Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, has been busy in the early months of 2025 trying out ways to make himself a counterweight to the Trump administration.
In a social-media skirmish in February over the administration’s hiring and firing of an official who had written racist posts, Mr. Khanna drew the ire of Vice President JD Vance, who told him, “You disgust me.” More recently, Mr. Khanna has been staging town halls in Republican districts across California with a parade of progressive co-sponsors.
Now, he is planning to shine an even brighter spotlight on Mr. Vance — and on himself — with speeches aimed directly at the vice president in April in Ohio, Mr. Vance’s home state, and at their shared alma mater, Yale Law School.
In an interview, Mr. Khanna, 48, said he intended to cast Mr. Vance as a unique threat to America’s constitutional order, and argued that there was no time to waste in building the case against Mr. Vance, a likely heir to President Trump’s right-wing political movement.
His speaking tour of several cities in Ohio, and on Yale’s campus in New Haven, Conn., is also an effort to nudge himself into the national conversation about the Democratic Party’s future.
For Mr. Khanna, who has represented much of Silicon Valley since unseating a Democratic incumbent in 2016, that has been a long-term project. He makes a cascade of cable news appearances and travels widely; his repeated trips to New Hampshire before the 2024 election included appearances as a surrogate for former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. and an unusual debate with Vivek Ramaswamy. At last year’s Democratic convention, he arranged to meet with delegates from 15 states.
“I don’t deny having ambition,” Mr. Khanna said. “Ambition is a good thing if it’s used towards good ends. And I want to be in a place where I can have, ultimately, the maximum impact on our country and our party.”
For now, he said, fending off the Trump agenda was most important. “Doing that, I think, is sort of table stakes for people who want to then have their positive vision heard,” he said.
Our conversation was edited for length and clarity.
SG: JD Vance isn’t the president. Donald Trump is doing all the things right now. So why talk about JD Vance?
RK: Well, he’s the one who’s trying to give intellectual justification for what Trump is doing. He’s the quote-unquote intellectual of Trumpism. So I think we have to take on the ideology. Because he’s trying to say that what Trump is doing is a coherent worldview.
You don’t think it’s too early to try to define JD Vance?
No. He represents the future of Trumpism. And I think all of our party should be exposing him and defining him.
Do you think it’s too early to be fighting the future of Trumpism given all the things happening in the present? Is it too soon to start talking about 2028?
It is too soon to be talking about 2028. But what JD Vance is articulating today is a potential crisis in the next few months. And he’s saying to Trump, ‘Defy the court orders, defy including the Supreme Court.’ I mean, that’s not 2028. That’s telling you about a potential constitutional crisis.
He’s saying, the universities are the enemy. That’s not talking about 2028. That’s talking about threatening our universities — the crown jewels, in many ways, of American democracy. So we need to draw the line in the sand now. We need to expose how hollow this is.
JD Vance, the student at Yale, would have recognized how hollow it is. And so, that’s partly why I’m going back there, where both of us got an education.
Can this be seen as a bid for attention? And do you think that’s a good thing?
Sure, it’s a bid for attention. It’s trying to push back on Vance’s ideology and trying to get my ideas out there. And 2024 taught us that we have to be creative in capturing people’s attention. If I had just written a Foreign Policy magazine essay on the same ideas, that probably wouldn’t really get people talking about them. I don’t think it’s a bad thing to try to get attention. But the question is attention for what? My hope is that I’m trying to get attention for something substantive.
You’ve actually traveled with Vance before, in early 2018, on a bus tour across Ohio.
He joined us for a day.
The Times called it a “Rust Belt safari.”
I remember that because I didn’t love the title.
Did you forge a real relationship with Vance?
I remember it being a cordial conversation about what it would really take to reindustrialize the country. But I don’t recognize the JD Vance who joined us on that trip, in terms of the things he’s now talking about.
I don’t think that JD Vance would ever have talked about defying the Supreme Court, or called universities the enemy. I mean, it was filled with people who had collaborated at universities and appreciated the role of universities.
I’m curious if you thought back then that the Democratic Party’s brand was as broken with working people as you seem to think it is today?
We had a problem back then. We have a problem today. But I don’t think it’s just the Democratic Party’s brand. The Republican brand isn’t that much better. I think people keep voting everyone out of office because they think no one is fundamentally transforming their lives. They see economic stagnation in their communities while wealth piles up in places like my district.
Have you ever seen Democratic voters as angry as they are right now?
No, but that’s a separate issue. There’s two levels of anger. There’s anger generally of voters upset with the economic direction of this country. And I would argue they’ve been upset for the last 20 years, trying to vote for change.
Then there is particular anger today among Democrats. They’re angry that they don’t see the Democratic Party providing clear direction of what they can be doing in this moment. And they don’t see us rising up strongly enough to confront the crisis. They don’t see us having a clear vision of standing with the working class and middle class.
I watched part of one of your town halls that was in your district. One of the people that stuck out to me said, ‘Why are you acting like things are normal?’
I remember that question.
Should Democratic incumbents be worried right now about these sort of burbling up frustrations?
Yes, they should. They were very, very angry at the Senate vote, that we didn’t get any concessions. But it’s beyond that. They want to see Democratic members of Congress doing everything humanly possible to avoid cuts that they think are life-or-death for their families. The amount of people at these panels who came to me in tears, crying, just seeking to be hugged and listened to — I was shocked.
People are not typically coming up in tears?
That has never happened to me before.
You know better than most the challenges of running a primary campaign against an incumbent member of Congress.
I tried it three times. It worked once.
Are you considering backing any primary challengers in this cycle against any of your colleagues?
I believe primary challenges are healthy and it would be hypocritical for me to say that they’re not. I believe people should run and we’re not entitled to these seats. I personally have seldom endorsed primary challengers, but I have in certain cases. With Marie Newman. With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I famously dual-endorsed. I never rule it out.
There’s a tension in your biography. You represent Silicon Valley and have had the backing of some of its biggest names. You also co-chaired Bernie Sanders’s 2020 presidential campaign. Are you more of a Bernie Sanders-style democratic socialist or are you a Silicon Valley capitalist?
I wrote a whole book called “Progressive Capitalism” trying to reconcile it — maybe not well! But I call myself a pro-growth progressive. The fundamental challenge in this country should be tackling income inequality. To tackle inequality in Milwaukee or Johnstown, Pa., you need government, but you also need business leaders.
I believe we need to have higher taxes on the wealthy in my district. We also have to have economic dynamism, economic growth in these areas, and business leaders, technology leaders, have to be part of the solution.
It sounds like the beginnings of a platform of a candidate for president.
If someone else wants to take it, that is fine. It’s a philosophy. The question is, can I get this philosophy — which I fundamentally believe is what the country needs to do — can I get our party to adopt it?
Have you ruled out running for president in 2028?
No one rules out anything. I’m of Hindu faith. And one of the great teachings of the Gita is if you do your duty without worrying about the reward, you’re more likely to get rewards.
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