in a donated triple-wide, on the grounds. “We are gonna get pounded from all sides from doing this,” Janet warned Mike, but added that their gambit would probably “go national.” She was right: Jay Leno featured the Huckabees and their triple-wide on his show, joking that Arkansas voters might accuse them of putting on airs.
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Sanders’s job is no doubt made harder by the fact that Washington insiders can be snobbish; more difficult is the fact that her boss continually acts in ways that require her to make excuses for him. Even the nimblest press secretary would have difficulty finessing the statements of a President who has declared that an African-American member of Congress has a “low I.Q.,” mocked a disabled reporter, bragged about grabbing women “by the pussy,” called Democrats who don’t clap for him “treasonous,” and ordered Iran’s President, via Twitter, to stop speaking “demented words of violence & death.”
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I asked Sanders how she, as a Christian, reconciles her religious beliefs with her support for Trump—a man whose Presidency has been imperilled, in part, by his payment of hush money to a porn star with whom he allegedly committed adultery. Instead of a searching answer, she gave me what has become a pat rationalization of many American evangelicals.
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“I’m not going to my office expecting it to be my church,” she answered. “Frankly, if people of faith don’t get involved in the dirty process, then you’re missing the entire point of what we’re called to do. You’re not called to go into the places where everyone already thinks like you and is a believer—you have to go onto a stage where they’re not.” She went on, “You have to take that message into the darkest places, and the dirtiest places, and the most tainted and dysfunctional places. If you can influence even one person, that’s what you’re supposed to do.” (Later, Sanders said that she was speaking broadly, about her social duty as a Christian and not about the White House.)
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I said a lot of Americans feel that the person who needs the most help is Trump.
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“We all need help,” she said. “That’s the whole basis of Christianity. No one is perfect. We are all sinners.” I asked her if she considered Trump racist. She said no.
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According to someone close to her, Sanders tries to focus not on Trump’s immorality but on the positive aspects of his “unconventionality”: “On the Embassy move to Jerusalem, she was, like, ‘I want it moved, and Trump’s the only one with the balls to do it.’ ” (Sanders confirmed that she supports Trump’s Jerusalem move, but denied using that language.)
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Watching Sanders at the podium, it is difficult to discern her personal feelings about the most inflammatory aspects of Trump’s agenda—she likes to say that it is her job to “state policy, not make policy.” She has never betrayed disappointment in the President’s personal behavior or offensive remarks. After the white-supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump was broadly condemned for insisting that there had been “blame” on all sides. When Sanders addressed those remarks, she echoed his equivocation: “The President’s been very outspoken in his condemnation of racism and bigotry and hate of all forms.”
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Inscrutability is her goal, even on important matters. When asked if she accepts that global warming is caused by human activity, she declined to comment. (This was on a day that the Administration was preparing for the landfall of Hurricane Florence.)
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She has a few tics and tells, though. When she’s in spin mode, she overuses the word “certainly.” At one point, Sanders told me that she considers Mack McLarty, Bill Clinton’s former White House chief of staff, “a true statesman” and a “really good guy.” Did she consider Trump a statesman and a good guy? “I definitely think he’s a good person,” she said. She named kindnesses that Trump has privately shown others, then said, “There’s certainly a lot of goodness in him.”
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A White House reporter said that Sanders wasn’t “someone who thinks—like Corey Lewandowski—that Trump can do no wrong.” The reporter added, “She will recognize, ‘Fuck, the way Trump woke up and tweeted those seven things this morning is gonna make my day a lot harder.’ She’s not gonna, with a straight face, try to tell you, ‘It was savvy P.R. to order Sessions this morning to end the Mueller investigation.’ She’s also not gonna go out and criticize Trump, not even in an anonymous quote.” Whereas many former Administration officials have publicly vented their frustration with Trump’s intellectual shallowness, Sanders may not see a problem; like the President, she is too busy to read books.
