In her new book, “107 Days,” Kamala Harris, the former vice president, recounts how she warned the American public that President Trump would enrich himself, go after his enemies and foment political unrest if elected again.
She just could not have predicted how quickly people and institutions would bend to his will, the one-time Democratic presidential nominee now says.
“I fear that every signal that he is receiving, including Jimmy Kimmel, is rewarding him for what he does and the way he does it,” Ms. Harris said in an interview this week from her home in Los Angeles, the first she has given ahead of the book’s release on Tuesday.
Ms. Harris was referring to ABC’s decision to suspend Mr. Kimmel’s late night show after he was accused by the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission of inaccurately describing the politics of the suspect in the fatal shooting of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
With her comments, Ms. Harris joined other Democrats, including former President Barack Obama, in warning that the right-wing establishment, led by Mr. Trump, is using Mr. Kirk’s killing to crush dissent.
“He’s going to start going after Democratic donors,” Ms. Harris said. “He’s going to go after nonprofit organizations that feed hungry people. It’s outrageous.”
She added, “He will keep doing this until somebody tries to stop him.”
Still, Ms. Harris, who weathered an intense and compressed presidential bid last year, would not say if she was interested in being the person to lead her party. For all of her name recognition and fund-raising power, Ms. Harris also appears ambivalent in her memoir about whether she wants a formal role in politics again.
She does write at some length about her desire to reach out to Generation Z voters who turned away from her campaign toward Mr. Trump and others who feel more despair than ever about their economic prospects. She argues that she had plans for them and had tried to articulate them, citing a proposal to provide Medicare benefits to people in need of home medical care, and another to offer down payment assistance programs for first-time home buyers.
“With this platform, I have to somehow contribute to shifting the power back to people,” she said in the interview. “I believe our charge, as much as anything, on an existential level, is to remind the people of their power.”
In the months since the presidential election, Ms. Harris has stayed largely out of sight in her native California, but not exactly silent. In writing the book, she worked with the Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Geraldine Brooks. The final result is written in snippets and snapshots of each day of her campaign, with triumphs and missteps coming through in a rush.
Good or bad, no single moment seemed to last except for the most crucial one, when it started to look as if she might lose on election night. Her two young grandnieces had been sent to bed that night, but Ms. Harris could still hear them crying through a wall of the vice president’s residence. An aide quietly scraped “Madame President” decorations from the top of celebratory cupcakes before serving the naked treats as comfort food. Ms. Harris was in shock, she recalls in the book.
“My God, my God,” she writes. “What will happen to our country?”
Ms. Harris comes across on the page much as she does in person: disciplined, polished and guarded, but with a few surprising revelations.
Her Democratic allies have reacted with surprise to some of the more candid assessment she shares in the book, which names more names than some in the political chattering class had expected.
In her telling, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. resembled a boss who couldn’t get out of his own way, even after he turned his campaign over to her. He called her just before her presidential debate against Mr. Trump in Philadelphia to wonder out loud if she was being loyal to him, she recounts.
Ms. Harris defends Mr. Biden’s ability to serve as president, praising, in particular, his understanding of foreign policy. (Still, there are a few policy areas in which they diverged. She wrote that she pleaded with Mr. Biden to “extend the same empathy he showed to the suffering of Ukrainians to the suffering of innocent Gazan civilians.”)
In the interview this week, Ms. Harris said she had not brought up the matter of age to Mr. Biden. Nor had she mentioned to him that there was a growing din of outside concern that he was not fit to be president or run again: “It was so disconnected from the reality of my exposure to him,” she told The New York Times.
But she does write that she believes “recklessness” and “an individual’s ego” guided Mr. Biden’s decision to run again, and criticizes his aides for not doing more to shield her from criticism as vice president or elevate her profile.
A representative for Mr. Biden did not return a request for comment.
In the book, Gov. Josh Shapiro of Pennsylvania comes off as more concerned with his future prospective role in a Harris administration than hers. She writes that she believes that Mr. Shapiro “would be unable to settle for a role as No. 2 and that it would wear on our partnership.” Manuel Bonder, a spokesman for Mr. Shapiro, said in a statement that it was “simply ridiculous to suggest that Governor Shapiro was focused on anything other than defeating Donald Trump and protecting Pennsylvania from the chaos we are living through now.”
And Pete Buttigieg, the former transportation secretary who, Ms. Harris writes, was actually her first pick as a running mate, told Politico that he disagreed with Ms. Harris’s belief that it would have been “too risky” to run a Black woman and a gay man on the Democratic ticket. “Politics is about the results we can get for people and not about these other things,” Mr. Buttigieg, who is openly gay, said.
Ms. Harris said in the interview that she was ready for the blowback. She described the book as an “honest” account of her time on the campaign that, she said, was less about settling interparty fights than about sharing what it was like to run a campaign.
“This book is not a book about grievance,” Ms. Harris said. “It’s about the American people, about my time with them, my experience with them, the optimism they brought me, and their stories.”
In person, as in the book, she toggles back and forth between the two sides of herself she has shown to the public: the realist and the optimist. At other times, a fighter shows up.
When asked about the critics who say that with her memoir she is rehashing old wounds and settling scores, Ms. Harris noted that, as a presidential candidate who had a little over three months to plead her case, she had something to contribute to the historical record.
“I’ll be damned,” she said, “if this gets written without my voice.”
Katie Rogers is a White House correspondent for The Times, reporting on President Trump.
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