The day after Donald Trump becomes president of the United States for the second time, I’m in a cramped booth in the back of Pete’s Diner, a greasy spoon in Washington, DC, experiencing the slow onset shock of a world turned to absolute shit. The future is a gaping void; the past a mushroom cloud. I’ve spent the previous morning in the bitter cold, fording rivers of guffawing frat boys, MAGA-hatted blonds in teetering heels, gaggles of acid-washed biker retirees, and street merchants hawking bootleg Trump T-shirts by the hundreds. In the distance, a man carols incessantly: They’re eating the dogs! They’re eating the cats!
In despair, I look across the table for a shred of hope and find the 48-year-old Democrat of the 17th Congressional District of California, Ro Khanna, nursing a weak cup of coffee as a 14-degree breeze blows through the jangling front door, stirring a flake of dandruff on Khanna’s rumpled blue suit.
Twenty-four hours earlier, Khanna had watched Trump take the oath of office in front of Abraham Lincoln’s Bible. His eye fell on the figure of Barack Obama, one of Khanna’s political heroes, whom he’d first campaigned for as a college student in 1996, now a shrunken idol from a bygone era. “I thought that when he won in 2008, he had centered a new generation,” Khanna laments. “A multiracial America, a vision of new dynamic leaders. And seeing him on the side of that stage, almost as a figure pushed aside, and watching Trump centered, was disheartening.”
Obama, Khanna says, “was the protagonist in my story.”
Today Khanna’s professional obligation, in this blizzard of shit, is to shovel cheerfully. And Khanna is nothing if not professional. “I mean, this is an opportunity for rebirth,” he insists. “Crisis is a time for renewal, revitalization, new leadership. And I think that that is the opportunity we have as Democrats.”
From the vantage of Tuesday, January 21, this “opportunity” is downright laughable. And in the weeks ahead, as Democratic leaders jaw empty platitudes like animatronic figures in a museum to their dead party, it won’t get much funnier. For Khanna the moment offers personal opportunity—the long, lonely chance to present himself as a new Democratic hope, jostling for attention with Gavin Newsom, John Fetterman, Chris Murphy, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and a bunch of other strivers on TikTok, podcasts, op-ed columns, and cable TV in the jump ball for the party’s future.
Khanna’s version of what went wrong will soon become conventional wisdom: Democrats went “too far” on social issues, putting the DEI cart before the economic horse. Joe Biden clung to power too long and Kamala Harris ran a weak campaign short on vision, he tells me. Trump, he will conclude, did the party a favor by delegitimizing its failed leadership. “There is no Democratic party leader,” he observes. “Who’s the leader? There’s got to be a ferocious battle with the establishment. This is not ‘Kumbaya, let’s all get along.’ This is ‘You screwed up and you betrayed the voters.’ ”
A desperate situation!
To his credit, Khanna has been preparing for this moment for years, doggedly selling a left-wing answer to MAGA populism that he has dubbed “progressive capitalism,” or more recently, “economic patriotism” (or sometimes, half-jokingly, “blue MAGA”). Since 2016, Khanna has made repeated visits to MAGA districts like Warren, Ohio, and Johnstown, Pennsylvania, to field-test his big idea: investing billions of federal dollars in American tech and steel companies to build new factories and create jobs in middle America, without trade wars and demagoguery. Democrats, Khanna argues, need to offer “a bold economic transformation of rebuilding this country, rebuilding our industrial base, using technology to have massive advances in society—those are all things that we didn’t do, and we didn’t have a policy, we didn’t have the grand vision.”
Khanna is an unlikely populist: His California district covers Silicon Valley and includes many of the most powerful tech companies in the world, including Apple and Nvidia. As Democrats’ self-styled tech whisperer, he advertises his friendships with Elon Musk and Marc Andreessen, and breaks with party orthodoxy on issues important to tech bros like “free speech,” the civic value of X.com, the right of TikTok to operate in the US, and the virtues of Bitcoin. At Pete’s Diner he offers a generous interpretation of Musk’s sure-seemed-like-a-Nazi salute at a Trump rally. “It’s a combination of making clear that any gesture like that is something to be avoided,” says Khanna, a trained lawyer, “while also giving people the benefit of the doubt about what they’re saying they’re doing.”
Khanna has unlikely fans on the right, most famously Steve Bannon, one of Trumpism’s primary architects, who singles Khanna out as a favorite Democrat who speaks the same populist language that he does. “Man, what an uphill fight he’s got,” Bannon said on his War Room podcast after Khanna became the sole Democrat to stand up and applaud when Trump spotlighted a 13-year-old boy with brain cancer during a congressional speech in March.
The Friday after we meet at the diner, Khanna appears on Real Time With Bill Maher and gets steamrolled by the splenetic ESPN host Stephen A. Smith, who excoriates Democrats as out of touch and unable to compete in the spectacle-style politics of the Trump age. Khanna counters, “Do we have to have the celebrity president? Is it all about coolness?”
