Kamala Harris: ‘Trump has given Netanyahu a blank check to do whatever he wants’
The former presidential candidate was interrupted by pro-Palestinian protesters at the start of a book tour in New York to promote her memoir about the election campaign she lost
Kamala Harris stepped onto the stage at Town Hall Theater in New York City this Wednesday, and suddenly it was the fall of 2024 all over again. The same broad smile, the long laughs at her own quips, the suit jacket... For a moment, it seemed as if, a year later, the presidential campaign in which Donald Trump soundly defeated her hadn’t ended. It also seemed as if, had the race continued, perhaps the woman destined to become the first female president of the United States would not have lost.
Or that’s at least the impression left on the reader by 107 Days, a blend of political memoir and campaign diary that the former Democratic candidate presented on Wednesday in a Manhattan taken over by the United Nations General Assembly. And the overarching impression is that its author is convinced that if she lost, it was due to a lack of time.
In just 107 days, the dizzyingly short span between President Joe Biden’s decision to quit the race on July 21, faced with the evidence of his inability to continue, and election night on November 5, Harris writes, she didn’t have time to show voters how much she could have “helped them more than Trump.” And that “saddens me enormously.” By choosing that title for her book, she makes it clear to the reader what awaits inside: a 300-plus page justification of why Harris crashed, and a phenomenal exercise in acquitting herself of responsibility for her defeat.
It was the first date of the book tour, and a group of pro-Palestinian activists interrupted the former vice president four times, shouting, “The blood of the Palestinians is on your hands.” On one occasion, Harris rose from her chair to silence the shouting, spoke of the “unimaginable suffering of the Palestinians,” and begged that someone else be held accountable—because she is not the president now, nor was she on October 7, 2023. “What’s happening to the Palestinian people is outrageous and it beaks my heart,” she told the 1,500 people gathered there. “Trump has given [Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin] Netanyahu a blank check to do whatever he wants.”
Harris also recalled that she gave a speech in Alabama in the days following the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023, in which she warned of starvation in Gaza, and that this earned her “a lot of heat” from the White House. On Wednesday, the protest continued outside Town Hall, an institution founded in the 1920s by suffragettes and the setting for some of the best live albums in the history of jazz.
Her demeanor on the stage, a little more belligerent and unafraid to stray from Biden’s policies, also suggested that perhaps things might have turned out differently if she had adopted this attitude earlier. Harris also told Democrats to get to work. “No one is going to come and fix the Democratic Party; we have plenty of stars who can step up. We have to get to work. We must fight fire with fire!” she proclaimed to a devoted, mostly female audience, who received a copy of the book with their ticket.
It’s not clear from 107 Days—nor was there any way to tell from her address in New York—whether she was including herself in the mix when she talked about Democratic “stars.” She won’t run for governor of California, but she hasn’t ruled out running for office in 2028. And judging by the angry reaction of some of her potential Democratic primary opponents after a hasty reading of her book, none of them are in a position to do so either.
In New York, Harris criticized Trump without mentioning him by name. She said that nobody could imagine the level of capitulation from big business. And why is that? “Because they’re waiting for permission for a business merger or because they’re trying to avoid an investigation? Because they don’t want to lose their yacht or their house in the Hamptons?”
The former vice president also accused the Trump administration of silencing the opposition and anything that smacks of criticism, comparing it to “a communist regime.” Trump, she added, “has no ideology.” He’s just lining his pockets while implementing an agenda decades in the making, she said.
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