There are two main themes in “Unapologetic,” Sarah Huckabee Sanders’ poorly timed memoir and launching pad for a run for national office: She thinks she’s an agent of God, and she models herself after President Donald Trump.
Between a few chapters of substance on the Arkansas LEARNS Act and family road trips, the book catalogues Sanders’ slavish devotion to the president — every cherished text message from Trump, his invitations to star in his campaign ads, his glowing endorsements, his tender kiss on her cheek at the 2024 Republican National Convention. If she ever hopes to distance herself from Trump as MAGA dies out, this book of truths shall not set her free.
The book also gives us a front-row seat into Sanders’ religious zealotry, which she kept toned down in her first memoir, “Speaking for Myself,” released in 2020. “Unapologetic” is chock-full of lengthy Bible verses, C.S. Lewis quotes, all fine. It’s the scripture references leveraged to justify apocalypse-tinged, violent policies that show the governor as shockingly out of step with modern Western democracy.
If we’re forced to recount who Sanders might be as a national candidate, “Unapologetic” shows that she is Trump: virulently pro-Israel, pro-Iran war, anti-immigrant, anti-trans, anti-DEI. The only areas where she bothers to differentiate herself are in her policies around school choice — initiated under the LEARNS Act — and in one unmemorable section on regulating AI (without ever mentioning data centers).
Whether she has a chance at national office will depend on the country falling in love with MAGA and religious zealotry again in 2028.
Alas, the book is also delicious and funny in places, so we’ve included some of that stuff, too.
No one loves, truly loves, Donald Trump like Sarah Huckabee Sanders
Sanders rightly names Trump as her kingmaker, the person who gave Sanders a plum role as press secretary during his first White House tenure and whose early endorsement for governor helped her raise money — and win the state. “I hope you don’t run for president!!!!” Trump once joked with her. Could she be more obvious?
Sanders relays her tearful, emotional response to his assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in the run-up to the 2024 election. “To watch someone you love and care about who has the best security in the world be shot on live television is a terrifying feeling that is hard to put into words,” she writes.
At the Republican National Convention, just days after the event, Sanders describes running, literally running, through the main hall so she’d be in the room when Trump walked in. When she was invited to sit in the box reserved for Trump and JD Vance at the conference, Trump stopped by and gave Sanders a hug and a kiss on the cheek.
“It wasn’t until he hugged me that it fully set in that he was really okay,” she writes, noting she was holding back tears at the thought of Trump’s demise.
She also boosts everything Trump stands for: his war in Iran, his immigration crackdown, his DOGE overreach. “He should never be underestimated, and I am confident that the movement he built to make America great again is only getting started,” she writes. LOL.
Obviously, the book was completed and printed before the midterm election’s Blue tsunami.
She explicitly states that she modeled her governorship after Trump
This has already been established, but here it is in plain language: “I love Arkansas, but I wasn’t blind to the problems our state faced. I thought that the best way to fix those issues would be through bold, new leadership, like what President Trump had brought to America,” Sanders writes on her decision to run for governor.
How could a good Christian back Trump, you may wonder. It’s because God isn’t done with him yet, she writes. “I believe that God saved President Trump to accomplish His purpose,” Sanders writes of Trump’s assassination attempt. “That belief doesn’t mean that President Trump is perfect or doesn’t make mistakes; it simply means that God isn’t done with him yet and has a bigger plan, I believe, to use him for America’s good.”
Which part of that plan includes his work as a convicted felon, sexual abuser, instigator of January 6, and friend to a notorious child rapist?
Sanders loves Jelly Roll, thinks Kid Rock is a ‘legit bad*ss’
As most Arkansans won’t soon forget, Kid Rock flew in from a duck-hunting trip in Stuttgart on his private jet, emblazoned with an “American Badass” and a middle finger on the tail, to perform at the governor’s inauguration, much to the delight of both Sanders and first gent Bryan. “Kid Rock is an incredibly talented musician and savvy businessman. He is also a true patriot. He loves our country and isn’t afraid to stand up for what he believes in,” she writes, before calling Rock a “legit bad*ss.” Later we learn she also loves the “raw, powerful” music of Jelly Roll.
