A Californian has gotten under the Trump team’s skin. Civility is a powerful weapon | Opinion
Congressman Ro Khanna of Silicon Valley may be California’s most effective opponent against the Trump administration right now. Who else can trigger Elon Musk or prod Vice President JD Vance to the point of throwing a hissy fit on X?
Khanna did that in a matter of days last week. “You disgust me,” Vance said to Khanna on X.
Because many of his 341,000 X followers are in tech, Khanna’s tweets are finding their way to Musk, Vance and other tech bros empowered by Trump for the moment.
“I understand that I have a unique position right now and a unique obligation to speak out,” Khanna said Monday night in an impromptu conversation with The Sacramento Bee Editorial Board. “We’re the ones in Washington and we need to be the primary line of defense against the administration’s unconstitutional actions.”
Gov. Gavin Newsom is understandably keeping his powder dry with Trump as he lobbies the president for federal funds in the wake of devastating Los Angeles fires.
The silence of Newsom created a political vacuum in California. Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi has been relatively quiet since breaking her hip in December. Meanwhile, neither of our United States senators, Alex Padilla and Adam Schiff, have evolved into leading change agents.
Enter Khanna. His emerging strategy is beyond the goal of eliciting a daily reaction from those now in power. He is up to something bigger. Khanna is finding a political voice as his Democratic Party has lost its own after its devastating November loss to Trump. A tone of civility and reason, as he defends the sanctity of the United States Constitution and the role of his Congress, is driving his opposition crazy.
Khanna, like Newsom, has that rare political gift of knowing how to get attention. Newsom tends to do it with one Sacramento stunt or another. Khanna is doing it with words and an inherent sense of timing.
Musk recently gave Khanna an opening that he exploited to the fullest. The world’s richest man was looking to rehire into the Department of Government Efficiency a staffer (Marko Elez) who had been fired for racist comments such as promoting the normalization of “Indian hate.”
Khanna, of Indian descent, took this personally. On Musks’ social media platform, X, he tweeted to Vance whether Elez should apologize before getting his job back.” Just asking for the sake of our kids,” wrote Khanna, reflecting how the vice president’s wife, Usha, is the first-second lady of Indian descent.
“You disgust me,” Vance later said in a prolonged back and forth.
“It got under the vice president’s skin,” Khanna said Monday. “I just sort of posed a rhetorical question.”
Khanna has had similar success with Musk, challenging him on X to release Congress-approved funding for international aid.
“Elon we have known each other a long time,” Khanna tweeted. “You can’t stop payments that Congress has authorized and appropriated. Make recommendations to Congress, but don’t stop payments. That’s Article I.”
Musk responded by hurling a guttural slang word at Khanna that’s straight out of the junior high school lexicon for boys. It wasn’t slick, but it rhymes with slick.
Khanna has had similarly curious interactions with Republicans in Congress, who seem fine with yielding their legislative authority to Musk and Trump.
“You can’t find three Republicans right now willing to say that Congress has the power of the purse,” Khanna said. “Our Constitution, Khanna said, “never contemplated that Congress would voluntarily give up its power to the executive branch.”
Perhaps Khanna’s rising voice isn’t most important back in Washington, but at home in his district. There, he faces a Silicon Valley that must decide whether to support or defy Musk, one of its own, as his creation of the online banking outlet PayPal helped launch the businessman toward stratospheric wealth.
“I do think the soul of Silicon Valley is at stake,” Khanna said. “Are we going to embrace techno-libertarianism, which rejects the Constitution, the rule of law and the role of government? Or are we going to be a valley that stands up for the Constitution….and also talks about working with government to re-industrialize America?”
Some of the primal and crude responses that Khanna has been eliciting are an invitation of sorts to descend the discourse into our modern-day political gutter, one that seems to be getting uglier by the day. But Khanna, at least so far, is not taking the bait. He is sticking to civility, using it almost as a weapon. It is a voice, he hopes, that more and more Americans will hunger to hear.
Now that defending the indispensable role of Congress has become a daily activity for Khanna and his peers, “I think the response needs to be tough and strong, but that says there’s a better way of having a conversation in America,” he said. “We want to be part of uplifting our public debate. And I think the pendulum will swing back to that in this country. At least that’s my hope.”
This story was originally published February 12, 2025 at 5:00 AM with the headline "A Californian has gotten under the Trump team’s skin. Civility is a powerful weapon | Opinion ."
