Vice President Kamala Harris hit back at Arkansas GOP Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ comments that Harris “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she doesn’t have children.
“I don’t think she understands that there are a whole lot of women out here who, one, are not aspiring to be humble,” Harris, the Democratic presidential nominee, told “Call Her Daddy” podcast host Alex Cooper.
“Two,” she added in the taped interview, which aired Sunday, there are “a whole lot of women out here who have a lot of love in their life, family in their life and children in their life, and I think it’s really important for women to lift each other up.”
“We have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both,” Harris, who is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children, told Cooper, adding, “And I consider it to be a real blessing.”
Harris discussed her relationship with her stepchildren, Cole and Ella Emhoff, who are her husband’s biological children from his first marriage.
“They are my children. And I love those kids to death, and family comes in many forms,” Harris said.
Last month, Huckabee Sanders, who served in former President Donald Trump’s administration, told attendees at a town hall: “My kids keep me humble. Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
Huckabee Sanders said in a statement to NBC News that she “would never criticize a woman for not having children.”
“The point I was making and that Kamala Harris confirmed by her own admission is that she doesn’t believe our leaders should be humble, which explains her arrogant claim that she alone can fix our nation’s problems after spending the last four years making them worse,” she continued.
Sen. JD Vance of Ohio, Trump’s running mate, has criticized women on a similar basis, saying in 2021 that Democrats who don’t have biological children are “a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made and so they want to make the rest of the country miserable, too.”
Asked what message Vance’s comments send to women who can’t conceive or have children naturally, Harris them “mean and mean-spirited.”
“I think that most Americans want leaders who understand that the measure of their strength isn’t who you beat down. The real measure of strength of a leader is who you lift up,” she added.
Cooper also asked Harris about Trump’s comments last month at a rally in Indiana, Pennsylvania, where he said that under a future Trump administration, “you will no longer be abandoned, lonely or scared. You will no longer be in danger. You’re not going to be in danger any longer. You will no longer have anxiety from all of the problems today. You will be protected, and I will be your protector.”
Trump added, “Women will be happy, healthy, confident and free.”
Harris blasted Trump, blaming him for nominating three Supreme Court justices who voted to overrule Roe v. Wade.
“They did just as he intended,” Harris said, adding that “there are now 20 states with Trump abortion bans, including bans that make no exceptions for rape or incest … which means that you’re telling a survivor of a crime with a violation of their body they don’t have a right to make a decision about what happens to their body next.
“This is the same guy that is now saying that?” Harris asked, referring to Trump’s comments about protecting women. “This is the same guy that said women should be punished for having abortions? This is the same guy who uses the same kind of language he does to describe women? So yeah, there you go.”
A spokesperson for the Trump campaign didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