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In a recent memoir, Spicer writes that, because of his association with a President many Americans despise, he had to install security cameras at his house, and that his wife began wearing disposable gloves while opening packages. After Sanders was ejected from the Red Hen, she was assigned a Secret Service detail. She has been pilloried by celebrities: Chelsea Handler referred to her as a “harlot” in “summer whore lipstick,” later noting, “When someone lies to the American public every single day, I rule out the normal rules of not making fun of someone’s appearance.” Journalists have been equally unsparing. The Los Angeles Times columnist David Horsey wrote that Sanders resembles “a slightly chunky soccer mom.” In print, Sanders has been called “Orwellian,” “sour,” and “the wall Trump promised to erect.” Civilians have also registered disapproval: she’s been given the middle finger at Costco, and a woman at a D.C. coffee shop once asked her, “How does it feel to be so good at your job—considering that you lie for a living?”
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Jordan Rhodes, her oldest friend, is a Republican and the daughter of prominent Arkansas Democrats. She told me that, in February, she and Sanders went with their families to Disney World, where the atmosphere was more welcoming: Sanders had “found her people.” One stranger after another recognized her and excitedly requested selfies.
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Sarah and Bryan Sanders have a daughter, Scarlett, who is in elementary school, and two sons: Huck, four, and George, three. Sanders returned to work soon after having each child. They live in northern Virginia, in a house with six bedrooms, one of which is occupied by a Colombian au pair. (Sanders’s kids have picked up some Spanish.) Bryan converted to Catholicism after attending Colby College, in Maine, and on Sundays the family tries to attend an evangelical service at a Washington church with a diverse congregation and female associate pastors. The church is an affiliate of Hillsong, the global megachurch that teaches creationism and intelligent design. Sanders, when asked if she shared these views, said, “I believe in the Bible.” She told me that her pro-life views are “non-negotiable,” and added, “One of the things that makes Americans unique is that we value life. We think each life has intrinsic value and worth, whether you are a baby in the womb or an elderly woman.”
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Sanders opposes gay marriage, but isn’t a virulent homophobe like her father—he defends conversion therapy and says that gay relationships have an “ick factor.” Like many modern evangelicals, after work she likes to have a glass of wine. In April, after the W.H.C.A. dinner, in which the comedian Michelle Wolf roasted her—“She burns facts, and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smoky eye”—Sanders and her husband stayed at the MSNBC after-party past 2 a.m. A White House reporter told me, “Sarah’s a drinker, and she can be profane—and I don’t say that as an insult.” Sanders, the reporter added, was “more sophisticated than people think.”
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Sanders avoids participating in profiles about her, because, she says, she doesn’t want to “become the story.” She was initially wary of me, but in May she conceded to a short meeting in her office. After I did reporting in Arkansas, she began coöperating, but with rigid parameters. I couldn’t visit her home, and I never met her husband, though we did speak on the phone. Her friends and relatives talked to me only after receiving her blessing. Whenever I spent time with Sanders, her tactical instincts were on display, such as when she allowed me, one Saturday in June, to join her for a visit to Rhodes’s home, in Greenwich, Connecticut.
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Sanders, Rhodes, and I sat in the library while their kids watched Disney’s “Hercules” in the family room. Sanders, wearing tropical-print shorts and flip-flops, with a blue blouse and her pearls, took a corner of a sofa and pulled a decorative pillow into her lap. Rhodes explained that they’ve been friends since they were thirteen. “We just clicked,” she said. “I was a bridesmaid in her wedding. She’s godmother to my baby, our husbands are really good friends, our kids are best friends. Our dogs love each other.”
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“It’s almost like we planned it,” Sanders said. “But God put it all together.”
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Rhodes wanted to talk about people’s meanness toward her friend. Sanders said that she ignores online comments about her, but Rhodes said that she reads them, noting that many “disgusting” Facebook posts are written by mothers. She showed me an indignant response that she keeps on her iPhone: “I pray your children never see what you wrote, because this is bullying at its best, which is parenting at its worst.”
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At the podium, Sanders capitalizes on the fact that she is the first White House press secretary who is also a mother. She has wished her children happy birthday, and she has identified herself as a parent while defending Trump’s inaction on school shootings. Allowing me access to Rhodes seemed similarly geared to softening her image. Rhodes described her friend as someone who “had everyone’s back growing up.” Sanders emphasized to me that, when her father was in politics, he particularly valued loyalty: “My dad has always said he’d rather have somebody that was incompetent but incredibly loyal than the smartest guy in the room that was totally _dis_loyal.”
