US Vice President Kamala Harris, garnering Democratic support for her surprise entry into the presidential race, rallied supporters in her first campaign speech on Monday and vowed to attack Republican candidate Donald Trump like she once did as a prosecutor in court.
“I encountered criminals of all kinds. Predators who abused women, fraudsters who defrauded consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own profit,” Harris told campaign workers, 28 hours after the 81-year-old President Joe Biden abandoned the 2024 White House race and endorsed her.
“So hear me when I say that I know the type of person Donald Trump is. In this campaign, I will proudly, I will proudly put my record against him,” said Harris, who was California’s attorney general and a U.S. senator before serving as Biden’s vice president.
The Trump campaign responded to Harris’ comments. “Kamala Harris is just as incompetent as Joe Biden and even more liberal,” said Carolyn Levitt, the campaign’s national press secretary. “Not only will Kamala have to defend her support for Joe Biden’s failed agenda over the last four years, but she will also have to answer for her poor record on crime in California.”
Trump is scheduled to be sentenced in September after pleading guilty to falsifying business records to hide payments he made to a porn star. He also faces criminal charges related to his efforts to overturn Biden’s 2020 victory. He has falsely claimed that his loss in 2020 was due to election fraud.
Biden, who dropped out of the race on Sunday amid questions about his age and health, phoned into Harris’ campaign event. Biden, who is recovering from COVID-19 at his home in Delaware, was hoarse in voice but praised his vice president.
Biden said he feels he made the right decision by stepping down from the presidency. Biden, the oldest person to sit in the Oval Office, said on Sunday that he will remain in the presidency until his term ends on January 20, 2025.
Harris, 59, outlined a number of policies she has promised to pursue, including signing laws to protect abortion rights and ban assault rifles, and said she would put rebuilding the middle class at the center of her presidency.
Within minutes of receiving Biden’s endorsement on Sunday, Harris began solidifying Democratic support for her presidential effort, winning commitments from hundreds of convention delegates, announcing a massive fundraising blitz and receiving endorsements from top party figures.
They include former Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who remains influential after stepping down as the party’s House of Representatives leader in 2022. The AFL-CIO labor union federation, which represents 12.5 million workers, said Monday it also endorsed Harris for president.
Sources told Reuters that the Harris campaign aims to secure commitments from a majority of the roughly 4,000 Democratic delegates to next month’s Democratic Party convention by Wednesday evening, effectively sealing the nomination.
Campaign officials and aides have made hundreds of calls urging delegates to nominate Harris for president in the Nov. 5 election.
Harris’s campaign said it raised $81 million in the 24 hours after Biden’s exit, the most for a single day in the 2024 campaign for either party.
Nearly all prominent Democrats considered potential challengers to Harris have announced support for her, including governors Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California and Andy Beshear of Kentucky. Whitmer said in a post on X on Monday that she would serve as co-chair of Harris’ campaign.
Biden’s departure was the latest setback for the White House race, which included his disastrous debate performance against former President Trump on June 27 and Trump’s killing by a gunman during a campaign stop on July 13.
Harris praised Biden’s services to the country. At an event held at the White House to honor college athletes on Monday, she said: “Joe Biden’s legacy over the last three years is unmatched in modern history.”
Harris will travel on Tuesday to Milwaukee, the largest city in the state of Wisconsin, where last week the Republican National Convention was held in a clear demonstration of Trump’s dominance over his party.
the new generation
Harris, who is Black and Asian American, would set up an entirely new dynamic with the 78-year-old Trump, presenting a vivid generational and cultural contrast.
The Trump campaign has been preparing for her potential rise for weeks, sources told Reuters. It on Monday issued a detailed critique of her record on immigration and other issues, accusing her of being more liberal than Biden.
It alleged that Harris supported abolishing the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency and decriminalizing border crossings, supported the so-called Green New Deal, backed the administration’s electric vehicle mandates and encouraged efforts to “defund the police.”
Some of these were stances Harris had taken as an unsuccessful presidential candidate in the 2020 election, when she ran on a more liberal agenda than Biden, but these were not stances the administration adopted, particularly with regard to border security and law enforcement issues.
Eric Holder, who was US attorney general in President Barack Obama’s administration, and his law firm Covington & Burling LLP will investigate Harris’s potential running mate nominees, according to two sources familiar with the matter.
Trump, whose false claims that his loss to Biden in 2020 was the result of fraud prompted the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, on Monday questioned the Democrats’ right to change nominees.
“He stole the race from Biden after he won the primary,” Trump said on his Truthout social platform.
At a rally for fellow Trump candidate J.D. Vance on Monday, Ohio state Sen. George Lang said a civil war was needed to save the country if Trump doesn’t win the November election. Lang later said on X that he regretted his comments. “We should all be careful about what we say at political events, myself included,” he wrote.
Harris is expected to follow Biden’s foreign policy on issues such as China, Iran and Ukraine, but could take a tougher stance with Israel over the Gaza war if she wins the election in November.
Some Democrats were concerned about the country’s long history of racial and gender discrimination. The US has not elected a single woman president in its nearly 250-year history.
Most opinion polls conducted before Biden contested the election did not find Harris performing statistically better than Biden against Trump.
Biden has not been seen in public since testing positive for COVID-19 on Wednesday. If he recovers, he plans to meet Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
