Kamala Harris jabs at Joe Biden’s old faith in a post-Trump ‘epiphany’ for Republicans
By Edward-Isaac Dovere, CNN
(CNN) — Kamala Harris thinks Joe Biden had too much faith in Republicans, and she’s jabbing at him for it.
“We cannot sit around hoping Republicans will have an ‘epiphany’ and do the right thing,” the former vice president will say in a speech Friday night in New Orleans, “because the American people can’t afford to wait.”
Beyond eventually writing in her post-election memoir that leaving the decision to run for re-election to the former president and his wife was “recklessness,” Harris has been careful in distancing herself from her former boss since she took over the Democratic nomination from him in 2024. But as she mulls whether to run for president again in 2028, she is pushing for a much harder tack than the one epitomized in Biden’s well-known 2019 prediction that “You will see an epiphany occur among many of my Republican friends” once he beat Donald Trump.
As Democrats look forward, Harris will say, they need to be ready for a much fiercer fight. “The good news is Donald Trump will be term limited out. However, please let us be clear: there is no term limit on this new Republican Party built in his image — and folks, there is a deep moral corruption about this new Republican Party,” she will say, according to excerpts of the speech shared with CNN. “Their ideology is clearly to create a smash-and-grab world. To sow chaos, grab wealth and abuse power.”
Harris is delivering the keynote address at the Louisiana Democratic Party’s annual gala, where she’ll also receive a legacy award. It will be her first major speech since the Supreme Court further eroded the Voting Rights Act in the spring by ruling in its Louisiana v. Callais decision against mandated Black-majority districts. The decision to give this speech in Louisiana is deliberate for the former vice president, who is preparing more speeches on Callais into the fall as she decides on her own political future.
Rather than sticking to anything like the status quo, she will urge those at the dinner to discover a “ruthlessness that must be the attitude of the Democratic Party.”
“This fight requires that we start to get comfortable with some things—including having a certain kind of ruthlessness,” Harris will say. “Now, I don’t mean ruthlessness like the cruelty they show. I mean the kind that is uncompromising in its impatience with injustice, that shows no mercy for corruption, that fights back hard when they threaten the power of the people.”
Harris will call for using government revenue to reduce costs on housing and healthcare, addressing inequality in the tax code, improving access to skills training and creating guardrails around artificial intelligence. But she won’t get into specifics.
“We’ll also need to look in the mirror and hold ourselves accountable. Government has to earn the trust of the people,” Harris will say. “And that means responding to the actual needs of the people—not with bureaucracy, but with speed and transparency. Not with process — but with progress.”
One announcement Harris is not scheduled to make on Friday: a decision on whether she will run again.
The-CNN-Wire
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