Kamala Harris hit back at the Republican Arkansas governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s comments that the vice-president and Democratic White House nominee “doesn’t have anything keeping her humble” because she does not have children of her own.
“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 told the Call Her Daddy podcast host Alex Cooper in a taped interview released on Sunday.
Sanders, a deputy White House press secretary during Donald Trump’s presidency, told a rally crowd in September that her “kids keep me humble”.
“Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble,” Sanders said.
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In a taped interview with Cooper, Harris said 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”.
Harris, who is a stepmother to her husband Doug Emhoff’s two children, Cole and Ella Emhoff, added: “We have our family by blood and then we have our family by love. And I have both.
“And I consider it to be a real blessing.”
Harris discussed her relationship with her stepchildren, who are her husband’s biological children from his first marriage, saying: “They are my children. And I love those kids to death, and family comes in many forms.”
But Sanders came back at Harris in a statement emailed to the Hill on Sunday, saying 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.
The clash stems from 2021 comments made by Trump’s running mate in November’s presidential election, JD Vance. The US senator from Ohio said women without 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”.
Harris called Vance’s comments “mean and mean-spirited”.
Vance has said he regretted that “a lot of people took it the wrong way”, but he did not particularly regret the comments themselves.
Sunday’s podcast comes as Harris begins a media blitz amid political media criticism that she has not subjected herself to one-on-one interviews since she secured the Democratic nomination, with the exception of Oprah Winfrey.
Cooper, the podcast host, also asked Harris about Trump’s comments last month that “women will be happy, healthy, confident and free” if he is given a second presidency.
Harris alluded to how Trump appointed three US supreme court justices who in 2022 formed part of the conservative bloc that overturned the federal right to an abortion once established by the landmark Roe v Wade case.
“This is the same guy that is now saying that?” Harris asked. “So yeah, there you go.”