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Later, Rhodes and Sanders went to a salon to get their hair done before attending a dinner party at the home of a Greenwich socialite. While Sanders was waiting, a woman with a fresh blowout approached her. Greenwich is a Republican island in a blue state, and this was one of “her people.” The woman said, “I love you. You’re phenomenal. I feel like you’re my friend.”
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In May, Mike Huckabee flew to Little Rock from Nashville, where he tapes a TV variety show for the Trinity Broadcasting Network. (Nashville has been tough on Huckabee lately: the Country Music Association Foundation, amid complaints about his homophobia, expelled him from its board.) The Huckabees now live in Florida but keep a condo in Little Rock. Mike and Janet celebrated their forty-fourth wedding anniversary—Sanders got married on the same day, in 2010—at a steak house. The next night, Huckabee’s former gubernatorial staff held a gathering. Nelson, his former communications director, told guests, “Just think how life changes—he’s not even the best-known person in his own family!” Someone had recently given Huckabee a T-shirt that read “sarah’s dad.”
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That weekend, Huckabee appeared on “Fox & Friends,” to comment on remarks that Barack Obama had made about Trump Administration scandals. During Obama’s Presidency, Huckabee said, “there were a lot of scandals, but the difference was, there wasn’t scrutiny.” He cited Benghazi, “pallets of just raw cash” that had been “delivered to Iran,” and, curiously, “federal raids on guitar companies.”
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Huckabee, who recently said on Fox News that the President is correct when he “talks about journalists being enemy of the people,” has begun to mimic Trump’s insinuating tone. After Netflix announced a deal with the Obamas, he tweeted, “It’s the ‘Circle of Life’ in American politics! Simba and Mufasa are singing it now to celebrate! The first video they will produce will be ‘The Lyin’ King.’ ” He defended ice policies by asking, “Where is outrage over permanent separation of a child and mother when the baby is ripped apart in the mother’s womb by knives of abortionists?” He tweeted a photo of tattooed Latinos making gangster signs, calling the men Representative Nancy Pelosi’s “campaign committee for the take back of the House.”
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In public, Sanders sometimes uses phrases that can also be found in her father’s books, blog posts, TV clips, and tweets; she has called opponents unhappy people, and declared that their criticisms say more about them than her. Huckabee has said that he prefers “Walmart Republicans, not Wall Street Republicans”; Sanders has joked that she’s “more Sam’s Club than Costco.” Huckabee once complained that “politics has become more and more where you’re handed this script and told, ‘Don’t improv’ ”; Sanders lauds Trump for not being a “scripted robot.” In 2008, when the press noted Huckabee’s weakness on foreign policy—he’d made repeated gaffes about Pakistan—he said, “We’re at a point in politics where everyone wants to say, ‘You made this little error here’ ”; in a briefing, Sanders said, “If we make the slightest mistake . . . it is just an absolute tirade from a lot of people in this room.”
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After the “tirade” comment, Brian Karem, the Sentinel Newspapers editor, shouted, “Sarah, come on! You’re inflaming everybody right here and right now with those words.” Karem, who thinks of Sanders as “Trump’s chief propagandist,” later told me, “She wants to act like she’s the schoolmarm and we’re the recalcitrant students. And that’s not the way it works.”
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At Sanders’s W.H.C.A. panel discussion with Mike McCurry, he reminded her that, in a democracy, unwelcome questions from the press are an “important part of our process.” He added, “You cannot do this job in an environment in which you are belligerent and saying, ‘We’re at war with these people’ every day.”
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“I don’t think I’ve ever said anything similar to that,” Sanders said.
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“You haven’t,” McCurry said. But Trump had, and until his election the President and the White House “did not declare war on the press.”
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“We have not declared war on the press,” Sanders said, laughing.
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“Yes, you did,” McCurry said. The audience murmured in assent. He added, “You can’t do it, but the President has got to roll that back.” Sanders lifted a bottle of water from a side table and sipped.
