The Republican campaign against people without biological children continued last night when Arkansas governor and former White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders suggested that the vice-president — a stepmother to two children — lacks humility because she … never procreated?
On Tuesday night, Sanders took the stage at a town hall for Donald Trump in Flint, Michigan, Trump’s first campaign event since this weekend’s apparent golf-course assassination attempt. In her speech, Sanders said that being a mother was her most important title and shared a story about helping her daughter get ready for a dance years ago. “I’m telling her how proud I am of her, how thankful that God chose us to be her parents. How beautiful she is inside and out,” recalled Sanders, who said her daughter then patted her shoulder and told her she, too, could be pretty one day. “So, my kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” the governor said, mispronouncing Harris’s first name.
Sanders’s remarks, straight out of J.D. Vance’s childless-cat-lady playbook, drew swift backlash from film producer Kerstin Emoff, who is the ex-wife of Harris’s husband, Doug Emhoff, and mother to Harris’s stepchildren, Cole and Ella. “Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families,” Kerstin wrote on X. “That keeps you pretty humble.”
Kerstin has come to Harris’s defense before. This summer, after a video resurfaced of Vance telling Tucker Carlson that the future of the Democrats is controlled by “people without children,” including Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, she told CNN that Harris has long been a “loving, fiercely protective, and always present” co-parent to Cole and Ella. Ella, too, has stood up for her stepmother. “How can you be ‘childless’ when you have cutie pie kids like cole and I,” she wrote on her Instagram stories in July. “I love my three parents.”
