Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Queen of Having It Both Ways

 Excerpts from:

Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the Queen of Having It Both Ways

By Frank Bruni - NYTimes Opinion - Feb 7, 2023

Mr. Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of “The Beauty of Dusk” and a contributing Opinion writer.

I keep hearing and reading that many Republican leaders want to move on from Donald Trump. I can’t imagine why. His role in a riot that could have gotten some of them killed? His masterful design of their midterm debacle? The possibility he’ll be indicted any day now?

They’ve had enough, or so they keep signaling and whispering.

And then they go and choose Sarah Huckabee Sanders to deliver the party’s official response to President Biden’s State of the Union address.

She spent nearly two years as Trump’s press secretary, the central figure in excusing his outrages and laundering his lies. She spent much of her campaign for governor invoking his name, appearing with him, even sending money his way — for the catering of fund-raisers for her at Mar-a-Lago.

Trump was her cause and then Trump was her springboard, and that’s what’s so fascinating about where she is now and what she’s being asked to do. She’s supposed to carry Republicans beyond Trump when she so carefully carries Trump inside her. It’s ludicrous. It’s perfect. It’s what makes her such a fitting mascot for a party that won’t come clean about the compromises it has made, the values it has trashed and the madness it has abetted.

She’s a brazen, shameless mascot, to boot. On Tuesday night, in televised remarks that began about half an hour after Biden’s ended, she referred at least three times, by my count, to Biden, his administration or their supporters as “crazy.” Not just wrongheaded — “crazy.”

“The choice is between normal and crazy,” she said, distinguishing Republicans from Democrats. This from a woman who worked for Trump, on behalf of a party whose leaders coddle the likes of Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene and now talk about the Jan. 6 riot as if it were no more sinister than a fraternity party with a keg too many.

Sanders eagerly joined the culture wars, heavily armed with the favored ammunition: “woke,” “indoctrinate,” “critical race theory.” But she also sought to soften that assault with frequent references to being a mom, repeated invocations of her three children and multiple calls for a “new generation” of leadership. A folksy battering ram — that’s what she was. In other words, her usual oxymoronic self.

“Good things happen to people who make bad, unethical choices,” said Tim Miller, a former spokesman for Jeb Bush and the author of the recent best seller “Why We Did It: A Travelogue From the Republican Road to Hell.” “It sucks. Been cultivating a practice of acceptance in yoga.”

What is Sanders cultivating? Her age — she’s just 40 — and her newness in office mean that she’s not among those Republicans who might offer themselves up as alternatives to Trump for their party’s 2024 presidential nomination.

But 2028? 2032? Wholly conceivable. Maybe even likely. And certainly not what most people envisioned back when she was furiously rapping the knuckles of White House journalists on television every afternoon and trying to vaporize the CNN reporter Jim Acosta with her death glare. As Trump’s mouthpiece, she put on a fiery performance for a combustible boss. She served faithfully.

“I think I’ve known her since she was probably 15, and she’s beyond smart, savvy and politically sophisticated — arrestingly so,” said Ralph Reed, the founder of the Faith and Freedom Coalition, which has huge sway with social conservatives in the Republican Party.

He told me that he’s especially impressed by her proven or potential credibility with all the important subgroups in the Republican Party. The daughter of a Baptist preacher and the graduate of a Baptist college, she’s beloved by evangelicals. The most ardent Trump enthusiasts are ardently enthusiastic about how loyal she has been to him.

Her focus of late puts her in line less with Trump and more with fellow Republican governors Ron DeSantis in Florida and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia, who have styled themselves as post-Trump alternatives.

She sounded like both of them not only on Tuesday night but also at her inauguration last month, when she vowed to make certain that schools in Arkansas were “not brainwashing our children with a left-wing political agenda.” She subsequently announced that she had picked Jacob Oliva, who worked prominently alongside DeSantis on education issues in Florida, to become Arkansas’s new education secretary.

She understands her currency in a party that would like to be able to claim more diversity than it has and to seem a bit more modern than it is. “I happen to be the youngest governor currently serving anywhere in the country,” she said during those inauguration remarks, just happening to mention that.

She’s asserting a political identity distinct from Trump’s. But his imprint on her is indelible — Or maybe she appreciates the futility of trying to make such a break. She wasn’t just one of the many Trump administration officials who shrugged off his laudatory comments about the white nationalists in Charlottesville, Va., his praise of autocrats, his flirtations with autocracy, his cruelty to migrant children, his bigoted tirades, his hush money for a porn star, his phantasmagorical dishonesty. She spun them into a fantasy of strong and inspiring leadership.

“Her briefings are breathtaking,” I wrote in a column in 2017. “For some 20 minutes every afternoon, down is up, paralysis is progress, enmity is harmony, stupid is smart, villain is victim, disgrace is honor, plutocracy is populism and Hillary Clinton colluded with Russia if anyone would summon the nerve to investigate her (because, you know, that never, ever happens).”

Her motivation? She made clear that she cherished Trump’s stated opposition to abortion and the promises he made — and kept — in that regard. And so she minimized and rationalized all the ways in which he flagrantly offended Christian principles.

But then she’s the queen of having it both ways.

She has a fine rapport with the destructionists who torment House Speaker Kevin McCarthy while also being in good with him. “Her MAGA bona fides are unassailable, but McCarthy doesn’t have to worry she’ll start talking about the Dominion machines or something else off message,” Miller said.

Does that add up to rank opportunism?Yes, especially in light of her answer, during her primary in Arkansas last year, to the question of whether she believed the 2020 presidential election was stolen.

“I don’t think we’ll ever know the depths of how much fraud existed,” she said, according to The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, adding: “We know there is fraud in every election. How far and wide it went, I don’t think that will be something that will be ever determined.”

How mushy. How weaselly. She knows better, and it turns out there’s one box she hasn’t checked: Integrity.