Kamala Harris felt compelled to speak out about what President Trump was doing to the country.
But not enough to attack him by name.
Two days earlier, the law firm that hired her husband, Doug Emhoff, with a multimillion-dollar salary had struck a deal with the White House to avoid crippling sanctions — an agreement Mr. Emhoff had objected to beforehand in private talks with the firm’s leaders.
Now, Ms. Harris wanted to make it known she was uncomfortable with such acquiescence.
“There is a sense of fear that is taking hold in our country,” she told an audience of Black women on April 3, in some of her most forceful remarks since November. Her voice rising, she added: “We are seeing those that are capitulating to clearly unconstitutional threats.”
Five months after being driven from public office for the first time in more than two decades, the former vice president is carefully feeling her way forward. As she plots her next move, she is navigating between a president who is using his executive power to crush those he sees as his strongest adversaries and restive Democrats who want their leaders to be the picture of defiance.
Friends, former aides and advisers say Ms. Harris, 60, still thinks she would have beaten Mr. Trump if she’d had more than 107 days to campaign — the implication being that former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. should have quit the race earlier.
