A former prosecutor and Attorney General of California before she became a U.S. Senator and then Vice President, Kamala Harris identifies as a justice warrior more than as a culture warrior — and her presidential campaign has so far pushed an emphasis on her background as a skilled practitioner in the law and order trade.
It’s an identity that gives Democrats an opening to recast the presidential race, with Harris as their likely nominee, as “prosecutor vs. felon” — a title card that pits Harris’s prosecutorial bona fides against GOP nominee Donald Trump‘s criminal convictions.
Harris herself is leaning into this narrative during the first days of her campaign, foregrounding her background as a law and order type.
On the opposite side of the law and order equation is another “type,” as Harris says in the video below. This type, which she has worked against for much of her career, includes “perpetrators of all kinds” — not least “predators who abused women” and “cheaters who broke the rules for their own gain.”
Saying she knows these predator and cheater types from long experience, Harris links that type directly to Trump, saying: “So hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type.”
Kamala Harris seemingly referred to Donald Trump as a predator “who abused women,” among other things, in her first speech since Joe Biden dropped out of the presidential race. pic.twitter.com/sbc8XiIhz0
— Newsweek (@Newsweek) July 23, 2024
Few people have witnessed Harris’s work in the courtroom, but her prosecutorial mindset was on display nationally when, as a U.S. Senator, she questioned Trump’s Supreme Court nominees. Below is Harris grilling future SCOTUS Justice Brett Kavanaugh.
[CONTEXT: Harris is questioning Kavanaugh about allegations of misconduct made against him by several women before his confirmation hearings.]
Part of Harris’s exchange — conducted via video due to COVID — with future SCOTUS Justice Amy Coney Barrett is below.