Former Vice President Kamala Harris criticized Donald Trump by name Wednesday in her first major speech since losing the 2024 presidential election.
Speaking at a San Francisco event promoting women running for office, the city’s former district attorney reflected on Trump’s first 100 days in office.
“We all know President Trump, his administration and their allies are counting on the notion that fear can be contagious,“ she said. ”They are counting on the notion that, if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chilling effect on others. But what they’ve overlooked is that fear isn’t the only thing that’s contagious. Courage is contagious.”
Alluding to Trump’s “reckless” tariffs, Harris praised “the courage of Americans who are banding together in the face of the greatest man-made economic crisis in modern presidential history.”
The former presidential candidate added that the president’s economic agenda will “hurt workers and families by raising the cost of everyday essentials, devastate the retirement accounts that people spent a lifetime paying into, and paralyze American businesses, large and small, forcing them to lay off people, stop hiring, or pause investment decisions.”
Harris also commended other signs of resistance, like Harvard “defying unconstitutional demands that threaten the pursuit of truth and academic independence.”
Judges, too, have shown courage “uphold[ing] the rule of law in the face of those who would jail them,” she said.
Harris, a child of immigrants, also called out the Trump administration’s controversial deportations of lawful residents, like university students, and its interrogations of U.S. citizens, like immigration lawyers.
It is “not okay to detain and disappear American citizens or anyone without due process,” she said.
Wednesday’s appearance is just the first in a series of public events where Harris plans to take on the Trump administration after largely remaining silent for his first few months in office.
She has made a few appearances in public but hadn’t mentioned Trump by name until this week. The decision to hold off criticism was part of a tradition of letting the next administration “get its sea-legs,” a source close to Harris told the Daily Beast earlier this week.
The former vice president is also set to appear at a fundraiser for the Democratic National Committee in New York City next week.
Speculation about Harris running for California governor began floating soon after her defeat to Trump.
An April poll by Politico and the University of California Berkeley found that political insiders in California felt “indifferent” to a possible Harris run, while registered voters appeared to feel stronger, with reactions both for and against her candidacy. “Joyful,” “outraged,” or “hopeless” were the most popular responses.
In her speech on Wednesday, Harris has also embraced Democrats who are publicly standing up to Trump and his administration—the most high profile of which was Illinois Gov. J.B. Pritzker, who on Sunday called for widespread resistance across the country.
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