Sarah Huckabee Sanders

Sarah Huckabee Sanders is the governor of Arkansas and was Trump’s White House Press Secretary from 2017 to 2019, after acting as a senior advisor in his 2016 campaign. Her father is Mike Huckabee, a former Arkansas governor, Baptist minister, and presidential candidate.

She made numerous controversial claims as Trump’s press secretary in defending his actions and claims. For example, 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.

She 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.

As Arkansas governor since 2023, 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.”

Sanders also signed into law a measure that banned any discussion of “gender identity and sexual orientation” before fifth grade. And on her first day in office, she 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. She also prohibited the use of the term “Latinx” by the government in a state where 8.5% of the residents have Hispanic heritage.

She also 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.

Sanders also joined the fray criticizing Anheuser-Busch’s promotion of TikTok celebrity Dylan Mulvaney, a transgender woman. The brewer and its Bud Light brand faced a right-wing boycott. Sanders then promoted beer koozies labeled “Real Women.” On her Twitter account, she posted a video with the caption, “Real women don’t have to fake it.”

She earned a bachelor’s degree from Ouachita Baptist University in Arkadelphia, Arkansas, before becoming a political campaign consultant and the national political director of her father’s 2008 campaign for president and managing his 2016 presidential campaign. She was preceded in her role as Trump’s press secretary by Sean Spicer.