Introducing Donald Trump is a strange occasion to talk about humility. To put it mildly, humility is not a quality that the former president is known for. But Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the former Trump press secretary and current governor of Arkansas, decided to muse about humility on stage in Michigan on Tuesday night. She told a story about watching her daughter get ready for a father-daughter dance, and of the moment when her daughter turned to her and said: “It’s OK, Mommy. One day you can be pretty, too.”
“My kids keep me humble,” Sanders said of the exchange. “Unfortunately, Kamala Harris doesn’t have anything keeping her humble.”
It was the latest in a series of attacks by Republicans on childless Americans, and among the more direct comments by Trump surrogates suggesting that Harris is morally suspect and unqualified for power because she has not given birth.
This is usually JD Vance’s line. The vice-presidential candidate and Ohio senator has been the most prominent face of Republican pro-natalism, responding to the overturning of Roe v Wade by the conservative-controlled supreme court with a series of public statements seeking to degrade childless women and advocating for their diminished citizenship.
It is Vance who has derided prominent Democrats as “childless cat ladies”, referred to adults without children as “sociopathic” and suggested that Americans who have not reproduced should have fewer votes. That Sanders, largely seen as an heir to the party’s Christian conservative wing, has taken up this pro-natalist rhetoric indicates that other sections of the Republican party are willing to make misogynist contempt of childless women a center of their campaign strategy.
Supporters of Harris are quick to point out that the vice-president does have children: she has stepchildren. Cole and Ella Emhoff, the products of Harris’s husband Doug Emhoff’s first marriage, have been a part of Harris’s family since they were teenagers; reportedly, they sometimes call her “Momala”. (Ella Emhoff, in particular, has become a target of rightwing ire for her tattoos, large glasses and a fashion sense I can only describe as “Ridgewood basement chic”: her style of femininity, the right never tires of reminding us, is one of which they do not approve.)
In the wake of Sanders’ remarks disparaging Harris for not being a mother, her campaign surrogates were eager to cite her enmeshment in a loving and very modern blended family. Kerstin Emhoff, Doug Emhoff’s ex-wife and the mother of Harris’s stepchildren, took to Twitter to defend Harris. “Kamala Harris has spent her entire career working for the people, ALL families,” she wrote.
These efforts to correct Republican smears about Harris’s childlessness are true enough, and they have noble motives as well as strategic ones. It is worthwhile on its own terms to reaffirm the legitimacy of blended families; and it is smart, in a campaign where median voters may well be swayed by appeals to “family values”, to depict Harris as a devoted member of a loving family.
But the rejoinder that Harris is not childless leaves intact the right wing’s suggestion that it would be a problem if she were. And it leaves untouched, too, the unspoken bigotry that animates those remarks: their assertion that women who devote themselves to things other than marriage or motherhood are somehow suspect, deficient or defective.
It seems almost silly to have to say this, but being a parent is not a qualification for the presidency. If it were, it’s not clear how well Donald Trump himself would measure up: the onetime reality TV star has five children with three different women, has reportedly made repeated remarks about his sexual attraction to his oldest daughter, Ivanka, and seems only distantly aware of his youngest two progeny, Tiffany and Barron.
Even setting aside the caliber of Trump’s own fatherhood, a total of five US presidents have not had biological children at all – including Trump’s own professed hero, Andrew Jackson, and no less a figure than George Washington. What is different – and to the right, offensive – about Harris is not that she has no biological children. It’s that she is a woman.
So far, the prospect of becoming the first female president has not played a major role in Harris’s case for her own presidency. Aside from things like the selection of a VP candidate (which, it was assumed, would have to be a man) and Harris’s comfort talking about abortion (which, it is assumed, is necessarily because she’s a woman), the campaign has largely sought to moot the salience of their candidate’s gender.
Perhaps this is because after 2016 and the crowded 2020 primary, the prospect of a woman at the top of a presidential ticket no longer seems novel; perhaps it’s because the Harris/Walz staff have taken the lesson from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign that too great a focus on the election as a possible feminist achievement could foment backlash. Whatever the reason, there is little public chatter now, either from the Harris campaign itself or from the pundit class, about how having a female president will change Americans’ view of the office – or of themselves. If there were, maybe someone would be willing to say what is obvious: that comments like Sanders’ are meant to suggest that women should be at home raising babies, instead of seeking positions of power. Instead, everyone is acting very conspicuously as if they think that Harris’s gender does not matter.
It does matter. And that vacuum of gendered critique is being filled, on the right, with a great deal of gendered resentment. As the gender gap in American politics continues to widen, Trump, Vance and increasingly the rest of the Republican party that they lead have begun to parrot talking points from the so-called “manosphere”, the collection of web forums and content creators that push misogyny as an ideological agenda.
The far-right drift of young men, after all, seems largely to stem from anxiety over their perceived loss of gendered status: their fear and anger that men are no longer uncontested in their social dominance, and that women are no longer uniformly compelled to serve them. What could be more comforting to young men descending into this kind of bigoted woundedness than the confident declaration that women who do not organize their lives around traditional roles are worthless? And what could be more threatening to them than the notion that a woman might ascend to that superlative position of patriarchal power – the presidency?
Moira Donegan is a Guardian US columnist
