A Progressive Star, Tone-Deaf To America

Ro Khanna has everything a Democratic presidential contender could want heading into 2028. He is 49, sharp, Silicon Valley-connected, and progressive enough to excite a base that is still searching for its next standard-bearer.

He has the pedigree (University of Chicago, Yale Law, a Stanford lectureship, Obama’s Commerce Department) and the committee assignments to match. On paper, he looks formidable. Now in his fifth term representing California’s 17th Congressional District in the heart of Silicon Valley, Khanna also serves as a vice chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus.

Then he opened his mouth.

Appearing recently on Left Hook, the podcast hosted by New York Times contributing writer Wajahat Ali, Khanna offered a preview of what his presidential campaign might look like. If his performance is any indication, it will look a great deal like Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign and Kamala Harris’s 2024 one: well-credentialed, intellectually coherent within its own bubble, and utterly tone-deaf to the country that actually votes.

The political environment should, in theory, favor Democrats, though not on every front. Trump’s Iran deal, for all the criticism it has drawn, wound down months of fighting without committing a single ground troop and produced an interim agreement under which Tehran pledged to forgo a nuclear weapon. Crude oil, which spiked during the war, has since fallen nearly 40% from its spring peak to around $75 a barrel. That is one grievance Democrats can no longer bank on. But affordability and housing remain flashpoint issues well beyond the coasts. With the expiration of Biden-era premium credits, millions on the Affordable Care Act are quietly absorbing spiraling costs, deductibles, and co-pays, and Washington is saying almost nothing about it. The opening exists. The question is whether Democrats will walk through it or, as Khanna appears determined to do, nail it shut.

The Immigration Trap

Khanna’s most damaging moment came on immigration, the issue that, more than any other, handed Donald Trump all seven battleground states in 2024. Rather than acknowledge the reality that Americans across party lines rejected what they saw as four years of open borders, Khanna doubled down. Federal data recorded more than 10 million border encounters over those four years, along with an estimated 2 million “gotaways” who crossed undetected.

He called for abolishing ICE, replacing immigration enforcement with an agency reoriented around human rights and combating sex and child trafficking. He opposed enforcement operations targeting undocumented immigrants who, in his framing, are working and paying taxes.

His sentiment may be genuine, but the politics are disqualifying.

Americans have not forgotten Laken Riley, the 22-year-old Augusta University nursing student who was beaten with a rock and asphyxiated by a 26-year-old Venezuelan man, in the country illegally, while she jogged on the University of Georgia campus. Most congressional Democrats said little. President Biden mispronounced her name as “Lincoln Riley” during his March 2024 State of the Union address. The Laken Riley Act, which mandates detention and deportation of illegal immigrants charged with theft-related crimes, ultimately passed with bipartisan support in 2025 after Trump took office; 46 House Democrats and 12 Senate Democrats crossed the aisle to send it to the President’s desk.

Khanna’s position, stripped of its humanitarian framing, sends a straightforward message to prospective illegal immigrants: enter illegally, stay quietly, work and pay taxes, and you may remain indefinitely. With no viable amnesty legislation on the horizon, this situation invites permanent legal limbo. It is also the precise message that voters repudiated in November 2024. Besides, Americans recognize that dropping the word “illegal” in favor of softer terminology insults the millions of legal immigrants who have spent decades navigating the system by the rules.

The Court Gambit

Khanna’s comments on the Supreme Court were equally ill-advised. Calling the current Court a “Dred Scott Court,” a reference to the 1857 ruling that declared African Americans had no rights the white man was bound to respect, is reckless overreach. That decision was so monstrous it helped trigger the Civil War and ultimately produced the 13th and 14th Amendments.

The current Court includes three liberal justices: Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Lumping them into a Dred Scott analogy to score points against the conservative majority strains credulity and trivializes one of the darkest chapters in American legal history.

Khanna also endorsed expanding the Court from nine to thirteen justices. Americans may have some appetite for modest reform. An 18-year term limit, for instance, polls reasonably well across party lines. But court-packing is another matter. Why thirteen? Why not twenty-one? And what structural safeguard prevents the next president, of either party, from simply appointing four ideologically aligned justices and doing it all over again? Khanna offers no answer.

The California Problem

Then there is the billionaire tax. Khanna has thrown his weight behind a California ballot proposal, pushed by a health-care workers’ union, that would levy a one-time 5% tax on the assets of the state’s billionaires; the mere prospect has prominent tech investors threatening to leave the state he represents. He backs a wealth tax at the national level, too. Whatever its merits in theory, championing a policy that has the wealthiest residents of your home state eyeing the exits is a difficult sell to the swing voters Democrats need in Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin.

The Bottom Line

Ro Khanna is not without genuine strengths. His focus on rebuilding American manufacturing, his work on the China competition committee, and his willingness to engage seriously with defense and technology policy distinguish him from many of his progressive colleagues. There is a version of Ro Khanna who could be a serious general-election candidate.

This was not that version.

The 2024 election was, among other things, a clear instruction from the American electorate. Khanna, on the available evidence, has not read it. A Democratic Party that walks into 2028 with abolish-ICE as its immigration posture, court-packing as its judicial reform, and a national billionaire tax as its economic centerpiece will not need Donald Trump to defeat it. It will manage that on its own.