Kamala Harris blasts Trump agenda in teachers union speech

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,…