By Maeve Reston · The Washington Post (c) 2025
LOS ANGELES – Kamala Harris will reemerge in California on Wednesday night for her first major speech since her departure from the White House, and she is expected to condemn President Donald Trump’s effort to upend democratic institutions, deny facts and create a culture of fear for many in his first 100 days in office.
Nearly six months after her loss to Trump, the former vice president has kept a low profile as intrigue swirls around whether she will run for governor in her home state in 2026 to succeed Gov. Gavin Newsom (D), who is term-limited. Though she set a deadline of mid- to late summer to make that decision, it has been complicated by her desire to keep the door open to another run for president and to explore other paths outside elected office, according to interviews with former aides, allies and friends.
The former California attorney general is expected to use her address at the 20th anniversary gala for Emerge – a group that trains and supports women who run for office – to outline her deep dismay with Trump’s use of executive power to seek revenge on his adversaries and pressure U.S. universities and institutions to change policies, according to a person familiar with her remarks, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss her plans before the event.
Harris is stepping back onto the public stage at a moment of deep anger and frustration within the Democratic Party. At huge rallies across the country, Democrats have fulminated about their leaders’ inability to do more to slow Trump’s agenda, including his mass deportation efforts. The Trump administration has swept up hundreds of people it alleges are gang members and shipped some of them to a foreign country without due process.
Harris’s defeat in November cast her future political career into uncertainty. As some Democrats hope to turn the page on the Biden era and a disappointing 2024 election, looking to a new crop of potential White House hopefuls, her once ascendant national status has changed. But she remains a draw in her home state.
Harris’s 2002 run for district attorney of San Francisco against an entrenched incumbent helped inspire the formation of Emerge and the group’s mission to create a support system for women running for office. Her trajectory and the obstacles she faced in her campaigns have shaped some of the training programs and curriculums that Emerge developed for female candidates to guide them through the unique challenges facing women in building fundraising networks, hiring staff and running their campaigns. So the former vice president’s return to San Francisco is a homecoming of sorts, and her remarks will be directed, in part, toward the next generation of leaders – some of whom she mentored.
“For all of us, it is a full-circle moment,” said A’shanti F. Gholar, the president of Emerge, who said the group has been seeing “the Kamala effect” since November of more women stepping up to run for office. At the 100-day mark, Gholar said Harris is well-positioned to deliver a rebuttal to Trump.
“Because we know that really making us exhausted and disillusioned and feeling that there is nothing we can do is part of the game plan,” Gholar said. “That’s how authoritarianism works. That’s how dictatorships work. They really just want people to be so exhausted that they don’t stand up and fight. And I know what we are going to hear from her is: That is not what they are doing to us; we are paying attention. We know what is at stake and we can still preserve our democracy.”
Harris addressed some of those themes and urged her listeners to show courage during her recent remarks to prominent Black female leaders and business owners at the Leading Women Defined Summit at the Ritz-Carlton in Dana Point, California. She spoke about the importance of that “sisterhood” of women coming together at that moment, when Trump and his allies were slashing policies and programs intended to promote gender equity and diversity. “No one can take our identity or existence from us,” she said, “because we won’t let them.”
“What has changed since 2016 is that we are in the midst of seeing progress being rolled back, policies that we birthed being rolled back,” she said. “What has changed is there is a sense of fear that has been taking hold in our country, and I understand it. But we’re seeing people stay quiet. We are seeing organizations stay quiet. We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats.”
The former vice president spoke at the Dana Point event after news broke that Willkie Farr & Gallagher – the law firm where her husband, Doug Emhoff, is a partner – had struck a deal with Trump despite Emhoff’s objections.In late February and March, Trump began using executive orders to target several law firms that had represented clients whom he considers his adversaries.He issued directives that barred them from government contracts and access to public buildings. On April 1, the president announced a deal with Emhoff’s firm to avoid those kinds of punitive actions.
Emhoff said publicly several days after Trump’s announcement that he had argued against it. “I wanted them to fight a patently unconstitutional potential executive order. Patently unconstitutional,” Emhoff said in remarks to Bet Tzedek, a nonprofit organization that provides free legal services.
