Sarah Huckabee Sanders defends her State of the Union response as an authentic, values-driven counter to "crazy" progressive policies, including banning CRT and pushing Arkansas’ Arkansas Learns reforms—boosting parental control, fixing 35% third-grade literacy rates, and raising teacher pay. She doubles down on opposing transgender rights legislation ("no longer defining what a woman is") and frames the GOP’s future as a freedom vs. government-control battle, crediting Trump with reviving working-class support while dismissing media elites. Rejecting 2024 speculation, she vows to outdo her father’s legacy with Arkansas-first policy wins, positioning conservative reform as the only path forward. [Automatically generated summary]
It isn't often that I get to have someone on to interview who is the only person to have accomplished something, but I have with me today the only person ever to give an effective response to the state of the union.
Also happens to be the governor of Arkansas, Sarah Huckabee Sanders.
Governor, thank you so much for coming on.
Absolutely.
Thanks so much for having me.
It was a great speech.
Before I ask you anything serious, there's one thing I've always wanted to ask someone.
The only person in politics that I ever feel any compassion for is the White House spokesperson.
Because no matter what, you have to defend your guy.
You can't just go out and say, yeah, the guy made an idiot move, right?
You have to say that.
Yeah, that wouldn't be very good job security if you did.
So I just want to know, did you ever walk out one day and just think, God is going to kill me for doing this?
I never got quite to that point.
I was, you know, if I had ever gotten to a place where I felt like I didn't have a good answer, a good enough story to tell, or felt like we were going across like a moral line, I would have just, you know, said, this is the end for me.
But we didn't get to that place.
Fortunately, I felt like our policies were always in the right direction in the right place.
And we had a really good story to tell.
The country was doing better under President Trump than it had in a long time.
And so I had great facts to go out and present.
Now, they didn't care to hear them most of the time, but I still did my best to try to share them.
Oh, it was vicious.
I mean, nothing like that now.
It was amazing.
Yeah, I wish I had the same crowd that I see now.
I'm wondering where that group of people came from because they certainly weren't there then during my two and a half years.
Yeah, they opened one box for the Democrats and one for the Republicans, different reporters.
Your speech was great.
Thank you.
And seriously, it's the only effective State of the Union response I've ever seen.
I think the first thing I should ask you, what was the trick?
What were you thinking going in?
You know, I really wanted it to be my voice.
And, you know, frankly, one of the very first drafts of the speech that we had didn't feel right.
It didn't feel like me.
And so we started over and I went in a totally different direction.
It was really important to me that I had the ability to talk about things that I felt like mattered, but also that allowed me to connect with the audience, which was not the camera, but the people at home and to really show kind of who I was in my heart and what I was about.
And so that's what we try to stay focused on throughout the process and felt like we did that.
And I was terrified leading up to, but very, because I've seen a lot of amazing speakers go into that moment and people who are kind of at the peak of their career and it not go so well.
And, you know, you don't know if you're being rewarded or punished when you're asked about that.
And so I was very happy to come out on the other side and really proud of what I felt like we were able to deliver that night.
And mostly that I felt like we were able to tell the conservative side of the story and really make it, you know, the difference between normal versus crazy, something that I feel like everybody could go.
I get it.
Putting Power Back Into Parents' Hands00:05:57
Well, that makes sense.
That was the thing that caught me.
It certainly, I mean, I think it's been since President Trump that the Republicans have started to learn a little bit.
Some of these cultural things that go on, you know, the newspapers or the press likes to dismiss them as cultural war, it's cultural war.
But we didn't start the culture war.
As you pointed out, I was so happy to hear you say that.
And these things really affect people.
They affect your kids and your schools and all this.
So what specifically do you think people are thinking right now?
Obviously, 2024 is coming up.
What do you think of the issues?
When you say just sticking with crazy versus sane, what do you think of the crazy issues that are really bugging people?
Well, I think one of the mistakes that we've made, frankly, on our side, is we've been on defense for so long.
And that was one of the other goals of that night was let's go on offense.
We're on the right side of this.
We're on the normal side of what is going on.
The fact that we can no longer define what a woman is and that we can no longer teach our kids basic things when it comes to reading, writing, and arithmetic.
