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In her first campaign rally as the presumptive Democratic nominee to face Donald Trump, Vice President Kamala Harris took aim at her Republican rival and a widely derided Trump-linked platform that provides a blueprint for the next GOP administration.
“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” she said in remarks from Milwaukee on Tuesday, just two days after President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign and endorsed his vice president.
Harris, who secured enough delegate pledges to clinch the Democratic Party’s nomination within a little over 24 hours after announcing her candidacy, linked Trump to Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation-backed plan for his administration, and one that his campaign is now furiously trying to distance itself from.
“He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we got to take that seriously,” Harris said. ”Can you believe they put that thing in writing? Read it. It’s 900 pages.”
The plan proposes cuts to Social Security and Medicare, tax breaks to corporations that will force “working families to foot the bill” and abolishes the Affordable Care Act, which “will take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions,” Harris said.
“Remember what that was like? Children with asthma? Women who survived breast cancer? Grandparents with diabetes?” she added. “America has tried these failed economic policies before and we are not going back.”
Project 2025’s core policy book Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise outlines major changes across the federal government, with chapters written by former Trump officials, with recommendations that are virtually identical to ones that have been proposed by Trump.
The president’s endorsement of Harris on Sunday was followed by a wave of support from Democratic officials and delegates who will cast their vote for Harris as the party’s nominee at next month’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Her campaign hauled in more than $100 million from donors within its first full day, and Biden’s running mate-turned-preferred nominee stands to inherit the president’s massive campaign war chest.
Prominent Democratic leaders, including former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Bill and Hillary Clinton, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, along with a majority of congressional lawmakers in their camp, have pledged to support Harris as the party’s nominee.
In her first stump speech as the likely nominee on Tuesday, Harris addressed campaign staff and supporters at the campaign’s headquarters in Delaware, where she hailed Biden’s legacy in office, promised to unite the Democratic Party around her campaign, and took aim at her Republican rival, framing Trump as a career criminal up against her history as a top law enforcement official in California.
As a former prosecutor, she “took on perpetrators of all kinds” — including “predators who abused women, fraudsters who ripped off consumers, cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain,” she said.
“So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she added.
Harris echoed those remarks in Milwaukee on Tuesday.
The vice president has pitched her campaign around support for abortion rights, voting rights, ending gun violence, boosting the middle class and making the case against Trump.
“In this campaign, I promise you, I will proudly put my record against his any day of the week,” Harris said. “We believe in a future where every person has the opportunity not just to get by, but to get ahead.”
Her campaign is putting Trump’s name next to the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse Roe v Wade and the wave of abortion bans across the country that followed.
She will work to stop what she is calling “Donald Trump’s extreme abortion bans,” she said on Tuesday, “because we trust women to make decisions about their own bodies and not have their government tell them what to do.”
Harris has also echoed Biden’s pledge to codify Roe v Wade into law, if Congress is able to pass legislation that will affirm Americans’ constitutional rights to abortion care.