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On June 28th, in Annapolis, a man with a pump-action shotgun opened fire at the offices of the Capital Gazette, killing five people. The man, Jarrod W. Ramos, was charged with first-degree murder; he’d been enraged by the newspaper’s coverage of his criminal online harassment of a woman.
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No deadlier event had taken place in an American newsroom, yet Trump declined to lower the flag at the White House and at other federal buildings. The mayor of Annapolis had requested that he do so, but it took five days before the President relented. When the mayor finally received a call from the White House, it was from Sanders.
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On July 20th, Trump invited A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of the Times, to the Oval Office, to discuss the newspaper’s relationship with the President. Sanders joined Trump in the room. The meeting was off the record, but after Trump tweeted about it Sulzberger released details. In a statement, he said, “I told the President directly that I thought that his language was not just divisive but increasingly dangerous.”
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Trump kept raging. At a rally in Kansas City, he pointed out the reporters covering the event, and said, “Don’t believe the crap you see from these people.” In Ohio, he called reporters “among the most dishonest human beings you will ever meet.” In late August, a California man was charged with threatening to shoot employees of the Boston Globe, in what Politico called “the clearest example yet of someone using President Donald Trump’s insults to target journalists.”
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“Can any of you draw? I’m thinking we should muscle into children’s books.”
When journalists have told Sanders that Trump’s incendiary words might lead to their colleagues being murdered, she has refused to acknowledge this as a legitimate concern; instead, she has flipped the question and focussed on herself, noting that she has been likewise subjected to threats. Whatever friendliness she maintains with reporters offstage, she has publicly backed up Trump’s animus toward journalists.
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On August 2nd, Ivanka Trump told an interviewer that she disagrees with separating families at the border, and doesn’t see journalists as “the enemy of the people.” At a subsequent briefing, Acosta, the CNN correspondent, decided to test Sanders’s independence. He challenged her to say that “the people who are gathered in this room” were “not the enemy of the people.”
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The challenge bore a striking resemblance to a question that was asked at a televised press conference with Trump and Putin in Helsinki, in June, which Acosta had attended. Jonathan Lemire, of the Associated Press, had been widely praised after he asked Trump, “Would you now, with the whole world watching, tell President Putin—would you denounce what happened in 2016, and would you warn him to never do it again?”
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Sanders answered Acosta by reading from a statement: “Repeatedly—repeatedly—the media resorts to personal attacks without any content other than to incite anger. The media has attacked me personally on a number of occasions, including your own network.” She went on, “When I was hosted by the Correspondents’ Association, which almost all of you are members of, you brought a comedian up to attack my appearance and call me a traitor to my own gender.” Acosta pointed out that Sanders still hadn’t admitted that the press isn’t the enemy of the people. He told her, “We all get put in the meat grinder in this town.”
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Sanders refused to say what Acosta wanted her to say; Acosta walked out. Later, on CNN, he declared that maybe “all journalists should go out on Pennsylvania Avenue and chant ‘We’re not the enemy of the people.’ ”
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Sanders had just defended Trump’s attacks against the press by spreading what the Post once called an “urban myth.” She said, “The media routinely reports on classified information and government secrets that put lives in danger. One of the worst cases was the reporting on the U.S. ability to listen to Osama bin Laden’s satellite phone in the late nineties. Because of that reporting, he stopped using that phone.” (This claim had been widely debunked.)
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Late that night, Sanders tweeted that “Trump Derangement Syndrome” had become an “epidemic among Democrats.” The tweet garnered more than sixty-six thousand “likes” and eighteen thousand comments, including “I hate you sooooo much!” and “Good people don’t defend bad people.” Writing for NBCNews.com, Kurt Bardella, a former media consultant for Breitbart News, who quit in protest over the site’s dissemination of propaganda, urged her to resign, noting, “You know things are deteriorating when you are regurgitating conspiracy theories about Osama bin Laden to justify your boss’s obsession with weakening the First Amendment.” He also said, “Nothing is worth losing your own self-respect or betraying your moral compass.”