She blames her Franklin County prison flop on the ‘crazies’ and the ‘good ol boy’ network in Arkansas
Sanders ran as a backlash candidate to the Black Lives Matter movement, and her failed efforts to force through a new state prison in bucolic Franklin County and install a yes-man to oversee the State Board of Corrections mark her biggest policy failures in Arkansas to date.
Sanders doesn’t hide her resentment. She dredges up the drama, blaming the pushback she received for unconstitutionally installing a secretary of corrections named Joe Profiri — and using emergency powers to force prisons to expand capacity — on misogyny. “It was a reminder that the good ‘ol boy system was still alive and well in Arkansas,” she writes.
Sanders never utters the Franklin County prison by name. Instead, she blames her lack of progress on her prison platform on a small but vocal minority of Republicans who are upholding the status quo. “I expected I’d be fighting the Left and the ‘defund the police’ crazies to make our communities safer, but I had no idea that some of the fiercest opposition would come from within my own party,” she writes.
She thinks she was chosen by God to lead Arkansas
Gov. Sanders really thinks that the Lord God Almighty chose her to be our governor. She spent months praying about it with her husband.
“We were determined to answer God’s call to follow Him and run the race to lead our state,” she writes. “I knew without question I was meant to enter that race.” As she recovered from thyroid surgery late in the campaign, she comforted herself in knowing: “I was only weeks away from becoming the first woman elected governor of my state and the youngest governor in the country. And most importantly, I had a God who loved me without reservation and without condition.”
She surrounded herself with people who told her God had commanded her to lead. Her pastor and bible study leader, Jay McGuirk, delivered the sermon at the inauguration, calling her election one of the most important days “in our state’s history” and comparing her to King Solomon in the Bible. “Our governing authorities are put in place by God. Sarah, you are where you are because the Lord has placed you there,” McGuirk said.
Sanders thinks it’s her job to ‘carry out God’s wrath’
Sanders’ ideas on crime and punishment make for some of the book’s most disturbing passages. She lays out her bone-chilling view of herself as “the sword,” a God-ordained punisher of evil and sin. She goes on to say that the government’s job is to punish evil, which must be done swiftly lest evil settle permanently into the human heart (an idea apparently backed up by Ecclesiastes). “The purpose of establishing law and order is not only to keep more evil from happening but to carry out God’s wrath toward evil in a way that is appropriate to the crime committed,” she writes.
Among the things Sanders describes as evil are China, the “defund the police” movement, mass shootings, Israel being uninvited to the Paris Air Show, antisemitism (but not other types of racism), Charlie Kirk‘s critics, drug cartels, and violent crime.
You can see where this is headed. Harsh punishment is one of Sanders’ preoccupations. Arkansas has one of the highest incarceration rates in the country, locking up a greater share of its population than authoritarian regimes like Iran. Under Sanders, the state has increased the state trooper ranks by 20%, the book notes, and passed harsh truth-in-sentencing laws that make it so that many violent offenders serve their full sentences, which often stretch for decades — or their entire lives.
One of the more eyebrow-raising passages on divine justice comes as she recounts an exchange at the family dinner table after the 2024 assassination attempt against Trump. Sanders’ son George said he was glad the shooter was dead. Their daughter Scarlett scolded him and said it was wrong to say such things. George said, “Why? The Bible says, treat people the way you want to be treated. You shoot somebody, you get shot.” The Sword told her son that though he got the details of the Bible passage wrong, she was glad the shooter was dead, too.
She crashed into a Sonic and careened off a mountainside
The beginning of the book is heavy on car crashes, we assume to humanize a person who often seems defensive or impassive. In the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, when the family went on a road trip out West, Sanders crashed into the ordering screen at a Fayetteville Sonic, ripping the side mirror off the family Yukon. Bryan didn’t let Sanders drive for the next 5,000 miles, apparently.
This was the same trip where they made a pit stop at Mount Rushmore to join President Trump’s highly controversial Fourth of July festivities — Sanders couldn’t believe hateful liberals wanted to shut down the event to spare people’s lives.
