So — what do we do?

An Excerpt from "107 Days"

While my new book, 107 Days, focuses on the campaign trail and election, I also write about the state of our country and how we move forward.

What we must understand is that the dismantling of our democracy did not start with the 2024 election. And while there is already a lot of damage done, there is still time to change course — because the power is still with the people. We must be strategic and tactical. Disciplined and bold. We must take to the streets and put forth a vision for the future worth fighting for.

The answers will not come out of Washington, DC. They will come from We, the People.

Read on for an excerpt from the Afterword of 107 Days.

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Two of the trending searches after the election:

What is a tariff?
Can I change my vote?

Gore Vidal called them “the four most beautiful words in our common language”:

“I told you so.”

I disagree, I don’t think they’re beautiful, and I wish I had no cause to say them.

Tariffs are a tax on everyday Americans. We are at risk of a recession.

The Marines, war-fighting warriors, have been deployed in our streets against civilians.

The authoritarian, nationalist Project 2025 is the blueprint for the Trump administration’s second term. As of this writing, of its 316 objectives, 114 have been fully realized and 64 more are already in progress.

The Justice Department is going after Trump’s enemies list, while Trump supporters have been pardoned and released: January 6 rioters who attacked police, the fentanyl dealer Ross Ulbricht, numerous tax cheats.

Foreign leaders have played him with flattery, grift, and favor. A luxury jet, or a Trojan horse?

He has lined his own pockets and enriched billionaires while doing nothing for the middle class and worsening the condition of the poor.

The destruction of scientific research aimed at fighting our worst diseases and the climate crisis, the targeting of SNAP, Medicaid, and programs for our veterans, the deterioration of our global friendships, the terrorizing of our immigrant communities, the starvation and sickening of millions around the world for lack of foreign aid, the reckless abandonment of clean energy, the rollback of environmental protections, the attack on intellectual freedom in our universities, the bullying of law firms, the breathtaking corruption. I could go on.

Trump says he has a mandate for these things. He does not.

His victory was whisker-thin. He beat me by 1.5 percentage points in one of the closest elections in a century. A third of the electorate voted for me. But a third of the electorate stayed home. That means two-thirds of our country did not elect Donald Trump.

Two-thirds of us did not choose this man or his agenda.

That’s why I have no patience for anyone saying, I’m giving up on America because America wanted this. We did not. Of the third that voted for Trump, a good part of them voted for him on promises unkept.

He did not “immediately bring prices down starting day one.” Instead, the opposite. He did not “cut energy prices in half within twelve months.” He could not bring peace to Ukraine “before I even become president.” Instead, he has acted as enabler to the aggressor and shamefully attacked a brave leader defending democracy.

I predicted all that. I warned of it. What I did not predict: the capitulation.

The billionaires lining up to grovel. The big media companies, the universities, and so many major law firms, all bending to blackmail and outrageous demands.

So what do we do?

The answer will not come out of Washington, DC. Their immediate task is to win the midterms and restore some checks and balances on this unchecked and unbalanced president.

What we the people must understand is that the dismantling of our democracy did not start with the 2024 election.

The right-wing and religious nationalists have played the long game, working for decades to take over state houses, gerrymander districts, and dominate local government boards. Their think tanks like the Federalist Society created the blueprint for stacking the Supreme Court, while the Heritage Foundation created Project 2025.

Their plans have been amplified by the rise of a right-wing media ecosystem built to operationalize their agenda through massive propaganda, misinformation, and disinformation. Trump was their vehicle, his road paved for him, years earlier, by a hot and pungent brew: Ronald Reagan’s celebrity, Newt Gingrich’s belligerent discourse, and Pat Buchanan’s nativism.

Don’t be duped into thinking it’s all chaos. It may feel like chaos, but what we are witnessing is a high-velocity event, the swift implementation of an agenda that was written many decades ago.

“This is how fascism begins,” warned Françoise Giroud, a journalist who served in the French Resistance. “It never says its name. It creeps, it floats. When it reaches the tips of people’s noses, they say:

‘Is this it? You think? Don’t exaggerate!’ And then one day it smacks them in the mouth, and it is too late to get rid of it.”