Maher practically laughs him out of the studio: “That horse has left the barn,” he says sourly.
For Khanna—and every other Democrat—the journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. As another icy breeze blows through the door, Khanna welcomes me on a listening tour of Western Pennsylvania and Milwaukee, where he will meet disenfranchised workers and sell his big idea for bringing factories and jobs back to the Rust Belt—and hope they forget for a minute that he believes in trans rights and DEI. “We’ve got to listen and persuade,” Khanna tells me. “And those are the two tenets of the rebirth of the modern Democratic Party.”
And I will ride along with Khanna through the valley of the shadow of political death.
I first met Khanna two years ago in Fremont, California, where one evening over a plate of biryani he explained his big idea. That year, he cosponsored the CHIPS and Science Act, a bill conceived under the first Trump administration but passed with bipartisan support and signed by President Joe Biden. The plan would seed Intel with almost $8 billion to build chip factories in Arizona, New Mexico, Ohio, and Oregon instead of importing chips from Taiwan. Khanna showcased the CHIPS Act in his 2022 book Progressive Capitalism: How to Make Tech Work for All of Us.
At the time, Khanna was critical of Governor Newsom, who was advertising California as the left-wing answer to Governor Ron DeSantis’s “free state” of Florida, which Khanna found tone-deaf. Khanna took an intriguing stance: Rather than billboarding California as a liberal Shangri-la (which it most assuredly was not), Democrats should show more humility and focus on economic prosperity for the heartland.
“It’s insensitive to the unique traditions, assets, and skills of people in other parts of the nation,” he said of Newsom’s California ballyhooing. “When I go to my wife’s hometown in Cleveland, if the Browns lose, people are depressed through Wednesday. They’re literally depressed. There’s a different level of attachment to place. I think that it comes off as out of touch to say that the whole nation should be California.” (Khanna later told me Newsom was unhappy with his critiques in Vanity Fair for that story, titled “Can Anyone Fix California?”)
Now, on a Tuesday afternoon in late January, Khanna’s aide shuttles Khanna and me in a rented Jeep Compass along a Pennsylvania highway dotted with Trump signs, drooping American flags, gigantic roadside crucifixes, rusted-out bridges, and the grim visage of an abandoned steel mill on a leafless winter horizon. I point to a pickup truck with a 1776 sticker on the back of the cab. “Democrats have been accused of saying that 1619 is when the country started, which is a little misreading,” muses Khanna, who is wearing the DC uniform of navy blue suit and crisp white shirt. From 1965 to 2025, he says, the story of America was the story of ever-growing diversity and pluralism. But people—Democrats—took it for granted. “If there is an assertion of nationalism, hearkening back to a nostalgic past, wouldn’t you expect it?” he says. “I mean, were we just expecting that we just kind of sleep our way into becoming this perfect multiracial democracy and everyone would just applaud?”
Johnstown, Pennsylvania, was a thriving steel town until the mills moved to China in the 1980s. The population plummeted, and now the city is plagued by unemployment, low wages, and full-throated MAGA enthusiasm. Walmart has become the big employer. Last year Khanna cosponsored the Modern Steel Act, which proposed to build next-generation steel plants here, complete with unions, to revive the town’s fortunes. At a Trump rally last August, local business leader and Trump donor Bill Polacek, whose manufacturing company thrives on contracts with the US government, railed against the idea, labeling it “green steel” to put the climate-change hex on it. “Two months ago we had a far-left liberal, a US representative from Congress, Ro Khanna, that came to our conservative town touting ‘green steel,’ ” he yelled. “That’s bullshit! Who the hell brought this far-left liberal from California to our town?”
At least they were paying attention. Voter turnout in Johnstown reached 81 percent in 2024, the vast majority going to Trump. Hope for Khanna’s steel bill faded to black.
That evening, Khanna and I drive to nearby Red’s Texas BBQ, a fluorescent-lit restaurant lined with gambling machines and a coin-operated claw game with a rubber Trump head inside. His ghoulish likeness is mashed against the plexiglass. As the co-owner, Tracy, takes Khanna’s order for a rack of ribs, her husband, Jimmy, comes by to ask if he’s a doctor, perhaps mistaking him for Sanjay Gupta from CNN. Khanna identifies himself as a congressman from California and leaps to defuse any embarrassment. “That’s a very good thing,” Khanna says cheerfully. “Indian Americans, when you go to different places, people think they could be a doctor, which is a positive impression.”
He tells the couple he’s in town to investigate opening a new steel plant: “Do you think that would help?”
“Yes,” Tracy says emphatically. “We need one. People need jobs. There’s not much left here.”
Khanna says a new steel plant would help businesses like hers. Tracy says Khanna faces an uphill battle: “The thought process of people in Johnstown is if it’s not directly helping them, they don’t want nothing to do with it,” she laments. “This town is so stagnant. People are just okay with being okay.”
