Harris Seizes Control, Clearing Field, Raising Cash and Slamming Trump

Vice President Kamala Harris moved swiftly to assert herself as the de facto Democratic nominee for president on Monday as virtually every potential remaining rival bowed out and a broad range of delegates endorsed her, all but clearing her path to the nomination.

With barely more than 100 days until the election, Ms. Harris immediately pressed her case against former President Donald J. Trump during a visit to her campaign headquarters, invoking her early career as a prosecutor who took on “predators” and “fraudsters.”

“Hear me when I say, I know Donald Trump’s type,” she said to cheers.

The vice president compared her day-old campaign to the civil rights and voting rights battles of the past, placing it on a continuum with “abolitionists and suffragettes.” And she said that Mr. Trump’s potential return would undo some of those victories and take the country backward.

“We are not going back,” she said.

Behind the scenes, Ms. Harris was moving just as quickly to take control of a sprawling political apparatus that just a day earlier had belonged to President Biden.

Ms. Harris tapped former Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr., who once oversaw Barack Obama’s vice-presidential vetting, to oversee her choice of a potential running mate, according to two people briefed on the matter.

Two of Ms. Harris’s top political advisers, Sheila Nix and Brian Fallon, joined the Monday morning call of senior staff members on the Biden-turned-Harris campaign — a shift that showed her team’s widening footprint inside the operation.