While closely tracking thosekinds of threats in Washington, Harris has been thinking about how she will shape her own political organization to build on the ideas from her presidential campaign and her legal career. She and her team have also been exploring the formation of a policy institution either on its own or connected to an academic institution such as Howard University, her alma mater, or Stanford University. But those talks have been informal and preliminary.
Harris’s potential run for governor has overshadowed and shaped the early months of the race. The Democratic field is already large and includes some of her allies, such as Lt. Gov. Eleni Kounalakis and former congresswoman Katie Porter, who previously represented a swing district in Orange County. Harris’s lengthy timeline for making a decision has chilled the fundraising efforts of some of the candidates, according to several people familiar with those efforts.
Initially it seemed as though Harris’s entrance would clear the field, but that is no longer certain. Candidates including former health secretary Xavier Becerra and former Los Angeles mayor Antonio Villaraigosa are likely to stay in the race if she enters, according to several people with knowledge of their thinking.
Rufus Gifford, the finance chair of Harris’s 2024 presidential campaign, said that while some of Harris’s donors are eager to see her run for governor, she also has an important role to play now at a time when the Democratic brand “couldn’t be any worse.”
“Whether you are Barack Obama, Bill Clinton, Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, now is not the time to sit on the sidelines and not share and not speak your mind. I think the time is now to speak out,” Gifford said. The majority of her supporters, he added, would “welcome her running for governor, doing that work in the state – being back on the national stage.”
Harris left office and returned to her home state as Los Angeles was reeling from wind-driven wildfires in January. Minutes after stepping off the plane from Trump’s inauguration, Harris headed to a World Central Kitchen outpost near Altadena to thank volunteers who were handing out dinner and talk to residents who had been affected by the fires – offering words of encouragement out of earshot of news cameras. Before driving to her home in the Brentwood neighborhood, she stopped to thank the firefighters and support staff at L.A. County Station 12, which had been the first to respond to the Eaton Fire northeast of Los Angeles.
She later toured the fire damage with Los Angeles County Supervisor Lindsey Horvath, who represents a large swath of L.A.’s west side, as well as heavily impacted areas like Malibu. And she and Emhoff attended the FireAid benefit concert that raised an estimated $100 million for people affected by the fires.
More recently Harris has been judicious about her public appearances – enjoying the chance to reconnect with friends and entertain with Emhoff at the four-bedroom, 3,505-square-foot property in Brentwood that he bought in 2012. Former aides and allies frequently resisted questions about her next political moves by joking about how much she was cooking – including fielding work calls while in the middle of mundane culinary tasks.
The couple was spotted soon after their return having dinner with friends at Craig’s in West Hollywood, the same spot where they went on their first date. She was tracked by the paparazzi on a run to the grocery store.
As she and Emhoff contemplated a life split between New York and Los Angeles, her fans also chronicled some of their New York outings on social media. They made several appearances on Broadway, including when they took in “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical” and visited with the cast and crew after the show.
Emhoff has shared brief glimpses of their public outings on his Instagram account, including a hike last weekend. The couple has been able to have a degree of privacy at the Hillcrest Country Club, a historically Jewish private club of which Emhoff has long been a member. On Easter, Harris and Emhoff attended services at Faithful Central Bible Church in Inglewood, a predominantly Black city in southwestern Los Angeles County, with her niece Meena Harris and her grandnieces.
Though she chose until now not to weigh in publicly on the daily political debates raging around the Trump White House, Harris has frequently offered to serve as a private sounding board for fellow Democrats.
That has included potential candidates seeking her advice, as well as the next generation of leaders trying to shape the party. She did not endorse, for example, in the race for the chair of the Democratic National Committee, but spoke to the major candidates before the contest.
Before the recent judicial elections in Wisconsin, she addressed Democrats in the state on a video call to thank them for their work on behalf of Judge Susan Crawford, who was facing a Republican opponent that Trump adviser Elon Musk backed with millions of dollars in spending.
“There is an unelected billionaire who should not and will not have a greater voice than the working people of Wisconsin,” she told them, underscoring that Crawford was a candidate who would protect their right to organize, advocate for fair wages and guard abortion rights. She urged them to stay involved in state and local races in key states like Wisconsin, and later called Crawford’s win “a victory for working people.”