Throughout the 2024 Presidential campaign, we heard plenty of warnings about how bad another four years of Donald Trump as President would be for the United States. But no one warned us as loudly as his Democratic opponent, Vice President Kamala Harris.
And now that Trump is showing us he was dead serious about doing all of the awful stuff he promised voters he would, we really have no one to blame but the people who voted for him (or who didn’t vote at all). So if anyone has the right to say ‘I told you so,’ it’s Kamala Harris, and that’s exactly what she did in a speech to a room full of Black women this week – even though she said she didn’t plan to.
On April 3, Harris spoke at the Leading Women Defined Summit in California. The event, created by former BET CEO Debra Lee is dedicated to empowering women of color. During Harris’ remarks, she talked about the progress that has been rolled back since President Trump took office and the culture of fear he’s created to stop people from speaking out against him.
“We’re seeing people stay quiet. We’re seeing organizations stay quiet. We are seeing those who are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats. And these are the things that we are witnessing each day in these last few months in our country,” she said.
As she seemed to be prepared to run down a list of examples of how we’re definitely not better off these days, Harris stopped herself and said something that left her and the rest of the audience rolling.
“I’m not here to say ‘I told you so,” she said as she and the audience erupted into laughter. “I swore I wasn’t going to say that,” she added.
But in the end, Harris left her audience with a message of hope.
“Fear has a way of being contagious. When one person has fear, it has a way of spreading to those around them, and we are witnessing that, no doubt,” she said. “But I say this also, my dear friends, courage is also contagious.”
A clip of Harris’ speech posted by MSNBC has already received close to 350,000 likes on TikTok, as commenters reflected on the misstep voters made in November.
“I swear. Not voting for her was THE BIGGEST fumble in AMERICAN history,” wrote one person.
Others chimed in to remind us that we’d have no reason to stay up at night worrying about social security cuts and tariffs if Harris had won.
“It could have been just a regular Thursday, with this gem of a woman as president, but nah...” wrote another commenter.
But most commenters were just sad we had to hear a speech like this from the person who could have been the country’s first female President in the first place.
“I can’t be the only who gets emotional every time I see her now. It’s such an overwhelming feeling of disappointment to know what reality we could be living right now, but aren’t,” someone wrote.