Fact-checking Kamala Harris’ Ellipse speech
Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic nominee for president, gave her “closing argument” speech for the 2024 presidential election at the Ellipse by the White House, the location former President Donald Trump spoke at on Jan. 6, 2021, before a mob of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.
Harris repeatedly condemned Trump, attempted to define herself as different from President Joe Biden, and presented herself as a conciliator when her record suggests the opposite.
Here are 6 fact checks of statements from her speech.
“Armed Mob”
Harris began her speech by referencing the Jan. 6 protest at the Capitol.
She said of Trump, “He is the person who stood at this very spot nearly four years ago and sent an armed mob to the United States Capitol to overturn the will of the people in a free and fair election, an election that he knew he lost.”
She went on to claim that “Americans died as a result of that attack,” and she noted that 140 law enforcement officers were injured.
The claim that the Jan. 6 protesters were “armed” has been disputed. Several carried pepper spray or bear spray. Some wielded flagpoles as clubs and attacked law enforcement officers.
Prosecutors charged at least three protesters with having firearms “on Capitol grounds,” or stashed nearby, meaning not necessarily inside the Capitol.
Harris is correct that people died, but only two people died directly from the Jan. 6 violence. Seven others died indirectly from events of the day, according to The New York Times. A Capitol Police officer fatally shot protester Ashli Babbitt when she was trying to break through a door, and another protester died in a stampede of fellow rioters. Others died of natural causes or suicide, but the stress from the violence and commotion of the day could have contributed to those deaths.
Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick, initially thought to have died from an attack, actually died of natural causes, although the stress from the day’s events could have prompted his strokes.
Abortion Lies
Harris repeated three lies about Trump’s agenda on abortion.
“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 pledged to leave the issue of abortion up to the states, even saying he would not sign a federal law restricting the practice.
Although Trump briefly mentioned that he would consider restrictions on contraception, he immediately reversed his position and has not returned to it.
As for IVF, an acronym for “in vitro fertilization,” Trump has not only not opposed it, but pledged to subsidize it with federal tax dollars.
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 the 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.
‘Price Gouging’
When seeking to distinguish herself from Biden, Harris said, “My presidency will be different because the challenges we face are different.”
“Our top priority as a nation four years ago was to end the pandemic and rescue the economy. Now, our biggest challenge is to lower costs,” she said.
Yet Harris appeared not to consider inflation her top priority. Her speech largely focused on Trump, abortion, and a few other issues. She did briefly return to costs when she pledged to cut down on price gouging, however.
“I will enact the first-ever federal ban on price gouging on groceries,” she pledged. She also pledged to cap the costs of drugs like insulin.
By focusing her price remarks on alleged price gouging, Harris suggested that inflation is largely due to greedy companies jacking up prices too high.
Yet as Heritage Foundation research fellow EJ Antoni pointed out, there is a far more obvious culprit: government spending.
As Antoni noted, “One of the functions of money is that of a measuring tool. If a yardstick were to shrink from 36 inches down to just 30, it would take 120 of these shortened yardsticks to cover the distance of a football field, instead of 100. As the dollar has lost value, it takes more dollars to measure the value of the things we buy.”
While Americans feel the pain of inflation, so do businesses. According to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “businesses have gotten the short end of the stick,” Antoni explained. “The producer price index is used to measure inflation on the products and services businesses buy—sometimes called wholesale inflation—and that index has risen 17.5% since Biden took office. Conversely, the consumer price index, the widely cited metric for inflation faced by American families, is up 17.1% over that same time.”
“Businesses have actually been sheltering consumers from some cost increases in an effort to maintain market share and not lose customers,” he wrote. “That also explains why, according to the Biden administration’s Census Bureau, total corporate profits have fallen for the last six quarters after adjusting for inflation.”
“If alleged price gouging were really the cause of inflation, did businessmen magically become greedy when Biden took office?” Antoni asked. “Were corporations never greedy in the 40 years leading up to Biden’s inflationary expansion of government? Businesses haven’t even passed all their higher costs on to consumers; if they’re trying to be greedy, they’re doing it all wrong.”
