Vice President Kamala Harris, who has spent the last few weeks trying to define herself and her life story for voters, turned on Thursday to describing the version of former President Donald J. Trump that she wants Americans to see, saying his candidacy represented a “full-on assault on hard-fought, hard-won freedoms and rights.”
At a campaign rally in Savannah, Ga., Ms. Harris accused him of wanting to curtail abortion access, cut Social Security and Medicare, and give tax breaks to big corporations and billionaires. She said his plan for across-the-board tariffs on imported goods amounted to an unfair tax on working families.
“Unlike Donald Trump, I will always put the middle-class and working-class families first,” Ms. Harris said to a crowd of thousands at a basketball arena. She added, “We’ve got some work to do, because we know Donald Trump has a very different plan.”
Her audience broke into chants of “We’re not going back,” which has quickly become a favorite slogan at her rallies.
Ms. Harris made her appearance hours before her first major interview since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee was set to be broadcast on CNN. She had faced rising pressure to hold an interview with a top journalist, with Republicans accusing her of hiding from tough questions.
In early clips of the interview released by CNN on Thursday afternoon, Ms. Harris pledged to appoint a Republican to her cabinet and curtly rejected Mr. Trump’s recent questioning of her racial identity.
After unexpectedly rising to the top of the Democratic ticket last month, Ms. Harris has used the early days of her campaign to tour the battleground states and reintroduce herself to voters, capping off her whirlwind ascent at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago.
She has focused on her immigrant parents, her middle-class upbringing and her time as a prosecutor and attorney general in California. Her policy agenda has been light so far, but she has unveiled a series of economic proposals aimed at lowering costs on housing, food and health care.
Her attempts to contrast herself with Mr. Trump have been aided by Project 2025, the conservative governing blueprint written by allies of the former president that includes radical proposals to overhaul the federal government. Among them: eliminating the Education Department, eroding the independence of the Justice Department and “explicitly rejecting the notion that abortion is health care.”
“They are out of their minds,” Ms. Harris said in Savannah, name-checking Project 2025 twice during her speech as she tries to make it common currency with voters.
The Harris campaign released an ad this week that called Project 2025 “a 922-page blueprint to make Donald Trump the most powerful president ever” and said Americans would “pay the price.” It also has a website devoted to the plan.
Mr. Trump has disavowed the document, although some of its policies track with his own.
Voters at the rally said they were aware of Project 2025. Linda Lea Walker, a Harris supporter and organizer with Savannah’s longshoreman’s union, said the policy blueprint was a chief concern. Al Purvis, a fellow union organizer who attended the rally with her, summed up his feelings about the election succinctly.
“We don’t have a choice,” he said, suggesting that voting for Mr. Trump was unthinkable.
Ms. Harris’s rally follows what her campaign had billed as a bus tour through rural South Georgia but that instead focused on Savannah, a Democratic stronghold where the party is hoping to lift turnout, with a brief stop in the small city of Hinesville about an hour away.
Democrats in Georgia say they are newly optimistic that she could hold on to the state, which President Biden narrowly won in 2020. The Democratic ticket’s standing in polls there has increased significantly since Mr. Biden dropped out, although Ms. Harris still trails Mr. Trump, according to a New York Times polling average.
Ms. Harris had been scheduled to appear in Savannah in early August, but a tropical storm forced her to reschedule. She also visited the city in February to deliver a speech on abortion rights — one of her signature issues — when she was still the No. 2 on the ticket.
Although Ms. Harris has proved herself a far more polished orator than Mr. Biden, she did stumble over one of her signature attacks on Mr. Trump on Thursday, momentarily confusing the Supreme Court for the Constitution.
“He even called for termination of the United States Supreme … the court, the supreme land of our nation, the United States Constitution,” she said.
At one point during her rally, Ms. Harris faced a shouted protest that was quickly drowned out by her supporters. Both she and Mr. Biden have been frequently interrupted by protesters angry about the war in Gaza, which the leading Democrats have handled with varying degrees of sternness and empathy.
As she has done in the past, Ms. Harris said that everyone had a right to be heard but that she “was speaking now” before reiterating her call for a cease-fire between Israel and Hamas and moving on with her speech.
And she also shut down chants of “Lock him up” from the crowd, which Trump supporters once shouted about Hillary Clinton at his 2016 rallies. Democrats have now turned that taunt against Mr. Trump, who was convicted this year of 34 felonies.
“The courts are going to take care of that,” Ms. Harris said.
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