SAN FRANCISCO — Former vice president Kamala Harris marked President Donald Trump’s first 100 days in office by condemning his “reckless” tariffs, “unconstitutional demands” and efforts to stoke a climate of fear to silence his dissenters.
Speaking at the annual gala for Emerge — a group that recruits and trains women to run for office — Harris used her first major address since leaving the White House to urge her supporters to speak out and fight back against what she cast as the Trump administration’s efforts to roll back decades of progress.
She accused Trump of breaking his campaign promise to lower costs. Instead, Harris said, the president is hurting working families and paralyzing American businesses with his “reckless tariffs.”
But the former California attorney general placed the greatest emphasis on how spreading courage could dispel the climate of fear that she said Trump has tried to create in Washington.
“We all know, President Trump, his administration and their allies are counting on the notion that fear can be contagious,” Harris 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.”
Harris is returning to the public stage at a moment of deep anger and frustration within the Democratic Party, nearly six months after her loss to Trump. At
huge rallies across the country, Democrats have fulminated about their leaders’ inability to do more to slow Trump’s agenda, including his mass deportation efforts.
In her speech, Harris pointed out some of the Trump administration’s most controversial actions, including how it
swept up hundreds of people it alleged to be gang members and shipped some of them to a foreign country
without due process.
She praised Americans “who are speaking out to say, ‘It’s not okay to
violate court orders. … Not okay to detain and disappear American citizens or anyone without due process.’” She said she was also inspired by judges who “uphold the rule of law in the face of those who would jail them” and universities “that defy unconstitutional demands.”
While Trump’s critics have described his agenda as creating chaos, Harris said her supporters should not be “duped into thinking” that. She described Trump’s tactics as a “high-velocity event” that is being used to “slash public education” and shrink government before privatizing its services.
What is happening under Trump, Harris said, is the implementation of a decades-long agenda on the right that is a “narrow, self-serving vision of America where they punish truth tellers, favor loyalists, cash in on their power, and leave everyone to fend for themselves.”
Since returning to her home state of California, Harris has kept a low profile as intrigue swirls around whether she will run for governor in 2026 to succeed Gavin Newsom (D), who is term-limited.
Though she set a deadline of mid- to late summer to make that decision, it has been complicated by her desire to keep the door open to another run for president and to explore other paths outside elected office, according to interviews with former aides, allies and friends.
Harris’s defeat in November cast her political career into uncertainty. Some Democrats are ready to turn the page on the Biden era and a disappointing 2024 election, looking to a new crop of potential White House hopefuls. But she remains popular in her home state and would probably vault to the top of the field of candidates running for governor if she entered the race.
Harris helped inspire the formation of Emerge in her 2002 run for district attorney of San Francisco against an entrenched incumbent. The obstacles she faced in that first campaign shaped some of the training programs and curriculums that Emerge has developed to guide female candidates through the challenges they face in building fundraising networks, hiring staff and running their campaigns.
A’shanti F. Gholar, president of Emerge, said the group has been seeing “the Kamala effect” since November of more women stepping up to run for office. At the president’s 100-day mark, Gholar said, Harris was well-positioned to deliver a rebuttal to Trump and urge a room of aspiring leaders and their supporters to stay engaged.
“Because we know that really making us exhausted and disillusioned and feeling that there is nothing we can do is part of the game plan,” Gholar said. “That’s how authoritarianism works. That’s how dictatorships work. They really just want people to be so exhausted that they don’t stand up and fight.”
Harris addressed some of those themes and urged her listeners to show courage during her recent remarks to prominent Black female leaders and business owners at the Leading Women Defined Summit in Dana Point, California.
In those remarks, she said was dismayed that she was “seeing organizations stay quiet. We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats.”
The former vice president spoke at the Dana Point event after news broke that Willkie Farr & Gallagher — the law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a partner — had
struck a deal with Trump despite Emhoff’s objections. In late February and March, Trump began using executive orders to
target several law firms that had represented clients whom he considers his adversaries. He issued directives that barred them from government contracts and access to public buildings. On April 1, the president announced that Emhoff’s firm had reached a deal to avoid those kinds of punitive actions.
