Going forward

When Staley suggested that Harris would be president one day in the future, the audience roared.

“I equate you running for [the] presidency as one of those moments where the American people have to be prepared for that moment,” Staley said. “Now that you’ve been through it, I hope you give it another shot.”

Harris said that she learned what it meant to “break barriers” during her first run in 2020.

“When you break things, you get cut and you may bleed and it is worth it every time,” she said. “It’s worth it every time, but it’s not without pain … it’s important that they are prepared for the fact that it will not just be about you being the first without a lot of pain and perhaps unfairness as people get adjusted to something they’ve never seen.”

Harris took a moment to criticize Trump, but also what she said is the coordinated effort behind his policies designed to benefit “billionaires.”

“It feels chaotic, but do understand what we are witnessing and experiencing is a high velocity event that is about a swift implementation of a plan that has been decades in the making,” she said. “This didn’t just come up and happen overnight. The Federalist Society, the Heritage Foundation. We talked about Project 2025. They didn’t write that thing overnight. That has been decades in the making.”

While Harris didn’t divulge her thinking over future plans, she said she would continue in the fight against “darkness.”

“Sometimes the fight takes a while,” she said. “So we don’t give up. We just understand what we’ve got in front of us and what we have to do.”

‘Disappointment’ and ‘empowerment’

Mary Caitlin Gagliardi made the trip from Baltimore, Maryland, because she couldn’t get tickets to Harris’s stop in Washington, D.C., but said she was “really inspired” hearing from Harris.

Gagliardi is listening to the audio version of the book, which Harris herself narrates.

“It feels a little bit more raw and passionate,” she said. “Hearing her, I feel like I’m in the book with her.”

Gagliardi said she was “astounded and disappointed” to hear about the “lack of support from some of the Democrats, some of her colleagues.”

“I think that she’s right, the Democrats need to have a united front on issues and move forward, and I feel like we are going to be the catalyst for the change, and I feel very inspired to move this party forward,” she said.

Sylvia Alston, who traveled from central New Jersey, said she wanted to hear how Harris “was feeling” and found it disappointing that the Biden camp didn’t do more to support her.

“They were loyal to Joe Biden in a way that they were not loyal to her,” she said. “She talked about the disappointment in a way that we hadn’t heard of how he hadn’t stood up for her, how his team didn’t stand up for her when the media and the right were maligning her.”

Still, Alston said Harris’ story felt empowering — not just for Black women, but for anyone facing challenges and working to move the country forward in difficult times.

Tickets for the event started at $56. Everyone who attended also received a free copy of “107 Days.”