Khanna asks for her best solution for bringing jobs back to Johnstown.
“Casino,” she says flatly.
“In the mall,” adds Jimmy.
The gambling games blare in the background.
“But a steel plant would help?” Khanna asks, hopefully.
“Steel mill, a casino, some kind of water park,” says Tracy.
“That would be huge,” says Jimmy. He enthusiastically describes a successful water park in a nearby town.
Khanna gingerly wades into politics, asking what people hope Trump will do for them.
“Not what he’s doing right now!” Tracy says.
Khanna’s eyes light up.
Over the weekend the administration temporarily freezes federal funds, making the Medicaid payment system temporarily inaccessible across many states, spurring panic. Tracy’s mother, we learn, is in the hospital with stage 4 cancer, and if she doesn’t have Medicare and Medicaid, she’ll have to sell everything she owns. Her cost of living, which includes her late husband’s leftover debt, leaves her with $19 to spare each month. “And that’s if she follows a strict budget and doesn’t stop for a coffee or McDonald’s,” Tracy says.
Tracy says she “absolutely” voted for Trump—“I’m not sad that I did”—and is looking forward to when he makes good on his no-tax-on-tips promise. Waiters in the area make $2.83 an hour plus tips, she says, and barely eke out a living. Still, Trump is an imperfect instrument. “He doesn’t know how it feels to not be able to feed your family,” she says, suggesting that Trump could mail out another round of stimulus checks to poor people, as he did during the pandemic, “to get a car, to get a job. ‘Here’s five grand, get yourself some furniture.’ Will it happen? Probably not.”
Khanna asks whether she considered voting for Vice President Kamala Harris, and Tracy says she was intrigued but found Harris “phony.” “I’m a pretty good judge of character,” she assures us.
“How phony do you think I am?” asks Khanna, to laughter all around.
“Really, honestly, good luck,” she tells him.
We climb back into the Compass and Khanna reviews what we’ve learned. “Their eyes lit up with the steel, did you see that?” he says. “You saw what it meant to people in this community.”
Tracy seemed more excited by the casino, I reply.
“Yeah, that was sad,” he acknowledges.
The whole exchange illustrates, Khanna believes, how Harris’s campaign message in 2024 was disconnected from working people. Instead of talking to the likes of Tracy, he says, “Kamala Harris was talking about ‘opportunity society’ so people can start start-ups. Like, does Tracy care about starting a start-up? I mean, come on.”
Khanna says Tracy’s story proves that only eight days into Trump’s presidency, Democrats are already finding political openings. “She didn’t bring up trans rights,” he says. “She didn’t bring up LGBTQ rights. She didn’t bring up, ‘Oh, I don’t like what they’re teaching in our schools.’ ”
The more Khanna thinks about it, the more he sees the proprietor of Red’s Texas BBQ as a political bellwether. “She shows why this country is absolutely winnable,” he says. “We just didn’t run a good campaign or she would have voted for Kamala. And I’m sure there are thousands of people like her. It reaffirms my faith in the country. That’s a voter we can easily win in ’26 and ’28 with the right message. It’s not that voters were wrong; we did something wrong.”
The next morning Trump suggests DEI is to blame for a fatal plane crash over the Potomac in Washington, as Khanna and I don hard hats and safety jackets to tour a factory of Höganäs, a Swedish company that produces metallurgical powders for manufacturing. The staff is largely white and working class, a rare union shop in a region of low-paying service jobs. An entry-level job at Höganäs pays about $24 an hour plus health care and a pension. Across town, the company operated by Trump donor Bill Polacek, who has broken at least two unionization attempts and festoons his warehouses with signs that say “God, Faith and Country,” reportedly pays some $18 an hour to entry-level welders. Turnover is rampant there, and Trump is wildly popular. But Höganäs is no different: Union officials estimate that around 80 percent of the company’s rank and file voted for Trump. The higher-ups argue politics with them every day. When they try debating staffers over Trump’s lies, “they just get angry with you,” says Gerald Lee, recording secretary for USW Local 2632. Joe Rogan is the common source of news. “His podcast runs heavy in this area,” Lee says.
Trump’s prolonged attack on transgender people worked in Johnstown, as it did across all of the Midwestern states formerly known as the blue wall. “We still have employees that think a bearded lady in a sundress is going to walk into the girl’s bathroom,” says Lee. Democratic state representative Frank Burns, or Far-Left Frank as some locals call him, says people feared that droves of immigrants would show up and work for less than $18 an hour and steal their jobs. Johnstown has almost no immigrants. “You factor in the cultural stuff on top of that, the transsexual stuff in sports,” Burns says, “it’s just beyond the comprehension of the average person. Like, where are we going as a country?”
At a luncheon afterward, Khanna meets with local union leaders in a dreary café across from a park where drug addicts gather at night. Baseball-hatted dudes from the International Association of Heat and Frost Insulators and Allied Workers and the Iron Workers Local Union No. 3 receive the Yale-educated Democrat from California with curiosity and politeness, maybe a touch of awe because he’s on TV a lot.
