Is Democrat Ro Khanna Preparing to Run for the U.S. Presidency in 2028

Ro Khanna, whose grandfather was imprisoned for seeking India’s independence, seeks to channel Americans anger over President Trump’s policies

March 30, 2025

“In America, our (elected) leaders shouldn’t hide from the people they represent..Meetings with constituents and voters are a core part of our democracy,” Ro Khanna wrote in an MSNBC opinion piece this week.

Many Republican lawmakers are not holding town halls, public gatherings of voters, apparently to avoid being booed and face protests from voters angry over President Donald Trump’s policies.

This month, Khanna, a Democrat lawmaker from California, held town halls in three congressional districts in the state held by Republicans. Each of the meetings, whose theme was “Benefits Over Billionaires”, attracted around 1,000 people. The number of people at these meetings “who came to me in tears, crying, just seeking to be hugged and listened to — I was shocked,” Khanna told the New York Times.

Ro Khanna “has been busy in the early months of 2025 trying out ways to make himself a counterweight to the Trump administration,” the Times noted. Khanna was elected to Congress from the heart of Silicon Valley where several thousand Indians are employed.

Through his public meetings, Khanna is pursuing two goals: mobilize voters in electoral districts where the Democrats have a chance of unseating Republican lawmakers and seeking to block President Donald Trump’s cuts in medical and education funding.

In posts on X/Twitter, Khanna states, “By 2032, America’s medical spending is set to reach $7.7 trillion. We are spending the most on healthcare than any other nation in the world, yet our citizens are still struggling to afford adequate care. This is unacceptable in America…Prescription drugs already cost Americans an average of almost three times more than other countries.,,middlemen skimming billions through spread pricing, clawbacks, and opaque rebate schemes.”

Khanna, 48 years old, is vice chair of the Democratic Progressive Caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is serving his fifth two-year term in the house.

A strong supporter of the labor movement, Khanna is one of a few members of Congress to refuse contributions from political action committees and lobbyists, according to his website. To pay for his own higher education, Khanna took out over $100,000 in student loans and has called for the government to forgive student loan debt.

Khanna seeks a U.S. foreign policy of military restraint and diplomatic engagement. Instead of spending trillions on wars overseas, Khanna believes the U.S. should invest in healthcare for all, affordable childcare and free public college and vocational school.

(Photo: Ro Khanna with wife Ritu.)

Khanna interest in politics was inspired by his maternal grandfather Amarnath Vidyalankar, who was active in the movement led by Mahatma Gandhi to secure India’s independence from British rule. Vidyalankar spent more than five years in prisons for seeking India’s independence and promoting human rights. After India gained independence in 1947, Vidyalankar was elected thrice to the Indian parliament and also served as a minister in the state of Punjab.

“He was very calm, very elegant, very disciplined,” Khanna, the son of Vidyalankar’s daughter, Jyotsna, told the East Bay Times. “He was not bitter at all. I think he viewed himself as having the chance to shape history.”

Rohit (Ro) Khanna was born in Philadelphia, in a middle-class family. His parents immigrated to the United States in the 1970s from India. His father, a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, is a chemical engineer and his mother is a school teacher.

Prior to being elected to Congress, Khanna taught economics at Stanford University and served as deputy assistant secretary of commerce in the Obama administration. He received a law degree from Yale University and graduated with a B.A. in Economics from the University of Chicago. Khanna and his wife Ritu have two young children.

Last month, Khanna posted on X/Twitter that both his and Vice President J.D. Vance’s children share an Indian heritage. Vance's wife, Usha, is the daughter of Indian immigrants.

Khanna mentioned this in the context of Marko Elez’s post against Indians. Khanna asked Vance, “Are you going to tell him (Elez) to apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire? Just asking for the sake of both of our kids.”

“Normalize Indian hate,” Marko Elez posted on X/Twitter last September, in reference to the prevalence of people from India in Silicon Valley, The Wall Street Journal reported in February. This statement was made, the Journal reported, on “a deleted social-media account that advocated racism and eugenics.”

“99% of Indian H1Bs will be replaced by slightly smarter LLMs, they’re going back don’t worry guys,” Elez posted in December, referring to large language models such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the Journal reported.

Elez, according to a report in WIRED, is a 25-year-old who had access to government payment systems “that in their totality amount to more than a fifth of the US economy.” He was working for the new U.S. Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), set up by President Donald Trump, which is run by billionaire Elon Musk. Elez graduated with a degree in computer science from Rutgers University, New Jersey, in 2021. Earlier, he worked at SpaceX, Musk’s space company, and then at X, Musk’s social media company.

Vice President J.D. Vance and his wife Usha Vance also attended Yale Law School. Khanna is planning to hold townhalls at Yale as well in Ohio, Vance’s home state. “I plan to travel to (Republican) districts in Pennsylvania, Nebraska, Nevada and Ohio in the upcoming months,” Khanna stated on MSNBC.

Khanna notes that while voters are “upset with their own Republican members of Congress, they were also fed up with the Democrats in Washington who are failing to fight back against the cuts that will put their lives in danger.”

When asked by the New York Times whether his town halls are a platform for launching his own Presidential candidate for 2028, Khanna said, “Ambition is a good thing if it’s used towards good ends…I’m of Hindu faith. And one of the great teachings of the Gita is if you do your duty without worrying about the reward, you’re more likely to get rewards.”