Vice President Kamala Harris speaks at her presidential campaign’s first rally in West Allis, Wisconsin on July 23, 2024. Photo: Mike De Sisti / Milwaukee Journal Sentinel / USA TODAY NETWORK
Vice President Kamala Harris held her first presidential campaign event last night in Wisconsin where she laid out what will be the main message of her campaign, which the audience started chanting with excitement.
But during her speech, she made a quip about Project 2025—the conservative plan for Donald Trump’s possible second term that lays out the party’s far-reaching agenda—that sums up what many people are thinking about it.
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“Donald Trump wants to take our country backward,” she said. “He and his extreme Project 2025 agenda will weaken the middle class. We know we gotta take this seriously.”
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Project 2025 is, as GLAAD describes it, “a 180-day playbook of regulations and executive orders that could be signed and implemented by the next president upon taking office, a database of potential appointees, and an online ‘education academy’ to train appointees in its conservative tenets.”
Project 2025 says, “Only heterosexual, two-parent families are safe for children,” which is not true. It calls for an end to anti-discrimination measures for LGBTQ+ people, for an end to funding for gender-affirming care through Medicare and Medicaid, for the Department of Justice to defend anti-LGBTQ+ discriminators on a First Amendment basis, for a ban on transgender people serving openly in the military, and for an end to USAID’s promotion of LGBTQ+ rights in other countries, which Project 2025 calls its “bullying LGBTQ+ agenda.”
Harris was talking about the 900-page document that Democrats have been tying around Trump’s neck because they believe it will make him less popular due to both its conservatism and its concrete language on issues that Republicans often speak about in more vague terms.
“Can you believe they put that thing in writing?” she said as the audience laughed.
She discussed some of Trump’s economic policies, like his attempt to end the Affordable Care Act the first time he was in office. She said ending the landmark health care bill, also known as “Obamacare,” would “take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny people with preexisting conditions. Remember what that was like?”
“America has tried these failed economic policies before,” Harris said, “but we are not going back. We are not going back.”
The audience then started chanting, “We’re not going back!”
“And I’ll tell you why we’re not going back: because ours is a fight for the future.”
Trump has said that he has never heard of Project 2025, despite it being put together by 140 people who worked for him in the past. Video from 2022 shows Trump at a Heritage Foundation dinner when the group was working on Project 2025. He called Heritage a “great group and they’re going to lay the groundwork and detail plans for exactly what our movement will do.”