It has to be a lot of what I think most of us would agree is total indoctrination.
Those are not normal things that we are trying to push down on the next generation of people growing up in our country.
And so making a clear contrast, I think, is really important, but also not acting like we're in the wrong here because we are not.
And going back on offense and defining who we are and what we're about and not being afraid of the nasty names that we know that they're going to call us because we believe in God, we have faith, we care about our families and a mom and a dad and things like that.
I don't think we're in the wrong and I think we need to go out and tell that story.
So what specifically things, I mean, I know the last governor of Arkansas is a Republican, right?
And he vetoed anti-transgender bills.
Would you sign those if they came back?
I mean, would you do what we did here in Tennessee?
Absolutely.
And our legislature actually overrode his veto.
So that did go into effect.
And I spoke out at the time and said that I would have signed that legislation.
And we have things we just have passed through the House our Arkansas Learns legislation, which I think is one of the most comprehensive legislative packages on education, certainly in the history of my state.
But also, I think anywhere in the country right now, and we deal with some of those indoctrination issues, banning things like CRT, which I signed an executive order on the first day, but putting that into the legislation, making sure those things are not going to become the norm in our schools.
Talk about LEARN for a minute because, you know, this is one of the issues that I think when I was talking to Vice President Pence, he was saying this is one of the biggest things of all, the educational system.
And I can't help feeling, you know, I think it was in Arizona they put in a lot of school choice, but it hasn't really resonated with people.
What's the trick here?
What do we do to take back our schools?
Well, I think it's putting power back into the hands of our parents.
You know, I think if we had any positive things that came from all of the craziness around the COVID pandemic, it's that we awakened parents to start paying attention to what is happening to their kids.
They started pushing back on the fact that, no, you're not going to shut down our schools.
You're not going to shut down our businesses.
You're not going to mask our kids.
You're not going to teach them these crazy ideas.
And so we are putting that power back into the hands of parents that are now paying attention.
Because I think for a long time, that wasn't necessarily the case.
I think most people felt like everything was good and they didn't realize some of the things that were taking place.
And so now that they are an awakened crowd, we're giving them that power and putting the decision-making ability back in their hand to say, this is a better fit for my student.
I'm going to move my child to this school or this school because I know that's the best place for them to be educated.
Arkansas has had a historic problem with this, a historic problem with education.
And governors have come and gone and nothing has happened.
What do you think is different this time?
I think we're doing something that's different.
We're not just tinkering with the system.
We're flipping the table over and breaking the system and adding so many new components.
It's not just that we're putting school choice as part of this.
We're also making, I think, and reinvesting in our public schools in a way to provide greater resources for them to be successful.
A huge focus on literacy that has been, I think, totally ignored.
We know that so many kids across this country are falling further and further behind.
The national average of students in third grade reading levels is about 41 percent.
In Arkansas, it's 35 percent at that make or break third grade benchmark.
And we know if a student isn't reading by that point, that we are setting them up for a lifetime of failure.
If you look at our prison population in the state of Arkansas, 70 percent of those incarcerated can't read is a huge indicator for whether or not a child is going to have the ability to be successful and be a contributor to their community or whether they're going to become dependent on the system.
And so focusing on areas like that, as well as empowering parents, also rewarding our teachers.
We're going to go from being at the very bottom in teacher pay to being number one in the country when you adjust it for the cost of living.
But even if you don't make that adjustment, we're still in the top five.
So we are really changing the system, focusing on, I think, things that matter and putting kids on a pathway to success.
Well, if you can produce numbers at the end of your term that show that turnaround, you'll be president of the United States.
That's something that is.
I just want to help the kids in Arkansas.
I think we're on the path to do that.
Looking Forward to 202400:05:59
Well, let's talk about the presidency 2024.
I'm going to guess that you're not going to run against Donald Trump.
I'm not going to run against anybody.
I just got elected Arkansas in my very first legislative session.
I have a really big agenda and to-do list at home and want to get those things done before I think about anything else.
What if he picks you as vice president?
You know, I think that there are a number of other great options.
I'm really happy to be back home in Arkansas.
I did two and a half years in D.C. and I'm happy to be back home.
And I love the job I'm doing and looking forward to getting a lot of things done.
All right.