“I represent Silicon Valley,” begins Khanna’s pitch, “and I’ve been passionate about figuring out how we reindustrialize our country. The reality, as all of you know, is for the last 50 years, we basically had industry after industry shift offshore. We lost steel. You guys know more than I do that we’ve made, in Western Pennsylvania, more steel than Japan and Germany combined. We lost aluminum. We lost shipbuilding. We don’t make enough of the drugs that we buy at CVS or Walgreens. A lot of the pill manufacturing has gone offshore. China announced last week that they have a $1 trillion trade surplus. That means they’re selling a trillion dollars more to places like the United States, and we’re buying from them while the jobs are there.
“Now, in my district,” he continues, “we’ve got $12 trillion of wealth and technology—Google, Apple, Nvidia, a lot of the new tech companies. But you can’t build a nation without manufacturing. You can’t be a strong country and a secure country without a strong industrial base. So I call it a new economic patriotism.”
Khanna pivots to the tale of Tracy, whose restaurant everyone is familiar with, asking why her ailing mother barely scrapes by every month “in a country where we’re producing $12 trillion in one district?”
The big idea laid out, Khanna acknowledges an obvious problem: The tech companies—“all my guys,” he says—were lined up beside Trump only days earlier. “Would they be willing to come to Johnstown?” a woman asks hopefully.
“I’m trying,” replies Khanna, reminding them that under the Obama administration, Musk took a $465 million federal loan to support a Tesla plant in Fremont, California, and the administration failed to demand labor neutrality as part of the deal, which would have allowed for unions. Despite what everyone may have heard on Fox News, Khanna says, the government is not the enemy. “Fifty years we’ve been hearing that,” he says, growing stern. “Let me just be blunt. We’re arguing about what’s going to happen with trans kids, we’re arguing about deporting criminals—all BS. All BS in terms of whether we’re going to beat China or not.”
It all sounds good on paper. Another union official wonders how Khanna plans to slow Trump’s bulldozing of DC, which appears, on day eight, unstoppable. Khanna attempts spine-straightening rhetoric. “We had people in this country scale the cliffs of Normandy,” he says, pacing. “We had John Lewis beaten on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. We had people who have sacrificed so much for 250 years of American democracy. We’re not going to lose democracy for one person named Donald Trump. I have more confidence in the American public.”
Khanna hangs his hopes on Tracy. “That confidence was restored last night when I talked to Tracy,” Khanna says. “She voted for Trump, but these cuts [to Medicare], she said, ‘It’s not why I voted for him. I voted for him because I didn’t want a tax on tips.… I voted for him because the Democratic Party has ignored rural America for too long. I didn’t think he was going to stop the basic services on which we depend.’ ”
Bowing to public pressure, the government rescinds the freeze, and within 48 hours the Medicaid system switches back on. “What does that tell me?” asks Khanna. “That when people in this country speak out, we still have an enormous amount of power.”
“Here’s the good news,” Khanna concludes. “Trump is a lame duck. In two years, we’re going to start running for the future.”
Khanna and I sat down to a buffet of soggy hamburgers and fries.
At the start of our tour, Khanna makes the bold prediction that Trump will be a footnote in American history. “He’s a passing moment in the American story that will be footnoted, with a little deeper footnote,” he’d told me. “Now he’s going to be Andrew Jackson instead of just inconsequential. But that’s not the American narrative.”
Trump’s talk of American revival is appealing, Khanna admits, an echo of John F. Kennedy and Obama, “but I think he’s linking all of that with his MAGA base, which wants to move back to an America prior to the 1965 immigration act, which allowed my parents to come to the United States.”
That America, he is quick to note, “excludes me.”
Khanna faces rooms of working-class white men with admirable courage. It helps that he talks in the nasal lilt of a native Pennsylvanian, his flattened vowels lending an air of approachability. He sells his biography as evidence of his essential Americanness: His father, a chemical engineer, and mother, a substitute teacher, moved to the states from Punjab, India, in the 1970s and raised Khanna in suburban Bucks County. He played Little League baseball (poorly, he says) and became valedictorian at his high school, class of 1994. He jumped on the conveyor belt to success: an economics degree from the University of Chicago, a law degree from Yale, a clerkship with a judge in Arkansas, a move to Silicon Valley in 2003, where he landed at Munger, Tolles & Olson, focusing on litigation. In 2004 he quit to work for John Kerry’s campaign, and to run for California’s 12th Congressional District on an antiwar platform against incumbent Tom Lantos, a Holocaust survivor. He lost by 46 points.
