Well, this just got interesting.

Donald Trump will not be facing President Biden in the race for president. Instead, he will likely be running against a tough, fit, and experienced former prosecutor nearly 20 years younger than he.

As most people now know, in an historically unprecedented move, this past Sunday President Biden bowed out of the race for president, endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris.

Democrats have been steadily endorsing Harris since that announcement. The Democrats’ fundraising exploded within hours of Biden’s announcement and endorsement of Harris. Money had all but dried up as questions about Biden’s fitness for a second term got louder.

Harris’s earlier career is perhaps better known here in California and in the larger Bay Area than in the country at large. She worked as an Alameda County prosecutor and was later elected San Francisco district attorney in 2004. She served two terms, from 2004 to 2010, in that role.

In 2010, Harris succeeded Jerry Brown as California attorney general.

Harris’s prosecutorial experience contrasts rather sharply with Trump’s career. Trump is a convicted felon. He was charged with 34 counts of falsification of business records in the first degree, which is a felony in New York, and convicted in May 2024. Trump has called for the termination of the Constitution in a Truth Social post, and he lies almost every time he opens his mouth (30 times during his debate with Biden for example). When he was president, many Americans died needlessly from his mishandling of the COVID pandemic.

It is clear that Trump and his followers, if they get into power, plan to rip our democracy to shreds as they have revealed in Project 2025. Harris pursued some good bread and butter issues as California Attorney General such as homeowner protections. She pursued criminal justice reforms and worked to protect the environment.

Since becoming vice president, Harris has been a staunch advocate for reproductive justice for women and the Biden/Harris campaign had already announced it would hold more than 50 events in battleground states marking the anniversary of the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that overturned the federal legal right to abortion.

Trump is running on overturning women’s reproductive rights. His running mate JD Vance is “OK” with women staying in marriages that were “maybe even violent” and he is also seemingly OK with the idea that “woman should be forced to carry a pregnancy to full term after she had been a victim of rape or incest.” (Newsweek July 17, 2024)

I am really looking forward to prosecutor Harris taking that one on. I believe the country saw prosecutor Harris in the debates for the Democratic nomination the last time around. I’d like to see her go for the jugular again. She absolutely eviscerated others on the stage with her.

Of course, that is exactly the Kamala Harris Republicans don’t want the country to see. As they are scrambling to reorganize their attacks against the Democrats, a video clip of Kamala Harris making a bumbling and awkward speech started circulating on social media. Given our times and the capacity to manipulate images, this will not be the worst of it, not by a long shot.

And I am really looking forward to seeing which of the many eminently qualified Democrats Harris will pick for her vice president.

As I said, things just got very interesting.

Susan Thistlethwaite has been published in the Washington Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the Huffington Post. She is the retired president of Chicago Theological Seminary as well as a retired tenured professor. These days she writes mystery novels. She and her husband live in Santa Cruz.