Congressman Ro Khanna is on a one-man mission to define Vice President Vance ahead of the 2028 election, saying he is a servant of the very tech industry that he often derides. The Silicon Valley lawmaker says the new administration is embracing the expansionism of President Polk, the protectionism of President McKinley, and the culture wars of Mao Zedong. 

Mr. Khanna is just one of many Democrats going on the road in the next two weeks while Congress is on its first lengthy recess of the Trump 2.0 era. The longtime supporter of Senator Sanders is likely trying to carve out his own lane ahead of a White House run for himself, possibly against Mr. Vance, in 2028. Mr. Khanna took his message to Mr. Vance’s native Ohio on Monday to deride the “new Gilded Age” that could come about as a result of President Trump’s policies. 

Mr. Khanna specifically mentioned tech billionaire Peter Thiel, a major donor to Mr. Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign after working with him in Silicon Valley. He is one of the new “economic royalists” embracing Mr. Vance, Mr. Khanna argues. 

“I’ve known him for many years — mentor and benefactor of Vice President Vance and an early collaborator with the ‘PayPal Mafia,’ with Elon Musk,” Mr. Khanna said during his speech to the City Club of Cleveland. He likened Mr. Musk to a former treasury secretary, Andrew Mellon. 

“He convinced President Hoover to slash government, seeing it as an obstacle to the ambition of great, enterprising men,” Mr. Khanna declared. “Mellon and Thiel see democracy itself as a burden, believe workers should follow the dictates of a visionary elite, [and] that government should make room for an aristocracy of talent that can lead the way.”

“Vance and Musk want to completely get government out of the way to usher in a new Gilded Age, so that corporate elites — particularly tech titans — can take the wheel,” he added. 

Mr. Khanna argues that the political program being pushed by Messrs. Vance, Thiel, and Musk is no different than the one pushed by the monopolists of the 19th century or the executives who outsourced jobs in the latter part of the 20th century. 

“Trump and JD Vance railed against this broken system, and people heard them. They were angry. They spoke about the hole in the hull of our economic ship,” he said. “But they offer no hopeful vision, no real solutions for the future.”

“No matter how much you wanna conquer Greenland or Panama, or build a high fortress with tariffs, you simply can’t have James Polk’s expansionism and William McKinley’s protectionism and expect to win in the 21st century,” he added. 

The Silicon Valley congressman, who is almost certainly testing out his presidential campaign message for 2028, says the Trump administration cannot be trusted by the business community or the employees who rely on certainty for their own retirements. 

“This has been the most chaotic, the most reckless, the most self-inflicted damage that any modern administration has done on the economy in modern history. That’s a fact,” Mr. Khanna declared. “Indiscriminate tariffs didn’t build Silicon Valley … and they didn’t build the Research Triangle, and they didn’t build University Circle here in Cleveland.”

Mr. Khanna went so far as to compare Mr. Vance’s criticisms of American universities to that of Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. On Monday, Harvard University announced that it would not comply with the Trump-Vance administration’s demands that the school enact a number of reforms in line with the president’s policy priorities. 

“They tried this — calling universities ‘the enemy’ in China in the Cultural Revolution, in purging intellectuals. And you know what happened? China stagnated for a decade,” Mr. Khanna said of the federal government’s new pressure on universities. 

Mr. Khanna and other Democrats are going on the road over the course of the next two weeks in a Tea Party-style national tour to rally a disaffected Democratic Party base. Over the weekend, Mr. Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez rallied with thousands of people at Los Angeles and at Salt Lake City.