Khanna’s defining moment arrived in 2009. He was teaching economics at Stanford when Nancy Pelosi recommended him for a job in the Obama administration. Khanna imagined himself jetting to Brussels and focusing on international trade as head of the Commerce Department. Instead he was assigned domestic policy and got a grand tour of Warren, Ohio. His aha moment was when he heard about 13 people in Warren who had taken their own lives in the wake of factory closings. “It had an emotional impact,” he says to me.
In 2012 Khanna wrote his first book, Entrepreneurial Nation: Why Manufacturing Is Still Key to America’s Future, and reached out to a rising tech pioneer for a blurb. Elon Musk followed through, calling Khanna a “leading thinker.”
“The unconventional ideas in this book chart the path America can take to lead the world for years to come,” enthused the man who was now hacking the federal government.
Khanna says he recognized Musk’s role in the electric vehicle revolution, and “wanted to see how we not lose him as part of the Democratic coalition,” he recalls. “And he knew I disagreed with him on labor issues, but we would have conversations.”
In 2014 Khanna ran for office again, this time in the 17th District of California against incumbent Democrat Mike Honda. Pelosi backed Honda in the primary and Khanna lost again. A friend of Khanna’s put it to him straight: “He says, ‘Look, you’re almost 40 years old, you’re not married, you’re in debt, you’ve lost twice,’ ” Khanna recalls. “ ‘What are you going to do with your life?’ That was a wake-up call.”
For years Khanna had been dating a woman named Ritu Ahuja, the daughter of a successful Indian American automotive-parts supplier from northeast Ohio. She was glamorous, a Georgetown grad with a master’s degree in strategic communications from Columbia. In 2015 Ahuja made one of her few campaign appearances as a political partner when she stood on a stage at a campaign stop in Santa Clara and recalled Khanna’s entreaties to marry him while dating on and off for eight years. She had rejected him twice but finally said yes on the cusp of Khanna’s third run for Congress, against Honda again. She compared her fiancé’s dogged romantic efforts to his political career. “Truly, the man does not give up when something matters to him,” she said.
Khanna initially supported Hillary Clinton as the Democratic nominee in 2016 but shocked his own campaign staff by switching mid-primary to Bernie Sanders. Some congressional colleagues viewed Khanna as an opportunist, but Khanna says he realized that he, like Sanders, was an outsider in the party. Pelosi had endorsed Honda against him again, making clear Khanna wasn’t part of the “club in California and the machine politics.”
“Bernie was just this outsider who was taking on the system, saying you’ve got to make way for more voices,” he says. “That was the emotional draw. And his advocacy for Medicare for All, which I was supporting.”
Khanna ran to the left of Honda and won the congressional seat. Subsequently, Sanders became Khanna’s mentor, later asking Khanna to co-chair his 2020 presidential campaign. Had it not been for the fateful job at Commerce and meeting Sanders, says Khanna, “my life could have easily gone a different way, into me being a guy who would have just been a voice for globalization and tech wealth.”
Khanna thinks of himself as a progressive’s answer to JD Vance—an ambitious and intellectual outsider from a marginalized background who earned a law degree from Yale, migrated to Silicon Valley to seek his financial and political fortune, and authored books to help define his public profile (though Vance’s book sold vastly more copies).“We followed each other for many years,” he says of Vance. “We’ve both seen the pinnacles of Silicon Valley, and he’s drawn from that techno-libertarianism of tearing down government, up by the bootstraps. Mine is much more focused on a fair social compact. Government needs to have a role in providing people with health care and education. So we’ve taken very different visions of the kind of America we want.” The two first met at a tech conference hosted by AOL cofounder Steve Case and later went on a bus tour of Ohio alongside then representative Tim Ryan. The New York Times dubbed it a “Rust Belt safari.”
Khanna and Ahuja both know Usha Vance, who had also worked at Munger, Tolles & Olson. When the Vances first moved to Washington, Usha and Ritu connected to talk about life in the Beltway. I ask Khanna: What must an educated second-generation Indian American woman think of her white husband’s immigrant bashing? Khanna, citing personal civility, sidesteps the question and turns the hose on JD: “I think his 22-year-old self, the JD Vance who was at Yale Law School and who married Usha Vance, would be horrified,” he says. “What would he think of what JD Vance has become?
“He’s obviously not George Wallace, but I think about George Wallace and how he adopted certain positions because of pure political opportunism, not because of ideology,” continues Khanna, referring to the racist demagogue and Alabama governor who ran for president multiple times in the 1960s and ’70s. “What Vance said about ‘cat ladies’ and the role of women in American society, saying Haitian immigrants are eating cats and dogs—the willingness to instill fear and division for the sake of power is a pretty unoriginal tale. It’s a pretty tried-and-true way of advancing yourself. And he’s doing that.”
In February Khanna called out Vance for defending a DOGE staffer who had resigned after a racist post about Indian immigrants came to light: “Are you going to tell him to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire?” Khanna tweeted at Vance. “Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”
Khanna drew an angry rebuke from Vance: “For the sake of both of our kids? Grow up,” Vance shot back. “Racist trolls on the internet, while offensive, don’t threaten my kids. You know what does? A culture that denies grace to people who make mistakes. A culture that encourages congressmen to act like whiny children.”