I noticed you slipped that question, but I'm going to let you go because it's a tough one.
No, Jim Acosta here.
We can keep going.
Talk about President Trump.
I think he did.
My personal opinion is for three years he did a great job.
He made some baubles during the COVID thing.
I think if there had been no COVID, he'd be president still.
I can't help feeling it'd be nice to get some younger people in the office.
I mean, I don't want you to talk about against your old boss, but at the same time, what would you like to see happen for the GOP going forward?
You know, I absolutely love the president.
He gave me an unbelievable opportunity.
I know our country was infinitely better off when he was in the White House.
I think we would be much better off right now if he was still in the White House.
I know a lot of the things that we are seeing the Biden administration destroy, he would never have allowed to happen if he was president.
And, you know, we'll see what happens.
I don't think, you know, I talk a lot about the new generation of leadership, but I don't think that's based on age.
I think that's based on energy and innovation.
And I think he has more of that than most of us combined.
You know, I'm half his age, but I had a hard time keeping up with him when I worked in the White House.
I've heard that about him.
Yeah, he sleeps about four hours a night at best, and he never stops.
And I do think that he was an innovator and brought a new sense of energy to the party that, frankly, we hadn't seen.
He added a whole new group of people that, frankly, had not been that supportive of the Republican Party.
I think he returned power and a focus back to the working man that had been ignored for a long time in this country.
And he gave a voice to a lot of people that had, I think, been voiceless for decades in the Republican Party.
And so we'll see what happens moving forward.
But I don't think anybody can challenge him when it comes to the influence and the energy and the innovation, frankly, that he brought to the party and could probably still deliver today.
You know, we started out kind of joking about the press, but I thought one of the most important things President Trump did was call the press out.
And I had heard a lot of people, insiders, a lot of political insiders, who would say to me that GOP will never win until they understand that they're running not against the Democrats, they're running against the press.
Looking forward, what should if you had the leaders of the Republican Party in a room and you had to tell them one thing about dealing with, to me, what is now a corrupt industry, what would you say to them?
Well, I think there's a couple of things, and I don't think they're wrong, but I think it's much bigger.
You're not just running against the press, and I think he did more than just take them on.
He took on all of the big institutions.
It was the press.
It was big tech.
It was higher ed.
It was kind of, you know, the leftist elites on, you know, the two coasts.
He took them all on and pushed back in a way that, frankly, no Republican, I think, had felt comfortable doing and gave, I think, the ability for new Republicans to follow that lead and start pushing back.
And so I think the biggest thing is don't back down, but also know that we don't need them.
He proved that you don't have to have them to win and to be effective.
And so I think what we're doing right now is we're seeing conservative media grow and new outlets and new opportunities for us to get our message out.
And I think we just have to work around them and never be afraid to push back when we know that we're in the right.
Yeah, I think if they learn anything, that has got to be the message.
What else, when you look at the country, what's the agenda of the GOP going forward on a national level?
You know, I think that we're really at a crossroads.
To me, it's very simple.
If you want the government to make decisions for you about how you raise your kids, about how you run your business, about what church you go to, about how you engage with your community, then you're a Democrat.
And if you want to make those decisions for yourself, if you want to decide how you're going to raise your kids and what school you're going to send them to and how you're going to run your business and you want personal freedom, then you're a Republican.
It is, to me, at this point in the country, it's that simple.
Do you want the government to run your life or do you want to?
And I think when we break it down and we make it that simple, I think the choice gets really clear for a lot of people.
It's interesting.
I think that basically says it.
Well, look, I think you've started out.
I think you've signed more bills in about 20 minutes in Arkansas than I've ever seen any governor put into action.
So you will at least be able to say as your term, your first term comes to an end, you'll be able to look at results.
It's a really interesting moment.
Arkansas has been a troubled state, and you certainly gave yourself a problem taking it over.
I like to think we had one governor that was really amazing.
You know, my dad was one of the longest serving governors in the country for about 11 years.
I like to say he's the best governor Arkansas's ever had, one of the best governors our country's ever had.
And I'm working really hard to take both those titles away from him.
All right.
Well, good luck.
It's really nice to talk to you.
And again, congratulations on that speech.
It was an actual game changer that I think set the Republicans up very nicely for 2024.