When Sanders was a student at Ouachita Baptist University, working on her dad’s gubernatorial reelection campaign, she got in a terrible car accident while leaving an event near Mountain View. Her roommate was also in the car. It was raining, and Sanders hydroplaned, overcorrected and drove the car off the side of a cliff, flipping multiple times and leaving them hanging upside down. The pair heard voices above — Sanders assumed they were angels. Turns out it was two guys in a pickup truck.
We start to wonder if she has a problem driving, but Sanders said she brought it up as a sign of “God’s divine intervention.”
The specter of seeing ‘intact’ male genitalia inspired her anti-trans crusade
It’s no surprise to learn that Sanders’ virulent reaction to trans rights is rooted in scripture — but apparently it’s also rooted in her queasiness surrounding male genitalia. She chronicles meeting Riley Gaines Barker, anti-trans activist and college athlete, and hearing of the “unimaginable” day that Barker was, by her account, forced to watch a trans woman, Lia Thomas, change in front of her in a locker room — with “full male genitalia intact.” These two people were in college at the time, mind you.
“No rational person can argue that allowing boys with all their parts intact to change in front of girls … is the right thing to do,” Sanders writes. Some of Barker’s teammates dispute the story and say Thomas was facing the corner and wrapped in a towel.
Would she prefer that Lia’s gender reassignment surgery have already been completed? Of course not. Sanders’ childish disgust helped to justify codifying biological sex into law in Arkansas, allowing residents to sue the state if they encounter a person of the opposite sex in a public bathroom, and banning gender transition surgery among minors. Some transgender Arkansans have since left the state — or are considering moving.
Sanders — the governor of an entire state — thinks women are men’s ‘helpers’
Sanders flaunts her status as the first female governor of Arkansas — and the first mom — but only when it’s convenient. She put up floral wallpaper and installed a green velvet couch in her office at the Capitol because she found the office too masculine. She talks about her love of holding babies.
But in her anti-trans chapter, Sanders sets down her quasi-feminism and slips back into fire and brimstone mode. God says, “men and women are distinct in design, role, and function,” she writes. Adam’s role is cultivating and guarding the garden, and “Eve was created as a helper fit for him,” Sanders writes. Helper doesn’t mean “inferior,” she promises.
Whether Gov. Sanders genuinely thinks women are just helpers for men or trots that out only when throwing trans people under the bus, she is not the helper of Arkansas — she is its most powerful executive in the state gearing up to be a powerful politician on the national stage. How does she account for that contradiction?
“My identity is not as a woman … My identity is in Christ,” she says.
She maybe can’t use a computer?
Sanders says she’s not tech-savvy, which could mean anything. She says during her first meeting with senior staff after getting elected, she made her notes in a Word document and had someone else print it out for her.
Sanders stretches the truth about having a constant target on her
Sanders has a tight, round-the-clock security detail, a group of people she calls “family” in the book. Large motorcades and intimidating plainclothes security are not things Arkansas’ past governors used. “I was the first White House press secretary to receive Secret Service protection due to credible death threats, but this one was the first since returning home to Arkansas,” she crows, referring to a mentally ill Rogers man who is now in prison. The governor says it’s her support of Trump’s policies that has “kept a target” on her. She claims to have had more death threats in her first months in office than the past two governors combined. We found public record of one other: A Republican-voting retiree from Fort Smith.
What didn’t make the book is how the governor has continued to use the specter of personal safety to hide details about her travel and security expenditures while in office. She tried to gut the Freedom of Information Act in Arkansas to permanently bring down the veil on public transparency. The book makes multiple references to her constant peril. She talks about how, while visiting the West Bank in Israel, a security official said a prominent pro-Israel family could easily be targeted by Hamas, for example. Later, she recounts how some thieves tried to push their way into her hotel room but were thwarted.
She barely mentions abortion
Sanders barely mentions abortion, other than to say Arkansas is now the most pro-life state (meaning home to one of the country’s most extreme abortion bans) and that she doesn’t force women to be parents. But she does force them to give babies away. “We instead promote adoption,” she writes.
