Few Democratic lawmakers have been as publicly vocal in their criticism of the Trump administration’s first six months as Ro Khanna. The congressman representing California’s 17th District—which includes much of Silicon Valley, including tech giants Apple and Nvidia—has been hosting town halls with voters in Republican districts and rallies around the country at a cadence that has already started fueling speculation of a 2028 presidential run.
He’s also publicly feuded with former Silicon Valley darling and his onetime friend Elon Musk, who aligned himself closely with U.S. President Donald Trump for much of the last two years and recently left the government after cutting thousands of federal jobs and millions of dollars through his unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). The day after Khanna sat down with Foreign Policy in his office, he voted with his party to subpoena Musk in Congress (though the motion was defeated by Republicans along party lines).
Khanna still expressed hope that Musk would come around—and indeed, he is now publicly feuding with Trump over Trump’s spending bill that Musk says will increase U.S. debt to unsustainable levels. The California lawmaker also played down his own presidential ambitions and said it will be a “Herculean” task to repair the United States’ reputation in the world after Trump.
The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.
Foreign Policy: I wanted to start with Elon Musk. You’ve had a good relationship with him in the past, if not as much recently. What are your thoughts on his exit from the government and his growing criticism of the Trump administration this past week?
Ro Khanna: Well, Elon has always cared very deeply about deficits, and he’s frustrated that the Republican budget is going to explode peacetime deficits in this country like we’ve never seen before. It’s going to move federal deficits from 7 percent of GDP to almost 8 percent of GDP. The historical average over the last 50 years has been 4 percent of GDP. So Elon sees that this is going to lead to the interest rates rising, the Fed engaged in quantitative easing to having to buy more Treasury bonds, and then making all our dollars less valuable and making Americans poorer.
He also, in my view, probably has unease with the administration’s pause on all international students—especially considering he was one, with the blanket tariff policy that’s hurt companies like Tesla and SpaceX, with the end of the clean energy tax credits that are hurting his company and many manufacturers in the United States, and with the cuts to the National Science Foundation, which helped start Google with the funding to Stanford and started so many other Silicon Valley companies. So, I’m hopeful to engage him and have him start to speak out against a protectionist, anti-immigrant, deficit-exploding agenda.
FP: When was your last conversation with him, and what is your relationship with him right now?
RK: I’ve been very critical of what he was doing in dismantling USAID [the U.S. Agency for International Development], what he was doing to dismantle FDA [the Food and Drug Administration], what he was doing in dismantling the EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] and other important government agencies, the National Park Service in particular, Veterans Affairs. We’ve had public, heated disagreements based on the actions DOGE was taking that I found unconstitutional.
But we’ve continued to text back and forth here and there, and I’m hopeful that he’s going to start to speak out for some of these clear principles of supporting science, supporting international students, rejecting isolationism and protectionism, and rejecting massive deficit spending.
FP: You’ve spent a lot of time recently speaking to Americans across the country. What is the attitude you’re seeing toward the Democratic Party?
RK: Well, there’s disappointment that the Democrats failed to keep Donald Trump out of the White House and that we failed to take back the House and the Senate. But now people see the extreme agenda that the Republicans are following, [and] they are deeply upset with the Medicaid cuts—that’s personal for them. Many people bring up their kids, or they’re talking about their grandparents and how that’s going to affect their lives. They’re deeply upset with the cuts in food aid that are taking place there. They find fundamentally unfair that tax breaks are going to the billionaires in my district, as opposed to prioritizing working- and middle-class families, and then they are appalled by the attack on medical research, by the bullying by the government of private universities, by the pause on all international students, by the total lack of due process for immigrants, and the shredding of the Constitution.
FP: You mentioned the billionaires in your district, along with trillion-dollar companies such as Apple and Nvidia. Have you been disappointed by the extent to which they are kowtowing to the Trump administration? Have you had conversations with them about that?
RK: Well, the challenge for any leader right now is the intimidation. If you’re not engaged with the administration, the administration is threatening to tariff your products, they’re threatening to bring lawsuits, they’re threatening to ban visas for your students or your employees. So, it is a very difficult line for university presidents and corporate leaders to navigate, given the gross overreach of the executive branch and their intimidation and bullying, and people don’t want to be singled out.
That said, I have tried to say there’s safety in numbers. We need a group of leaders speaking out about the blanket tariffs, about the attacks on science funding, about the attacks on medical research, about the attacks on international students. And you’re seeing more people now starting to speak out, but I’m trying to organize people [in Silicon Valley] who might be comfortable speaking out in a group.
FP: You’ve also been critical of Trump’s tariffs and the economic disruption they’ve caused. What would you do differently to re-industrialize the United States?
RK: I would create a White House economic development council with a national investment bank to finance the scaling of new factories. And before you can protect industry, you have to build industry—we need federal financing for new factories in steel, in ships, in aluminum, in drug manufacturing. We did this with the CHIPS Act. We need to say if you build it here, America will buy it to help create a market in the United States. We need to focus on the development of the workforce with the skilled trades, with apprenticeships, and ensure that there are local apprentices who have the opportunity to work on these projects.