Emhoff said publicly several days after Trump’s announcement that he had argued against the arrangement. “I wanted them to fight a patently unconstitutional potential executive order. Patently unconstitutional,” Emhoff said in
remarks to Bet Tzedek, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services.
Trump revived criticism of Harris on Wednesday. In a
social media post Wednesday, Trump bashed Harris for giving a “disastrous answer” during a “60 Minutes” interview before the 2024 election. Trump sued the show over how it edited the interview, sparking a legal fight that
continues to roil CBS.
While closely tracking the Trump administration’s actions in Washington, Harris has been thinking about how she will shape her own political organization to build on the ideas from her presidential campaign and her legal career. She and her team have also been exploring the formation of a policy institution, either on its own or connected to an academic institution such as Howard University, her alma mater, or Stanford University. But those talks have been informal and preliminary.
Harris did not address her potential run for governor on Wednesday night, but her shadow has shaped the early months of the race.
The Democratic field is already large and includes some of her allies, such as Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former congresswoman Katie Porter, who previously represented a swing district in Orange County. Both Porter and Kounalakis attended the Emerge dinner in San Francisco Wednesday night.
Initially, it seemed as though Harris’s entrance would clear the field, but that is no longer certain. Candidates including former health secretary Xavier Becerra and former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are likely to stay in the race if she enters, according to several people with knowledge of their thinking.
Rufus Gifford, finance chair of Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said that while some of Harris’s donors are eager to see her run for governor, she also has an important role to play now, at a time when the Democratic brand “couldn’t be any worse.”
“Whether you are Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, now is not the time to sit on the sidelines and not share and not speak your mind. I think the time is now to speak out,” Gifford said. The majority of her supporters, he added, would “welcome her running for governor, doing that work in the state — being back on the national stage.”
Harris left office and returned to her home state as Los Angeles was reeling from wind-driven wildfires in January. Minutes after stepping off the plane from Trump’s inauguration, Harris headed to a World Central Kitchen outpost near Altadena to thank volunteers who were handing out dinners and to talk with residents who had been affected by the fires — offering words of encouragement out of earshot of news cameras. Before driving to her home in the Brentwood neighborhood, she stopped to thank the firefighters and support staff at L.A. County Station 12, which had been the first to respond to the Eaton Fire northeast of Los Angeles.
She later toured the fire damage with Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents a large swath of L.A.’s west side, as well as heavily impacted areas such as Malibu. And she and Emhoff attended the
FireAid benefit concert that raised an estimated $100 million for people affected by the fires.
More recently, Harris has enjoyed the chance to reconnect with friends and entertain with Emhoff at the four-bedroom, 3,505-square-foot Brentwood property he bought in 2012. Former aides and allies frequently resisted questions about her next political moves by joking about how much she has been cooking.
The couple were spotted soon after their return having dinner with friends at Craig’s in West Hollywood, the same spot where they went on their first date. She was tracked by the paparazzi on a run to the grocery store.
As she and Emhoff contemplated a life split between New York and Los Angeles, her fans chronicled some of their New York outings on social media. They made several appearances on Broadway, including when they took in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical” and visited with the cast and crew after the show.
Emhoff has shared brief glimpses of their public outings on his Instagram account, including a hike last weekend. The couple have been able to have a degree of privacy at the Hillcrest Country Club, a historically Jewish private club where Emhoff has long been a member. On Easter, Harris and Emhoff attended services at Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, a predominantly Black city in southwest Los Angeles County, with her niece Meena Harris and her grandnieces.
Though she chose until now not to weigh in publicly on the daily political debates raging around the Trump White House, Harris has frequently offered to serve as a private sounding board for fellow Democrats. Those have included potential candidates seeking her advice, as well as the next generation of leaders trying to shape the party.