Is she mostly mum on abortion because she trusts abortion politics are mostly settled on a national level? Not a chance. She knows that Arkansas’s dismal maternal health record is a real political liability, so she spills a lot of ink on her plans — other than expanding Medicaid and abortion — to help pregnant women not die.
“As conservatives, we have to do a better job of supporting parents after their baby is born — our focus can’t be on the baby only while in the womb. Being pro-life is about the entire life,” she writes.
Sanders recycles the dubious notion that Arkansas students are making significant gains
The LEARNS Act, Sanders’ hallmark legislation, was launched within months of her taking office — and it takes up a lot of real estate in the book. The act launched Education Freedom Accounts (more commonly known as vouchers) that allow parents to pay for their kids’ private school or homeschool on the taxpayer dime, arguably draining public-school resources and resegregating schools.
Sanders makes the claim in the book that test scores in Arkansas are up at every grade level, with reading proficiency up by 20%. What she doesn’t say is that the ATLAS system makes Arkansas test scores impossible to compare to schools around the country, or that the act doesn’t hold private schools, to which public-school kids are decamping under LEARNS, to any sort of testing standards.
She mentions racism and slavery twice (the dog whistles were too many to count)
Not counting the references to slavery in the Bible, of course.
Sanders can’t stop calling immigrants ‘illegals’
One of Sanders’ first trips as governor was to the southern border to “help manage President Joe Biden‘s border crisis.” This is where her inability to see large swaths of humanity as God’s children, deserving of compassion, really stands out.
Seeing human beings crossing the border by the hundreds and hearing about facilities “packed” with thousands of immigrants did not inspire empathy from the governor or pique curiosity about what conditions folks are fleeing. Rather, it inspired her to bring Trump’s racist immigration policies home to Arkansas, where she boasts about putting tough penalties on undocumented immigrants who commit crimes in Arkansas, expanding the state’s ban on sanctuary cities, and forcing local law enforcement to cooperate with ICE.
“It’s one thing to read about the border crisis. It’s another to see it and to hear from the men and women working tirelessly to protect America from being completely overrun by illegal immigrants,” she writes.
By her own numbers, of the 10 million undocumented border crossings that occurred during the Biden administration, thousands were known criminals and hundreds were on the terrorist watch list.
She stayed in a by-the-hour hotel in Memphis, the horror
While flying back to Little Rock from the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in Orlando, where she did a joint appearance with her dad, Mike Huckabee, Sanders and her family couldn’t land in Little Rock and were diverted to Memphis, where a staffer put them up in a rent-by-the-hour hotel. The horror! A fight broke out in the hallway and someone was arrested at 4 a.m.
“I couldn’t get out of there fast enough,” Sanders writes. At checkout, Mike Huckabee was talking to call girls at the front desk but didn’t realize it.
She lets Mike Huckabee tell her kids appalling lies about Palestinians
Sanders took her kids and husband to Bethlehem in the Israeli-occupied West Bank for Christmas Eve in 2025. The West Bank is part of historic Palestine and is internationally recognized as occupied Palestinian territory.
During that same trip, when they weren’t zip-lining, visiting holy sites, or buying knickknacks at a Christmas market in Bethlehem, Papa Mike Huckabee regaled the Sanders kids with wildly offensive, inaccurate stories about Palestinian children and what the international backlash to Israel’s genocide in Gaza is all about.
He told the kids that Palestinian children, from the age of six, are taught that “they’ll get heavenly rewards if they kill a Jew.” He also keeps a map he claims was taken from a fifth-grade classroom in Gaza, depicting a Hamas flag over Israel. “This is what Israel will look like if Hamas achieves its goal of murdering every Jew in Israel,” he told her children.
Sanders also posits that Mike Huckabee is uniquely qualified to be Trump’s ambassador to Israel, by virtue of having traveled there countless times over the past 50 years. To be clear, Huckabee’s experience largely consists of leading Christian tours to biblical sites in Israel, hardly a substitute for foreign policy or diplomatic expertise. His regard for Palestinian human rights is appallingly lacking.