Immigration
Harris accused Trump of cynically using immigration as a campaign issue rather than attempting to solve the problem.
“Politicians have got to stop treating immigration as an issue to scare up votes in an election,” she said. “I will work with Democrats and Republicans to sign into law the border security bill that Donald Trump killed.”
“We will quickly remove those who arrive here unlawfully, prosecute the cartels, and give Border Patrol the support they most desperately need,” she added. “I will work with Congress to pass immigration reform, including an earned path to citizenship for hard-working immigrants.”
Yet her narrative does not align with reality. Biden only supported the “border security bill” earlier this year, while he issued multiple executive orders on his first day in office, reversing Trump policies like the Migrant Protection Protocols (commonly known as “Remain in Mexico”) and instituting a system of catch-and-release.
Furthermore, not every Democrat in the Senate even voted for the bill Biden supported earlier this year, and critics have warned that the bill would have cemented Biden’s open-border policies into law.
Trump, by contrast, directed his administration to crack down on illegal immigration when he was in office, creating new policies to prevent illegal entries.
People Who Disagree Are Not the Enemy
Harris claimed that she does not consider people who disagree with her to be the enemy.
“I pledge to listen to experts, to those who will be impacted by the decisions I make, and to people who disagree with me,” she said. “Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe people who disagree with me are the enemy. He wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at my table.”
“I pledge to be a president for all Americans, and to always put country above party and self,” she added.
Yet Harris’ record suggests she does consider those who disagree with her to be the enemy.
David Daleiden and the Center for Medical Progress released a slew of undercover sting videos showing Planned Parenthood staff admitting to selling aborted babies’ body parts for profit in 2014. (Planned Parenthood denied it did so.) Harris, who received funding from Planned Parenthood during her 2016 Senate campaign, directed her office to search Daleiden’s home, seizing his video footage and preparing a legal case against him. Her successor as California attorney general, Xavier Becerra (now secretary of Health and Human Services), filed 15 felony charges against Daleiden and his center in 2017.
“I would say this is an abuse of the criminal process,” Peter Breen, special counsel at the Thomas More Society, told PJ Media in 2020. “I could point you to undercover investigations that are being shown on the evening news in Los Angeles. Under the standard they are applying to David, those would be felonies.”
In May 2020, Daleiden sued Becerra and Harris, claiming Harris conspired with Planned Parenthood to violate his civil rights by prosecuting him for the undercover investigation. That case remains pending.
Harris also targeted the conservative groups Americans for Prosperity and American Freedom Law Center. Her office demanded that those groups turn over their IRS Schedule B tax forms, which include donor information. Both groups refused to hand over the forms, citing concerns for donor anonymity.
Harris’ office threatened to suspend their nonprofit registrations and fine their leaders. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld their rights to protect donor anonymity in a 2021 ruling.
In the U.S. Senate, Harris served on the Senate Judiciary Committee. She aggressively questioned Trump’s nominees on issues arguably unrelated to their official positions. She pressed nominees over their membership in the Catholic fraternal organization the Knights of Columbus, because it upholds the Catholic Church’s position against abortion. She also joined her colleagues in pressing Allison Rushing, another Trump judicial nominee, about her participation in events with Alliance Defending Freedom, a conservative Christian legal organization.
As Harris spoke Tuesday night, Biden rallied Latino voters and condemned a remark about Puerto Rico during Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday.
Comedian Tony Hinchcliffe, who spoke before Trump, called Puerto Rico an “island of garbage.”
“They’re good, decent honorable people,” Biden said of Puerto Ricans. “The only garbage I see floating out there is his supporters. His demonization of these people is unconscionable and it’s un-American.”
Speaking about Hinchcliffe Tuesday, Trump told ABC, “I don’t know him, someone put him up there. I don’t know who he is.”