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Soon after Sanders became press secretary, her father told reporters, “I know that she is going to be loyal to a fault.” Yet Trump’s loyalty to others is often fleeting. Many White House employees have experienced a moment that Spicer has called “the beginning of the end.” The Trump White House has seen unusual turnover—more than a hundred and fifty staffers who once worked for the President are now gone.
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Sanders has lasted longer than many West Wing colleagues—her one-year anniversary as press secretary fell on July 21st—and her career prospects appear healthier than Spicer’s. Last November, when Senator Cotton was mentioned as a contender for the directorship of the C.I.A., Sanders was floated as his possible replacement in the Senate. If she leaves the White House, she could plausibly become a fixture on Fox News, or take a lucrative job in the private sector. One White House reporter told me that either path would allow her to leverage the fact that “she has a lot of access to the President and understands him as well as anyone.” Rex Nelson was not the only person to tell me, “I can absolutely see her as a future governor of Arkansas.” A figure close to Trump said that Sanders might even ascend to a Cabinet post; her allies include Mike Pompeo, the new C.I.A. director, who is also a devout Christian. Sanders often says, “Never say never.”
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November’s midterm elections will determine whether the Republican Party retains control of Congress. A win for the Democrats may well bring impeachment proceedings against Trump. Conservative Christians, determined to keep Republicans in power, are planning their largest voter-mobilization effort yet. Sanders represents a vital link to that effort—the Washington Post has called her one of the nation’s most visible evangelicals.
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In 2016, Trump won the support of eighty-one per cent of the white evangelicals who voted; a recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute found that seventy-five per cent of evangelicals feel positive about him. This suggests an ongoing willingness to overlook the President’s character problems. Trump hasn’t galvanized evangelicals as much as evangelicals have found a figure willing to grant their wishes, especially in terms of appointing judges who oppose abortion and gay marriage. Sanders is clearly playing the long game. Last year, she appeared on a television show called “Pro-Life Weekly” and talked about the “monumental appointment” of Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch, which, she said, would have a “generational impact that will carry on long after the President is out of office in eight years.”
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Michelle Boorstein, a religion reporter for the Washington Post, has written that, in Sanders’s lifetime, many “politicians have broken promises to Christian conservatives.” So far, Trump, who recently hosted a dinner for evangelicals, hasn’t broken his promises to them, leading some to proclaim his victory as evidence of the hand of God. Brian Kaylor, a former Baptist pastor who writes about religion and politics, recently said, of Sanders’s defenses of Trump, “It’s more than you are defending a politician, or even a President—you are defending God’s chosen leader for this time.”
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Not long ago, as the media speculated whether Sanders had plans to leave her job, her husband told me, “Public service is very difficult. Sarah has witnessed that her whole life. You ask yourself all the time if it’s worth it. We always come back to the idea that, if good people don’t stay involved, bad people end up running the country.”
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On August 26th, Sanders, for the first time, publicly marked a line between herself and Trump. When Senator John McCain died, Trump, who had mocked him for being “captured” in Vietnam, issued a pointedly stinting tweet; as with the Annapolis shooting, he lowered the White House flag only after being roundly criticized. That week, when a TMZ crew filmed Sanders leaving Reagan National Airport, she looked into the camera and called McCain an “American hero.”
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The next day, however, she was back to being Trump’s messenger. During the frenzy over the anonymous Times Op-Ed, Sanders tweeted a condemnation of the media’s “wild obsession” with uncovering the author’s identity. This much was obvious: it wasn’t her. ?
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This article appears in the print edition of the September 24, 2018, issue, with the headline “The Mouthpiece.”
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Paige Williams, the Laventhol/Newsday Visiting Professor at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, became a staff writer at The New Yorker in 2015.
September 24, 2018
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breaking up family looks like tipping pt? s sanders, fox calls for end of WH breifing? she will bail?
https://www.alternet.org/cnn-panel-derails-after-rick-santorum-defends-trumps-barbaric-immigration-policy-and-promptly
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https://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/press-response-michelle-wolfs-comedy-routine-should-frighten-us
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https://www.cbsnews.com/news/what-did-michelle-wolf-actually-say-about-sarah-sanders-at-the-white-house-correspondents-dinner/
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