“I cannot overstate how much I loathe this emotional blackmail pretending to be concern,” Vance added.
Sensing he’d hit a nerve, Khanna scheduled a big speech for April, “Defense of the Constitution and University,” choosing Yale Law School as the backdrop against which to road test some soaring rhetoric and take potshots at a certain elegiac hillbilly, comparing him to other historical monsters: “As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin,” said Khanna, “strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.” (“Yawn” a Vance spokesman responded in the press.)
Khanna is not a natural pugilist. When I suggest he might be too mild-mannered for this gig, Khanna gets defensive, invoking his maternal grandfather, Amarnath Vidyalankar, who fought for Indian independence alongside Mahatma Gandhi and was imprisoned for two years. Khanna says he comes from a “maverick” legacy.
“I don’t have to walk in and suck up all the oxygen,” he tells me. “I can listen. People often describe me as a listener, right? Maybe, after the bombast, the ugliness of what’s going on, the simple chance of embodying American decency, and kindness, and empathy, and listening, and substance, which is also a strain in the American story, right? For every Donald Trump character, there are also those characters. And our country is so beautiful and diverse, and there’s room for all, and maybe people are drawn to it.”
After Khanna got poleaxed by Stephen A. Smith on Bill Maher’s show in January, he received a note from the actor Jesse Eisenberg, who had also appeared on the panel and said the exchange “felt emblematic of this moment, but also every moment when the thoughtful person is drowned out by the loud person.”
Not that Khanna isn’t trying to adapt. In February he went after Musk on X over the unchecked slash and burn of the federal government, prompting Musk to snap back, “Don’t be a dick.” Khanna turned the exchange into a TikTok video promising to be “the biggest dick in Congress” if transparency isn’t forthcoming. I ask about the exchange, and Khanna again invokes Tracy in Johnstown. By endangering her mother’s health care, he says, Musk is giving Democrats a message they can run on. “I can already imagine the bumper sticker in 2026,” he tells me. “ ‘Don’t fire veterans and don’t take away Medicaid.’ ”
It’s a very long bumper sticker, I tell him.
We’re somewhere between Milwaukee and Chicago when the subject of Bannon first comes up.
The Rasputin of the far right went to prison in 2024 for refusing to testify before Congress about his role in the January 6 insurrection. By the time Khanna and I are talking, he’s back on top, gabbing with Newsom on Newsom’s podcast, giving a long interview to Ross Douthat of The New York Times, critiquing the failures of Democrats, attacking Musk, espousing the importance of reviving American industry—and sounding very much like Khanna.
I’ve known Bannon since he was a lawyer in Hollywood, trading in gossip about players like Mike Ovitz and Ron Burkle, the California grocery store magnate and old pal of Clinton. Bannon had a financial stake in Seinfeld and earned residuals from the show before becoming a populist firebrand. I text Bannon to say I’m with Khanna, and he instantly shoots back: “He’s a rock star!” Khanna is delighted when I read the text and jokes that Bannon might want to endorse him in his next race. “He thinks that the economic patriotism [idea] I have can be a successful vision for our party,” surmises Khanna. “Having an Indian American son of immigrants talking about why we need steel in Johnstown—I mean, that’s probably what intrigues people like Bannon. Here’s a Stanford econ grad, Indian American guy, saying, ‘Boy, those politicians were dumb to take away the industrial base.’ And yeah, we’ve got to rebuild it, and nations matter, and you can’t just have unlimited free flow of global capital.”
It all makes perfect sense.
Two weeks later I meet with Bannon on the eighth floor of the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, where he’s padding around in stocking feet and his signature rumpled field-general chic, long hair greased back, belly hanging out, looking like a founding father after a weekend ayahuasca trip. Khanna’s “economic patriotism” motif, Bannon declares, “is stealing our shit! Yeah, he’s put a new title on it.… He’s trying to take Make America Great Again and put even more stars and stripes on it.”
Bannon is all in on Khanna’s vision of marrying Silicon Valley wealth to middle-American industry, “but the broligarchs will never do it. They’re in the algorithm business.”
As Bannon envisions it, the battle for the future is between the tech leaders in Khanna’s district who want to put computer chips in the heads of their customers and plug them into artificial intelligence (the “transhumanists,” he calls them) and the normal, analog, non-billionaire class he says he’s fighting for (“I’m on Team Homo Sapiens”). Bannon split with Musk over the issue of H-1B visas, which allows Silicon Valley companies to import skilled engineers from India and China, and which Khanna and Musk both support. When Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s would-be partner in DOGE, said H-1B visas are necessary because American workers are mediocre, he exposed the canyon between Bannon’s movement and the tech oligarchs with whom Trump has allied himself. Bannon refers to these Indian engineers in Silicon Valley as “indentured servants.”