The administration is doing the exact opposite. They’re actually getting rid of the job corps program, defunding the job corps program that creates the skilled trades and the apprenticeships. We need to engage the local communities in seeing what support they need from the private sector, invest in the universities and community colleges to have the workforce that will be needed.
We need a Marshall Plan for America—the federal government working with the private sector, working with labor, working with universities to re-industrialize these communities. And then we can use strategic tariffs to prevent dumping and foreign state-subsidized products competing with ours.
The problem is that the Trump administration is doing the icing with tariffs and they’re not baking the cake. They’re not talking about the recipe of actually building the industry.
FP: You’ve been critical of most of the Trump administration’s policies but have supported them in some areas—such as prescription drug pricing. Do you see anything in the administration’s foreign policy you can support?
RK: Personally, the foreign policy has been a deep embarrassment to America, American ideals, and American moral leadership. It has been a betrayal of [former President John F.] Kennedy’s vision articulated so beautifully in his inaugural [speech] about America being the leader of the free world.
They berated [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky in a way that made Americans feel so small about our commitment to standing for free people. They have launched incoherent tariffs against Canada. The Canadians are the politest people. For them to be talking about having elbows up and jerseys off in a fight with America requires great incompetence for an administration to anger them so much. They have totally compromised our relationship with Mexico—in fact, I’m going to see [Mexican] President [Claudia] Sheinbaum in a bipartisan delegation—because of the tariffs, they are hurting Mexico’s economic development and going to force further migration into the United States.
They are engaged in a language of colonialism, talking about conquering Greenland, conquering Panama, the language we haven’t seen in this country post-FDR [former President Franklin D. Roosevelt]. The foreign-policy framework has been an undermining of all of the principles that this country has stood for in the post-World War II era.
FP: So how do you begin to repair that trust with allies and partners, at a moment when it seems like the world is starting to move on without the United States?
RK: I don’t think the world can move on without the U.S., we’re too consequential. So much of the AI leadership is here. Our military still is the best in the world. Our research institutions remain the best in the world, despite Trump trying to damage them every day. Our economy is still the strongest of the world, our market power still dwarfs almost any other part of the world. So America is going to matter.
The question is: Are we going to matter in shaping a more moral, more just world, in a world where people’s lives improve? I believe the next administration is going to have a Herculean task. We’re going to need the mobilization of the entire American public to rebuild this country, to rebuild the institutions.
Now we have an administration that is really destroying the institutions, except not because of an external event but because of their own self-inflicted damage.
FP: Given how publicly you’ve been out there, there’s growing speculation you might be gearing up for a 2028 presidential run. Care to comment on that?
RK: Well, I’m laser-focused right now on the House, because the urgency is to make sure [Minority Leader] Hakeem Jeffries becomes speaker and we have some check on this administration. The urgency is to organize around the country so we can get terrible provisions like a 10-year moratorium on any legislation to protect workers or kids from AI out of the current bill.
Politics is like tennis—if you start to focus on the set, you’ll lose the point at hand. You have to be in the moment, organizing, articulating the danger that the Trump administration poses to both the working-class Americans and the world, and offering an alternative of what the Democrats believe in.
I believe in economic patriotism. I believe in the America that my parents came to during the Kennedy years. We need a new national purpose for America that will unify the country and that will make America a moral leader and a beacon to the world again, and I want to articulate that vision for the Democratic Party.
FP: I want to ask about China policy, another area you’re closely invested in. How has the Trump administration’s China policy diverged from [former President Joe] Biden’s so far, and what would you like to see?
RK: Well, we’re not focused on developing our industries here in the United States. The Biden administration was very focused on how we’re going to develop the batteries, the electric vehicles, and clean technology here. Trump is reversing all of that, and that’s giving China a lead. That’s the biggest challenge. And then he’s getting foreign students not to come here—that’s again taking away one of our comparative advantages. Our biggest advantage over China is that we have much deeper universities and research universities than China. So it’s the self-sabotage of the American enterprise that is the biggest distinguisher between Biden and Trump.
In terms of the specifics on China, he is also not building our alliances to confront China. Instead of reaching out to South Korea, Japan, Europe, Canada, and Mexico and saying: “Let’s all collectively stand up to China’s unfair trade,” he is firing haphazardly across all countries and diluting our ability to have a concerted front against China.
FP: Another big tech backdrop of the Trump administration this term has been cryptocurrencies. Is there a way for cryptocurrency to be more integrated in Washington while avoiding broader concerns around conflicts?
RK: We should start with a rule that no elected official or their family should be engaged in having meme coins or issuing stable coins, because that’s an inherent conflict of interest. When you have the UAE [United Arab Emirates] putting $2 billion into [Trump’s crypto firm] World Liberty Financial and the Trump stable coin—the Trump family is going to make $50 million of interest on that, as anyone would if they had a stable coin. Is that going to create a conflict in how the Trump administration deals with the UAE? Is that going to make it less likely to put an AI center in western Pennsylvania, as opposed to in Abu Dhabi? That is the problem. It’s a conflict of interest.
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