It is not too late for us, but we need to think both strategically and tactically.

When we go to the streets, as we will, we must not give them the spectacle they are craving. We will go out of love of our country and belief in its promise. We cannot let them lie about that.

We need to come up with our own blueprint that sets out our alternative vision for our country. A blueprint on how we will lead a government that truly works for the American people.

There will have been so much damage done.

Perhaps so much damage that we will have to re-create our government. And that doesn’t mean nostalgically reproducing what has been before, but something leaner, swifter, and much more efficient.

At the heart of my vision for the future is Gen Z. The youngest member of that cohort is thirteen now, the oldest is twenty-eight. In five years, the younger members will be about to vote, the oldest might be having kids.

They have lived through the pandemic, the resulting economic upheaval, the accelerating climate crisis, the increasingly toxic dominance of social media. And now they are living through Donald Trump’s global tariff chaos, isolationism, and slashed safety net, including health coverage and food assistance.

Their generation is larger in number than the Boomers’. We need to invest in them. I’m talking about something on the scale of the investment that we made in the Greatest Generation. Initiatives such as the GI Bill allowed people to harness their potential, to realize their greatness. Since Ronald Reagan, we’ve systematically gutted Pell Grants, which once covered much of the cost of college for talented but low-income kids. These grants now cover less than a third, making them useless to the kids most in need.

The education we fund shouldn’t focus only on college degrees but should equally value and uplift the trades and skills that build our homes, modernize our electric grid, improve our infrastructure, realize the clean energy transition.

As they enter the workforce, Gen Z is feeling the greatest impact as AI and robotics revolutionize industries. We will need to govern with vision so that the opportunities of the new era fall equally. It is a challenge of massive complexity. Gen Z needs access to an education that is supple enough to adapt to rapid change and that helps them move nimbly through those innovations.

This generation is the destiny of our country and the world.

These days, unemployed for the first time, I have literally been unpacking my life.

Folders of letters and emails sent to me, some by voters, some from people in distant countries, expressing gratitude for the campaign we ran and despair over the aftermath. Boxes of awards I received in elected office and before. Each engraved plaque or lead glass tchotchke reminds me of the work I have done, the people helped by it.

That’s consoling. But it also brings up a swell of regret for all the work that I wanted to do.

By now, maybe, young people would be applying for their $25,000 housing down payment assistance. An increased child tax credit would be lifting thousands more families out of poverty. Medicare would be helping thousands of families and people in the sandwich generation to provide home care for their elderly loved ones. People in Africa would still have access to their AIDS medications. Our global friendships and our national reputation wouldn’t be in tatters.

I can’t help having these thoughts, when the daily barrage of bad news becomes overwhelming. But I’m not looking back.

Of all the advice and consolation I have received since the election, Minyon Moore’s words have moved me: “God gave you a beautiful 107 days to reclaim who you are. You have been able to push back against the caricatures, all the vile and ugly things, and be yourself. You gave America your heart and soul. You gave it your all.”

I did. And I’m not done.

When I decided to become a prosecutor, I had to defend that decision to my family, like a student defending a thesis. I asked why, when we seek change, must it either be by breaking down doors or crawling on bended knee? I wanted a seat at the table. I wanted to make change from inside the system.

Today I’m no longer sure about that. Because the system is failing us. At every level—executive, judicial, legislative, corporate, institutional, media—every single guardrail that is supposed to protect our democracy is buckling. I thought those guardrails would be stronger. I was wrong.

To keep people safe and help them thrive. That’s what I’ve always worked for, and that work has never been more needed—when the government sends armed, masked men into churches and courthouses, when children are washed away in known flood zones starved of resources for adequate warning systems, when the Department of Education is torn apart and the hungry and sick are denied their basic needs.

In this critical moment, working within the system, by itself, is not proving to be enough.

I’ll no longer sit in DC in the grandeur of the ceremonial office. I will be with the people, in towns and communities where I can listen to their ideas on how we rebuild trust, empathy, and a government worthy of the ideals of this country.

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107 Days by Kamala Harris is available September 23.