Fact-Checking Kamala Harris’ Phoenix Speech
Jarrett Stepman /
Vice President Kamala Harris held a rally Thursday in Phoenix, making a finish-line pitch to voters in a key swing state ahead of next Tuesday’s presidential election.
Harris mostly focused on themes she has hit during her campaign and in recent speeches. The vice president said she is for protecting “democracy,” Trump is about punishing enemies, and she would preserve the freedom of Americans.
Here’s a fact check of four statements Harris made at her Phoenix rally.
Banning Abortion
Harris repeated false arguments about Trump and abortion that she made Tuesday in a speech near the White House.
“He would ban abortion nationwide, restrict access to birth control and put IVF treatments at risk, and force states to monitor women’s pregnancies,” Harris said. “Just google Project 2025.”
Trump has insisted that any restrictions on abortion should be decided by the states, as the Supreme Court decided in 2022. The former president has not proposed a national abortion ban.
“My view is now that we have abortion where everybody wanted it from a legal standpoint, the states will determine by vote or legislation, or perhaps both, and whatever they decide must be the law of the land—in this case, the law of the state,” Trump said in a video posted in April on Truth Social, his social media site.
Trump said at one point that he was “looking at” possible restrictions on contraception, but later said he “has never and will never” restrict birth control.
Not only has Trump supported in vitro fertilization, or IVF, he has advocated subsidizing it.
On Tuesday, my colleague Tyler O’Neil fact-checked Harris’ claim about Project 2025, which is worth repeating here in full:
As for Project 2025—a project launched by The Heritage Foundation in partnership with over 100 conservative organizations to empower a conservative president to undermine the deep state and restore the Constitution—Trump has stated that he has not read it and does not support it.
The project consists of three major parts: ‘Mandate for Leadership,’ a list of policies Heritage recommends; a database of conservatives who would be interested in joining a conservative administration; and trainings for those in the database.
The claim about forcing states to monitor women’s pregnancies comes from a twisting of a policy advocated in ‘Mandate for Leadership.’ Even left-leaning outlets like PolitiFact have rightly branded this claim false. The Project 2025 document does not call for the federal government to force states to monitor women’s pregnancies. It does, however, urge the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to require every state to submit abortion data. Currently, the CDC does not require states to submit abortion data, but many of them do.
Cost of Living
Harris promised Thursday to get control of the cost of living, which skyrocketed during the Biden-Harris administration.
“I will fight to make sure that hardworking Americans can actually afford a place to live,” she said.
Harris said again that she plans to pass national legislation against price gouging to address inflation.
But many economists argue that it’s the Biden-Harris administration’s spending that has caused prices to soar, not corporate greed.
EJ Antoni, public finance economist at The Heritage Foundation, says prices have simply gone up across the board because of inflation, not because businesses are making more profit.
“The prices that businesses are paying have gone up by the same percentage that our prices have,” Antoni told The Daily Signal in August. “So, all of the cost increases that businesses have faced, they’re simply just passing them on to consumers, and that’s why we’re all paying more.”
Enemies List
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy,” Harris said Thursday. “He wants to put them in jail; I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
Harris insisted in her speech that Trump is obsessed with revenge and wants to use “unchecked” power if elected again.
“If he is elected, on Day One, Donald Trump would walk into that office with an enemies list,” she said. “On Day One, when I am elected, I’ll walk in with a ‘to do’ list.”
When Harris was California’s attorney general and later represented the state in the Senate, however, she made a habit of targeting the Left’s enemies.
“Harris made headlines a decade ago by threatening to punish nonprofit groups that refused to turn over unredacted donor information,” The Wall Street Journal’s editors wrote in August. “She demanded they hand to the state their federal IRS Form 990 Schedule B in the name of discovering ‘self-dealing’ or ‘improper loans.’ The real purpose was to learn the names of conservative donors and chill future political giving—that is, political speech.”
Harris targeted Christian and pro-life organizations too.
When she was attorney general, Harris unleashed California Department of Justice resources on pro-life journalist David Daleiden, who recorded undercover videos of Planned Parenthood officials.
“This is a pattern for her,” Daleiden said in an interview with The Daily Signal. “Her weaponization of the powers of her office, on behalf of her powerful special-interest sponsors in the abortion industry, to cover up their wrongdoing and persecute the people who want to expose it, that began in California with my case. And I think it’s a pattern that she’s continuing to this day.”
Ending Israel-Hamas War
The vice president at one point during her Phoenix speech was again interrupted by anti-Israel protesters.
“That’s all right. That’s all right. Democracy can be complicated, but we believe in democracy,” Harris said.
She then addressed Israel’s war with the Hamas terrorist organization, which has ravaged the Hamas-governed Gaza Strip. On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas terrorists entered southern Israel from Gaza, killed 1,200, and took about 250 hostages.
“Let’s talk for a moment about Gaza,” Harris said. “We all want for this war to end and get the hostages out, and I will work on it full time when I am elected president.”
The Biden-Harris administration has said it is committed to bringing the hostages home. However, four Americans are still being held by Hamas, and the administration’s message about the Israel-Hamas war has been unclear.
Harris and Biden have faced criticism for undermining Israel’s war with Hamas and with Hezbollah, a Lebanon-based terrorist group also financed by Iran, and for publicly criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
At a campaign stop at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee in early October, Harris seemed to agree with a protester who accused Israel of committing genocide against Palestinians who live in Gaza.
After the protester was escorted out, the New York Post reported, Harris said: “Listen, what he’s talking about, it’s real. That’s not the subject that I came to discuss today, but it’s real and I respect his voice.”