Sarah Huckabee Sanders aces the loyalty test
“I’m amazed she would make a speech like that! I know her! She’s a nice person! She has a sense of humor. . . .” That was the immediate reaction of Van Jones following Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s response to President Biden’s State of the Union speech on February 7. Jones was participating in a CNN panel performing a postmortem on Biden’s speech and the morose rejoinder by Sanders. The rhetoric of Sanders, the newly elected governor of Arkansas, bore the imprint of Trump’s inaugural “American carnage” address seven years earlier.
The opening mood on the CNN panel was one of shock and head-shaking perplexity at the bizarre content and bellicose tone of Sanders’s speech, made especially dark by contrast with the upbeat tone of the address by Biden that preceded it. Sanders ran through the litany of right-wing victimology from the tyranny of a bloated federal government, to hordes of illegal immigrants swarming across the Mexican border, to defunding the police, to transgender turpitude, to disregard for the patriotic white working class, to the critique of institutional racism embodied in Critical Race Theory, and other “woke fantasies.” On behalf of victims of imagined religious oppression, she protested being told “every day” that “we must . . . partake in their rituals, salute their flags, and worship false idols.” Especially shocking was her disrespect toward President Biden, whom she called “the first man to surrender his Presidency to a woke mob who can’t even tell you what a woman is.”