Sanders never says anything about the genocide in Gaza — as if. Throughout the book, Sanders does not even say Palestine or Gaza; she refers to these places as “Palestinian-controlled territory” or “Judea and Samaria under Palestinian control,” language she also forces Arkansas public employees to use when referencing Palestinian land under Israeli control. Move over, Palestinians.
She also believes with her whole heart that anything Israel does is part of God’s plan. “We don’t have to agree with every political move or military decision that Israel makes,” she writes, but modern-day Israel is “God’s chosen instrument to preserve the Israel of the Bible and give millions of Christians the opportunity to safely visit the Holy Land.”
Sanders’ commitment to Israel is really that transactional. Jewish people are simply a pawn in the eventual return of a Christian God — and a backdrop for her family’s tourism schemes. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we learn that Sanders’ brother David has continued to lead Christian groups to Israel over the past few years.
She wants credit for Trump attacking Iran
Sanders very much wants to claim a role for herself in the calamitous U.S. conflict with Iran. She reminisces about her dad’s disturbing text message from June 2025, in which he urged the president to bomb Iran because Trump would “hear a voice from heaven” telling him to do so. Trump screenshotted and posted the message to X and then bombed Iran in Operation Midnight.
At a White House dinner with Trump a few months later, we learn that the president asked Sanders and her husband if he should launch a military strike. “You’ll do the right thing to defend America,” Sanders says she told the president, appearing to want some credit for Trump’s decision to take out the Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei a few days later, alongside Israel. Okay? Sure.
It’s an enormously unpopular war with both Republicans and Democrats. Perhaps she needs to recast the war as a righteous battle against radical Islam and an effort to contain a nuclear power to have a chance at a national run — or she really is that besotted with Trump.
The first gentleman once told her filming in the State House Museum would look like a ‘hostage video’
We also learn some things in the book about Bryan Sanders, First Gentleman. Chief among these is that he’s a savvy Republican operative who is deeply concerned about Sarah Sanders’ image. He encourages her “craziest ideas” and wrote the ads for her first gubernatorial campaign (does that mean he wrote the Brad, welfare queen ad, and the transphobic man in women’s sports ad? ). He can also be offensively candid when it comes to telling her what doesn’t look good.
When Sanders was going to film a 2023 State of the Union response in the Old State House Museum, as tired and aged-looking as it sounds, Bryan grew steely and silent, worried it looked “like a hostage video.” Sanders reportedly told her husband to calm down, one of the only deeply relatable things she writes in the entire 238-page screed.
Bryan also has a ‘90s rap mix — he played it during a small late-night gathering the night of Sanders’ inaugural ball, during which McDonald’s was served.
Her religiosity is terrifyingly devoid of values
The book is chockabrock with Bible verses and quotes from Christian texts. One would imagine that such a book would focus on compassion, helping the poor, telling the truth, loving thy neighbor as thyself and so on. Sanders abuses her religion to paint herself as an embattled soldier of God, to justify violent and inhumane policies and to absolve herself of any responsibility.
Sanders quotes from a book, “Wild at Heart,” by John Eldredge, which argues that becoming a Christian doesn’t remove you from life’s struggles; it moves you “to the front lines” of the battle. “So often, people misunderstand how Christianity works,” she quotes Eldredge as saying. “Sure you can create a safe life for yourself … and end your days in a rest home babbling on about some forgotten misfortune. I’d rather go down swinging.”
Even her notions of how God transforms a person’s soul sound violent. In quoting C.S. Lewis‘s book, “Mere Christianity,” she relays that God wants to kill your old self and then take it over. “I want You,” Sanders quotes from Lewis’s book. “I have not come to torment your natural self, but to kill it … I will give you a new self instead. In fact, I will give you Myself: my own will shall become yours.”
Under Sanders’ circular reasoning, if someone is mad at her, it’s because God is testing her. And every single wicked thing she does is blessed by a higher being. So, yes, if your public school was drained by “Education Freedom Account” vouchers, your immigrant neighbor got deported, your trans child was denied medical care, that’s just the Lord working through Sarah Huckabee Sanders.