'We Are Not Going Back': Harris Rips Trump, Project 2025 in Nomination Speech

Vice President Kamala Harris accepted the Democratic nomination Thursday night with a speech condemning her November opponent, Donald Trump, and his far-right agenda as a dire threat to critical social programs, fundamental freedoms, and democracy itself.

"We know what a second Trump term would look like. It's all laid out in Project 2025, written by his closest advisers," said Harris, referring to the Heritage Foundation-led initiative that the Republican nominee has unconvincingly tried to disavow.

"Its sum total is to pull our country back to the past. But America, we are not going back," said the vice president. "We are not going back to when Donald Trump tried to cut Social Security and Medicare. We are not going back to when he tried to get rid of the Affordable Care Act, when insurance companies could deny people with pre-existing conditions. We are not going to let him eliminate the Department of Education that funds our public schools."

Harris went on to warn of the continued threat that the former president and his allies pose to abortion rights, which Trump-appointed Supreme Court justices helped revoke at the federal level in 2022—a ruling that the Republican nominee has repeatedly celebrated and taken credit for.

"Over the past two years, I've traveled across our country, and women have told me their stories," Harris said Thursday. "Husbands and fathers have shared theirs. Stories of women miscarrying in a parking lot, developing sepsis, losing the ability to ever again have children, all because doctors are afraid they may go to jail for caring for their patients. Couples just trying to grow their family, cut off in the middle of IVF treatments."

"Children who have survived sexual assault, potentially being forced to carry a pregnancy to term. This is what's happening in our country because of Donald Trump," she continued. "And understand, he is not done. As a part of his agenda, he and his allies would limit access to birth control, ban medication abortion, and enact a nationwide abortion ban, with or without Congress."

Harris devoted limited attention in her address to a crisis that loomed large over the gathering in Chicago even as it received scant attention from DNC speakers: Israel's U.S.-backed assault on the Gaza Strip.

The vice president acknowledged the "heartbreaking" scale of the suffering in Gaza and declared that the Biden administration is "working to end this war"—even as the U.S. continues to transfer tens of billions of dollars worth of weaponry to the Israeli military.

"What has happened in Gaza over the past 10 months is devastating. So many innocent lives lost. Desperate, hungry people fleeing for safety, over and over again," said Harris, who received sustained applause from the convention audience after calling for "dignity, security, freedom, and self-determination" for the Palestinian people.

Harris also pledged to "always stand up for Israel's right to defend itself" amid mounting global calls for an arms embargo. Critics of the Biden administration's unwavering military support for Israel—even in the face of overwhelming evidence that Israel has used American weaponry to commit war crimes—said pledges to secure an end to the humanitarian emergency in Gaza are hollow in the absence of concrete action, such as cutting off the flow of arms that has fueled the catastrophe.

"If VP Harris wants to end the suffering in Gaza that is causing her so much heartbreak, she can stop sending the bombs Israel is using to cause mass suffering among Palestinians," said Yonah Lieberman, co-founder of IfNotNow, an American Jewish group that advocates for Palestinian rights.

The vice president delivered her speech after DNC organizers rebuffed a widely supported demand that a Palestinian American speaker be given just five minutes to address the convention.

Asma Mohammed, an "uncommitted" DNC delegate from Minnesota, toldAl Jazeera following Harris' speech that "there are balloons raining down on the Democrats in our party, and there are bombs raining down on children and families and people I love."

"That's what I was thinking," she added.