“I think it’s terrible what we do with these Indian kids,” he says. “I mean, it’s a fucking ghetto there, but the oligarchs love it. [They] love the fact these guys live six to a two bedroom in Silicon Valley because they’re working 20 fucking hours a day at these companies.”
I ask Bannon to advise Khanna on how he can succeed politically. “He needs a rally point,” Bannon says. “And that rally point is to tell Dems they were lied to by the Democratic establishment. ‘Yeah, you’ve been crushed. Yeah, you were sold a false narrative.’ That’s why, right now, as hard as we had it, [Democrats] have it harder. They think they were lied to.”
Khanna has a tough road ahead, Bannon says, because Democrats can’t credibly talk to the working class: “Populism is not easy,” he says. “You have to really believe it. Nobody in your party believes it.”
“I think the reason he’s a breath of fresh air is he’s a decent guy,” Bannon concludes. “He’s not one of these know-it-alls on MSNBC telling you you’re bad, you’re evil, you’re stupid. But he needs critical mass and wins. Process and content.”
I mention Khanna’s theory that rebuilding industry in MAGA country might make people stop hating on immigrants and trans people, the stuff Trump and Bannon exploited for years to build the MAGA following. “Theoretically, that might be true,” he snaps, “but it’s also a masturbatory fantasy. First off, you have to be in power, which you’re not.”
The easier solution? For Khanna to switch to the Republican Party and go full MAGA—which Bannon predicts Khanna will do within 18 months. “He’ll eventually be a Republican,” he says. “Of course he will! He’s out there with the oligarchs, they’re all right-wingers now.”
I can practically see Bannon’s tail wagging.
Bannon aims to recruit both Khanna and Pennsylvania senator John Fetterman to join the MAGA ranks. “They’re my top two targets,” he declares. “You understand if we flip Fetterman and Ro Khanna, [Democrats] got nothing? They have no intellectual fire. My top target in ’16 was Tulsi Gabbard. Ro needs a year in the wilderness to see how hard it is to change the Democratic apparatus.” Considering reports of Fetterman’s erratic and tempestuous behavior behind the scenes, he may be the ripest of Bannon’s targets.
The big difference between Khanna’s brand of populism and Bannon’s version, I am at pains to point out, is that Khanna envisions a multiracial society and not a white nationalist autocracy. Bannon comes back with the familiar argument that MAGA made big inroads with Black and Hispanic voters in 2024, adding, for good measure, “I’m the chairman of the Hindu Republican Society,” misremembering the actual name of the group, Republican Hindu Coalition.
Bannon the Cynic views people as transactional. As far as he’s concerned, Khanna—whose name Bannon repeatedly mispronounces as Kuh-hawna—could help fill MAGA’s quota of nonwhites. “In the populist-nationalist movement,” he suggests, Khanna “could be the guy that actually brings in the South Asians. And it’s open. We want it.… I would love to be able to convert him.” (A week later Bannon complicates plans when he makes a Nazi-like gesture at the Conservative Political Action Conference.)
Bannon reveals that he’s exchanged a few texts with Khanna, advising him, “First, you gotta go back to your fucking district and take care of those goddamn oligarchs you’ve loosed on the world.”
Before I depart, I show Bannon the social media exchange in which Khanna promises Musk he’ll be “the biggest dick in Congress.”
“That’s not bad, it’s a start,” says Bannon. “You gotta start somewhere.”
The bromance of Khanna and Bannon highlights an uncomfortable truth: The success of Trumpism has so utterly reshaped American political reality that Democrats, if they are ever to win again, must absorb its cruel lessons. Khanna, in effect, is promising a kinder, gentler version of Trumpism—“blue MAGA,” as Khanna had joked. Maybe he’ll convince Bannon to flip to his side, he jokes, but it’s not that funny. “I think that he is right,” Khanna admits after I read him Bannon’s political advice. “You have to be willing to take the fight to the establishment with no mercy. It can’t be Pollyannaish. ‘The establishment screwed you.’ In that, I totally agree with him.”
Looking back, 2016 was a world-historic fork in the road. Democrats may have had a chance to cut Trump off at the pass by nominating the populist insurgent Sanders for president, but the establishment standard-bearer also offered the irresistible prospect of becoming the first woman president. The what-if grows starker in the rearview. “I think the Democratic Party in 2016 wouldn’t have allowed me to be a populist,” muses Khanna. “I couldn’t have smashed the Democratic Party myself, but Bannon and Trump did it for us, and there’s a rebirth and it’s a free-for-all.”
I joke to Khanna that he should rebrand himself “Bro Khanna” and start drinking protein shakes, try selling himself to the trad white males who support Trump. “I don’t think that the party wins by becoming Trump-like,” he says, “by dressing like Trump, by mimicking Trump’s cursing, by mimicking Trump’s crudeness. Why would we? Why would that be authentic? I mean, we win by being the opposite.”
