SAN FRANCISCO, USA – Former U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris launched a blistering critique of President Donald Trump’s administration on Wednesday, April 30, 2025, accusing him of presiding over a “narrow, self-serving vision of America” that rewards loyalty over truth and fuels division through fear.
Delivering her first major speech since the Democratic Party’s defeat in the 2024 election, Harris addressed an audience at a political training event hosted by Emerge, a group that prepares Democratic women for public office.
Her remarks offered a sweeping condemnation of Trump’s governance while rallying progressives to resist what she called a deeply regressive agenda.
“What we are, in fact, witnessing is a high-velocity event, where a vessel is being used for the swift implementation of an agenda that has been decades in the making,” Harris said, invoking imagery of a political system hijacked for radical aims.
She criticised Trump and his allies for leveraging fear as a political weapon: “They are counting on the notion that, if they can make some people afraid, it will have a chilling effect on others.”
But she was quick to counter that notion with optimism.
“Fear isn’t the only thing that’s contagious. Courage is contagious,” she declared, drawing applause.
Harris accused the administration of orchestrating a broad rollback of public goods and democratic norms. “An agenda to slash public education.
An agenda to shrink government and then privatise its services—all the while giving tax breaks to the wealthiest,” she said, pointing to Trump’s second-term proposals, including further deregulation and expanded executive authority.
In one of her most forceful statements, Harris described Trump’s government as one that “punishes truth-tellers, favours loyalists, cashes in on power, and leaves everyone else to fend for themselves.”
While acknowledging the defeat her party suffered at the polls, Harris emphasised that resistance to Trump’s agenda is growing across the country.
“The courage of all these Americans inspires me,” she said, urging women and progressives not to retreat from public life but to organise, run for office, and speak up.
