Just over a month to the day that President Joe Biden ended his re-election campaign, Kamala Harris made history of her own as she accepted her party’s nomination to take on Donald Trump.
Harris delivered her acceptance speech before a packed crowd at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago’s United Center on Thursday, capping off a four-day celebration of her candidacy.
“Together, let us write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told,” she said in her closing statement.
She told thousands of cheering supporters about her “unexpected journey” from a middle-class background to a barrier-breaking career as a prosecutor, senator and vice president, before turning her attention to Trump.
Her remarks threaded the Heritage Foundation’s far-right “Project 2025” guidebook through Trump’s growing authoritarian vision for his second term.
“In many ways, Donald Trump is an unserious man. But the consequences of putting Donald Trump back in the White House are extremely serious,” she said. “Imagine Donald Trump with no guardrails, and how he would use the immense powers of the presidency … not to improve your life, not to strengthen our national security, but to serve the only client he has ever had: himself.”
He tried to “throw away your votes” with his spurious legal campaign to overturn election results in 2020, and “when he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers,” Harris said.
“He fanned the flames, and now, for an entirely different set of crimes, he was found guilty of fraud by a jury of everyday Americans, and separately found liable for committing sexual abuse,” she said.
The extraordinary candidacy of Harris — who galvanized the party around her within days of Biden ending his re-election campaign and endorsing his vice president — marks a major milestone for political representation, as the first Black woman and first Asian-American to lead a major political party.
The daughter of Indian and Jamaican immigrants could be the first woman elected president, eight years after Hillary Clinton made her own history as the first woman nominated by the party in 2016.
As Beyonce’s anthem “Freedom” boomed from the arena’s loudspeakers, Harris strode on stage in a black suit while the crowd — filled with women dressed all in white as an homage to the suffrage movement — waved signs bearing her first name, which they chanted over and over again.
Harris quieted the arena with just four words: “Let’s get to business.”
She thanked her husband Doug Emhoff, who wiped tears from his eyes, and her stepchildren Ella and Cole seated beside him.
Harris also wished the Second Gentleman, or “Dougie”, a happy anniversary — Thursday marked 10 years of marriage for them.
She also thanked her running mate “Coach” Tim Walz and President Joe Biden, the man who selected her as his running mate four years ago, for his “extraordinary record” and “inspiring” character.
Her vision for the administration is “charting a new way forward, to a future with a strong and growing middle class,” she said.
“Building that middle class will be a defining goal of my presidency,” she said. “Compare that to Donald Trump, because I think everyone here knows he doesn’t actually fight for the middle class. Instead he fights for himself and his billionaire friends.”
As pro-Palestinian advocates and “uncommitted” delegates pressed her campaign and the DNC to let a Palestinian-American speak on stage, Harris recommitted herself to Israel’s “right to defend itself” to ensure that Israel will “never again face the horror of what a terrorist organization named Hamas did on October 7.”
“At the same time, what has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating — so many innocent lives lost, desperate hungry people fleeing for safety,” she said.
She said her administration will press for “freedom, security and self-determination” for Palestinians.
On Republicans’ anti-abortion agenda, Harris said: “Simply put, they are out of their minds.”
With her voice raised over the roar of the crowd, Harris said she will “never hesitate to take whatever action is necessary to defend our forces and our interests,” noting threats from Iran and North Korea, who are “rooting for Trump.”
“They know he is easy to manipulate,” she said.
Her Republican rival “won’t hold autocrats accountable because he wants to be an autocrat himself,” she said.
Over four days, members of Harris’s family painted a joyful portrait of the Vice President, from her husband’s gushing praise for his one-time blind date, to her sister, step-children, nieces and godchildren telling Americans what they see in the woman now running for president.
Harris paid tribute to her mother Shyamala Gopalan Harris, who at 19 years old immigrated from India to the US, where she met Jamaica-born economics student Donald Harris at the University of California, Berkeley.
After the couple divorced, Shyamala, a cancer researcher, raised Kamala and her sister Maya.
Harris described her multiracial, middle-class community in California, where her mother relied on neighbors who “instilled in us the values they personified: community, faith and the importance of treating others the way you wanted to be treated, with kindness, respect, and compassion.”
Her mother — a “brilliant, five-foot brown woman with an accent” — taught them “to never complain about injustice, but do something about it.”
“She also taught us: never do anything half-assed,” she said. “And that is a direct quote.”
In her own career, as a prosecutor, “I’ve only had one client,” Harris said. “The people.”
She accepted her party’s nomination on behalf of “the people” and “every American, regardless of party, race, gender, or the language your grandmother speaks” and “on behalf of everyone whose story can only be written in the greatest nation on earth.”
At 9:44pm local time, Harris sent the capacity crowd to its feet, causing the arena to shake when she told attendees: “I accept your nomination to be president of the United States.”