Khanna’s cardinal faith is that pure economics can beat culture-war issues—with a dose of sympathy for white fragility. “They were in classes where they were told the future is female,” Khanna observes of aggrieved white males in America. “They feel that people don’t realize how hard it is for them, and they don’t feel seen or heard, and so our message to them shouldn’t be, you know, ‘It’s time to reassert manliness in American society at the expense of women.’ Our message to them should be, ‘We see that a declining economy where we offshored all these jobs, where we let wealth pile up in a few places, has left you without real economic opportunity.’ ”
Khanna, like every other Democrat, is surfing a fast-moving political wave, trying to keep his balance amid the daily shocks of the Trump administration. In the course of reporting this story, Trump launches a global trade war, heralding a “renaissance” of American industrialization, extracting a promise of $100 billion in new US manufacturing from Taiwanese chipmaker TSMC. On the surface it’s the kind of development Khanna would otherwise support, given his passion for rebuilding industry. “He has the same aim but the wrong means,” he says of Trump. “It’s not going to work. I just disagree with how he’s doing it.”
In March, when Trump threatens to defund the CHIPS Act, I sense the walls closing in on Khanna’s populism.
Frustrated, Khanna texts me: “Trump beckons FOREIGN firms instead of building AMERICAN CAPACITY … By gutting CHIPS, Trump is not giving American industry any chance to develop.”
Khanna again trains his fire on Vance, whose home state of Ohio could now lose a planned Intel facility projected to create some 10,000 new jobs. “How can you be for rebuilding the industrial base and watch that disappear?” he asks, suggesting Vance will be politically damaged when he runs for president in 2028 (if any of it is remembered).
In the spring Khanna starts a series of rallies in Republican districts in California, focusing on veterans and federal workers hurt by DOGE cuts, pulling larger-than-usual crowds with a populist “benefits over billionaires” message, allying himself with the barnstorming Bernie Sanders and AOC. “I see it as the wing with the most energy,” says Khanna of the progressives. “It’s a vindication tour for Bernie. ‘You should have listened to me.’ ”
Even when Trump’s approval rating finally takes a dip below 40 percent in April, Khanna and the Democrats are still looking for an argument, an opening, a wedge, a foot in the door, a breeze at their backs, momentum of any kind. They need a fresh face, a new voice. Khanna? Well, nobody looks possible until one day they do. See also: Trump. “What wakes up the American people?” Khanna asks. “I understand that there are things that the government can do more efficiently, but Democratic projects are hard. It’s hard to get people to do things, to build things for the economy. It’s a hard thing.”
A lot of people believe Trumpism is here to stay, that America is on the slow glide to fascism. Or the fast glide. Maybe we’re already there. Or maybe Trump’s tariff gambit will work and Democrats will look like obstructionist fools in the grand scheme of history.
“Isn’t that the exhilarating part of American democracy?” Khanna says. “It’s that we don’t know. We don’t know whether my ideas are going to work, or connect, but that’s the process.”
On my flight home from California, where I had toured Khanna’s home turf of Silicon Valley, I watch Gary Oldman portray Winston Churchill in the 2017 film Darkest Hour. Director Joe Wright’s Churchill, facing impossible odds and no good options against the Nazi threat, finds his voice, and his spine, by sounding out opinions from regular folks riding the London Tube, inspiring the “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech to Parliament. The movie ends on a stark quote: “Success is not final, failure is not fatal. It is the courage to continue that counts.”
In April I call Tracy in Johnstown to ask how her mother is doing and whether Trump is helping her cause.
“Not really, no,” she tells me. “I just feel like there was a bunch of promises made that are just not being addressed. ‘This will change. That will change.’ I understand that it’s only been since January, but there’s nothing changing.”
Operating costs for Red’s Texas BBQ have gone up 40 percent in the past year, she says. “I can’t blame it on Trump, because he wasn’t in office,” Tracy says, “but he’s claiming so much that he’s gonna fix. I know it’s not gonna happen overnight, but I just don’t see anything happening. I just don’t see anything moving.”
Tracy’s mother developed pneumonia after Khanna and I left town and had to be flown to a hospital in Pittsburgh. The bill for the 20-minute helicopter ride was $60,000. “Imagine if she didn’t have insurance,” Tracy says. Tracy worries about it “absolutely every day.”
I ask Tracy whether Democrats could ever break through in Johnstown. She compares working-class voters to pit bulls. “So, pit bulls have a bad name, just because they’re pit bulls,” she says. “But if you get a pit bull and you love it, and you nurture it, you raise it, and you put care and concern into it, it’ll be the best, most loyal dog you’ve ever had.”
Tracy says Khanna’s attention made an impression on her. She wasn’t the only one in Johnstown who told me that. “He came all the way from California, here to this little hole in the wall, to a place that is privately owned, instead of going to Applebee’s,” she says. “That was promising. Definitely.”
It’s a start.
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