Vice President Kamala Harris delivers the keynote speech at the American Federation of Teachers’ 88th National Convention in Houston, July 25, 2024.
Brendan Smialowski | AFP | Getty Images
Vice President Kamala Harris in a fiery speech Thursday blasted the policy agenda of former President Donald Trump as one of “chaos, fear and hate,” after telling members of the nation’s second-largest teachers union that she was running for president because of her first-grade public school teacher and “many people like you.”
“In this moment, we are in a fight for our most fundamental freedoms,” Harris said in the keynote address to the American Federation of Teachers convention in Houston.
“Bring it on!” the de facto Democratic nominee said, before her audience began loudly chanting that same phrase.
Harris contrasted her agenda of abortion rights and LGBTQ rights, gun control, support for organized labor, and student loan debt relief with the policies of the Republican nominee Trump and his allies on those issues.
Shortly after Harris concluded her speech, Trump’s campaign released a “Plan to Save American Education and Give Power Back to Parents,” which contained a range of ideas that are anathema to the AFT, among them abolishing teacher tenure and adopting merit pay.
Harris spoke four days after President Joe Biden said he was dropping out of the 2024 election contest and endorsed her to become the Democratic Party’s presidential nominee against Trump.
On Wednesday night, Biden in a national address from the Oval Office said he was setting aside his “personal ambition” for a second term with the goal of “saving democracy” from a Trump return to the White House.
Before Harris took the stage Thursday, AFT President Randi Weingarten said she had told Harris backstage that “her entry to the race has electrified this race, and electrified this hall.”
“Are you excited? Are you ready to elect the next president of the United States?” Weingarten asked the crowd, which responded enthusiastically.
Harris began her remarks by saying Biden on Wednesday night had “showed once again what true leadership looked like.”
And she thanked the AFT for “being the first union to endorse me this week.”
The vice president then laid the groundwork for the theme of the speech — America looking forward, not backward — by noting her gratitude for her first-grade teacher, the late Frances Wilson, who she said “encouraged me, and educated and inspired me.”
“Mrs. Frances Wilson was in the audience when I walked across the stage to accept my law school diploma,” Harris said.
“It’s because of Mrs. Frances Wilson and so many people like you that I stand before you as vice president of the United States and that I am running to become president of the United States,” she said.
Harris said teachers like Wilson “are visionaries — you have a vision of the future … you see the potential in every child.”
“Today,” Harris said, referring to the election against Trump, “we have a choice between two very different visions for our future.”
“One focused on the future, and one focused on the past,” she said. “And we are fighting for our future.”
“Ultimately,” Harris said, “we each in our country face a question, that question being, what kind of country do we want to live in? A country of freedom, compassion and rule of law? Or a country of chaos, fear and hate?”
She tied Trump to Project 2025 — the Heritage Foundation’s 900-page vision for a second Trump term in the White House — calling it “a plan to return America to a dark past.”
“Randi, can you believe they put that in writing?” Harris quipped to Weingarten.
“Donald Trump and his allies want to take America back to failed trickle-down policies … to union-busting, to tax breaks for billionaires,” Harris said.
“You know, America has tried these failed economic policies before, but we are not going back. We are not going back,” Harris said to sustained applause.
“Donald Trump and his allies want to cut Medicare and Social Security … they even want to eliminate the Department of Education and end Head Start, which of course would take away preschool for hundreds of thousands of our children.”
“And he intends to end the Affordable Care Act,” she said. “Think about that: To take us back to a time when insurance companies had the power to deny coverage to people with preexisting conditions.”
“We want to ban assault weapons, and they want to ban books,” Harris said after one audience member shouted out, “Tell them, President Harris!” “They pass so-called ‘don’t say gay’ laws,” Harris said.
“So today, I asked you, AFT, are you ready to make your voices heard?” Harris asked before the audience members yelled “yeah!”
“Do we believe in freedom? Do we believe in opportunity? Do we believe in the promise of America, and are we ready to fight for it and when we fight, we win?” Harris asked, with audience members responding each time in the affirmative.
The Trump campaign, in its education plan released after Harris’ speech, provided a sharp contrast to her comments.
The plan would cut “federal funding for any school or program pushing Critical Race Theory, gender ideology, or other inappropriate racial, sexual, or political content on our children,” “find and remove the radicals who have infiltrated the federal Department of Education,” “create a new credentialing body to certify teachers who embrace patriotic values,” and “implement the direct election of school principals by the parents.”
In a statement, Trump said, “Our public schools have been taken over by the Radical Left maniacs. Here is my plan to save American education and restore power to American parents.”
“As the saying goes, personnel is policy, and at the end of the day, if we have pink-haired Communists teaching our kids, we have a major problem,” Trump said.
“When I am President, we will put parents back in charge and give them the final say. We will get back to teaching reading, writing, and math – called arithmetic — and we will give our kids the high-quality, pro-American education they deserve.”