Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Sarah Huckabee Sanders was Trump’s Press Secretary from 2017 to 2019 and is the Governor of Arkansas. As Governor, Huckabee Sanders has rolled back the clock on protections against the exploitation of children, by eliminating long-standing work permit and age verification requirements for children under 16 to be used as child labor, a measure orchestrated by a right-wing dark money group called itself the “Foundation for Government Accountability.”

While Governor, Sanders has worked to defund and harm public education. In 2023 she signed the LEARNS Act into law, allowing public school funding dollars to fund students attending private schools.

On her first day in office, Sanders issued an executive order barring any curriculums that include “critical race theory,” similar to bans in at least 12 other states that have been deployed to bar teaching about the civil rights movement and America’s history of racial discrimination against Black Americans. In August 2023, she removed college credits for AP African American studies. And, in February 2023, she signed a proclamation to recognize homeschooling in Arkansas.

Sanders has also been at the center of the culture wars. She signed into law a measure that banned any discussion of “gender identity and sexual orientation” before fifth grade, and has prohibited the use of the term “Latinx” by the government in a state where 8.5% of the residents have Hispanic heritage.

In another early act, Sanders approved legislation permitting the installation of a privately funded “monument to the unborn” on Capitol grounds, listing the number of abortions conducted in Arkansas before the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade’s federal constitutional protection for abortion access in the Dobbs ruling in 2022.

While Trump’s press secretary, she made numerous controversial claims. In one, she called Trump’s policy of separating migrant children from their parents “very biblical,” and falsely tried to blame Democrats for migration in Trump’s tenure. Huckabee Sanders also refused repeated requests to affirm that the press was not the “enemy of the people.” She also promoted videos attacking the media produced by James O’Keefe, who was convicted of a crime involving “false pretenses” and who was repeatedly accused of–and shown to be–doctoring videos to try to discredit Democrats and the media.

She also claimed Trump never in any “form or fashion has ever promoted or encouraged violence” even though Trump urged his fans to “knock the heck out of” hecklers at his rallies and, as of mid-2017, PolitiFact found “at least seven other examples in which Trump offered public musings that showed a tolerance for, and sometimes even a favorable disposition towards physical violence.” (This was before Trump incited the violent and deadly insurrection on January 6, 2021.)

During Special Counsel Robert Mueller investigation of Trump’s ties to Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election, she acknowledged she misspoke and provided inaccurate information in her official capacity when she falsely claimed that she had spoken with “countless” FBI agents who agreed with Trump’s firing of FBI Director James Comey, who refused to pledge loyalty to Trump even though Comey made damaging comments about Hillary Clinton on the eve of the 2016 election.

This profile has been updated.