Kamala Harris made history at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago as she accepted her party's nomination to take on Donald Trump, pledging to “write the next great chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told”.
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 setting out the threat posed by a Trump comeback.
Her remarks threaded the Heritage Foundation’s far-right “Project 2025” guidebook through her opponent’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 the 2020 election results, she said, and “when he failed, he sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol, where they assaulted law enforcement officers”.
“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.
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