In a speech at Yale Law School, Khanna and Vance’s alma mater, Khanna said the vice president’s affiliation with the institution is a “stain on the degree of every Yale graduate.”
NEW HAVEN, Conn. — Rep. Ro Khanna, D-Calif., unleashed an early 2028 attack on Vice President JD Vance here Tuesday, attempting to frame President Donald Trump’s heir apparent as a threat to the Constitution while comparing him to Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.
“Vance,” Khanna said in a speech at Yale Law School, “has not only declared war on the courts, but on the universities. And it is no accident. As Stephen Kotkin observed in his study of Stalin, strongmen do not fear recessions or even failed wars as much as they fear the university.”
Khanna’s remarks called back to Vance’s history of criticizing what he has described as inexcusably liberal policies and teachings in higher education. The speech came a day after the federal government froze more than $2 billion in grants to Harvard University, which has rejected demands the Trump administration has issued to address antisemitism on campus.
For Khanna, the appearance at the school where both he and Vance earned law degrees also marked an escalation in his effort to stake out a place for himself in the already-developing Democratic presidential field. He sees an opportunity to establish himself as his party’s best foil for Vance, who is well positioned to run as Trump’s successor. So at a time when much of the progressive left’s attention is on the term-limited Trump and his billionaire adviser, Elon Musk, Khanna is trying to build up Vance as the ultimate Republican villain — and to tear him down.
“Yawn,” a top political adviser to Vance said when asked about how Khanna has made attacks on the vice president central to his pitch.
Khanna addressed a room of about 75 law students and professors over a lunch of catered sandwiches. (Khanna abstained, saving his appetite for a late-afternoon trip to Pepe’s, a famous New Haven pizzeria.) There was a tension around his visit befitting the Trump administration’s attitude toward universities.
Campus officials initially objected to the presence of media, insisting the speech be off the record before Khanna pushed them to relent. And the conservative Yale Federalist Society canceled a prearranged meeting with Khanna after leaders learned his day at Yale would be filled with Vance-bashing.
The cancellation freed up time for a more leisurely meal at Pepe’s, where he sampled from a tomato pie, a white clam pizza and a house special loaded with meats and vegetables. Two photos of former President Bill Clinton visiting the pizzeria hung above him.
Jake McDonald, the Yale Federalist Society’s president, wrote in an email to NBC News that it had “become clear … that his visit today to the law school is nothing more than a publicity stunt designed to attack the Vice President — and that his meeting with us would be used to further that end.”
Vance, McDonald added, is an alumnus of the Yale Federalist Society, “and we will not let the organization be weaponized by Rep. Khanna as a venue to make partisan headlines.”
In his speech Tuesday, Khanna talked of a “great anger” gripping the public. He also warned of a push “to dismantle” the checks and balances among the branches of government.
“At the head of this gathering storm stands Vice President Vance, calling on the president of the United States to defy the Supreme Court, and casting universities like Yale … as the enemy,” Khanna said.
Vance has not called on Trump to defy the Supreme Court. In a February post on social media, he criticized the idea of federal judges intervening to “control the executive’s legitimate power” at a time when courts were blocking Trump from carrying out parts of his cost-cutting agenda. Many saw the post as a signal that Trump could choose to ignore unfavorable court rulings.
“Now, Vance says the president, elected by the people, should tell the court what the Constitution means, and if the court disagrees, let them try to enforce their ruling — that the president, as a co-equal, may simply ignore the court’s judgment of the law,” Khanna said.
Khanna also noted Vance’s response to what the Justice Department has characterized as a man’s mistaken deportation to El Salvador. Vance falsely referred to the man as a “convicted MS-13 gang member” and, later, as “an illegal immigrant with no right to be in our country,” despite a 2019 protection order against his removal from the United States.
“When Americans asked for due process, he answered not with reason, but with feigned rage — accusing us of sympathy for a gang member,” Khanna said of Vance.
“Let me say this as clearly as I can: JD Vance, your cold indifference to the lives of vulnerable immigrants betrays every principle that this law school was built to uphold,” he added. “Your affiliation with this law school is now a stain on the degree of every Yale graduate.”
In an interview afterward, Khanna brushed off questions about his White House ambitions, stressing a need for all Democrats to more forcefully push back on Trump and Vance.
Specifically, Khanna mentioned the recent marathon speech by Sen. Cory Booker, D-N.J.; the huge crowds at rallies headlined by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y.; and increasingly tough talk on Trump from Maine’s Democratic governor, Janet Mills.
“Those Democrats who want to help be new voices for our party need to speak out forcefully and clearly, like Cory Booker did, like the Maine governor did, like Bernie and AOC are doing,” he said.
Khanna is a leading progressive voice in Congress — a “pro-business, pro-growth progressive,” in his words — but is not well known outside Washington or his Silicon Valley-based district. His travels this week continued his long-running push to change that. His latest anti-Vance offensive kicked off Monday in Ohio, the vice president’s home state, with a speech at the City Club of Cleveland.
There, Khanna lumped Vance in with Trump and Musk while focusing on a pitch for “economic patriotism.” In place of Stalin, he compared Vance to China’s Mao Zedong.
“Ro Khanna is a far-left socialist from one of the wealthiest and wokest congressional districts in America,” Ohio Republican Party Chairman Alex Triantafilou said in response to Khanna’s visit to his state. “His remarks remind Americans that California extremist liberals like Ro Khanna are responsible for enabling open borders, mass illegal immigration, and the out-of-control government spending of the Biden regime. He should’ve stayed in California.”
Khanna sees himself as something of a generational peer to Vance. Khanna, at 48, is eight years Vance’s senior. And Vance has risen further. But both see themselves among a younger wave of leadership ready to take over a political system that has been dominated by septuagenarians and octogenarians like Trump and former President Joe Biden.
“In times of crisis, this nation has often cast aside the old guard and turned to a new generation for new paths,” Khanna said Tuesday.
Both Khanna and Vance also are the fathers of Indian American children — a detail Khanna sought to score political points with in February when picking a fight on social media with Vance. Vance had come to the defense of a federal employee who had resigned over making racist remarks online.
Drawing on their common ground, Khanna chided Vance on X, asking “for the sake of both of our kids” if he would demand the employee apologize for an offensive post about Indian people. Vance likened Khanna to a “whiny” child and accused him of “emotional blackmail.”
In the interview, Khanna said he was spurred to take on Vance more directly after he was bothered by what he saw as a “callousness” emerging in someone he got to know when both joined a bus tour of venture capitalists through Midwest cities in 2018. The tour predated Vance’s political career.
“I have criticized Vance, but I also thought, OK, to get your message heard these days, you can’t just give a positive speech,” Khanna said. “You have to, you have to provide some contrast. … So to the extent that I want to get my message out, I thought, OK, well, who is the person who was really the opposite of what I believe?”
