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Good Sunday morning. Adam Wren here. If President Donald Trump has any hard feelings over Dave Portnoy’s increasing criticisms of his presidency, they weren’t evident as the two embraced at the UFC fight in Miami last night. Drop me a line:awren@politico.com.
Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is set to hit VP JD Vance on domestic policy. | Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
FIRST IN PLAYBOOK: Democrats have a JD Vance problem, and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) is on it.
Tomorrow at the City Club of Cleveland in Ohio — Vance’s home state — the Silicon Valley representative will frame Vance and Trump as “stubbornly cling[ing] to 19th-century dogma in a 21st-century world.” Khanna will also hit the president and vice president for “indiscriminate tariffs” in the beating heart of the Rust Belt.
The speech, shared exclusively with Playbook, amounts to one of the most intellectually rigorous framings of the Trump 2.0 era so far. But it’s also part of a monthslong effort by Khanna to get under Vance’s skin and fashion himself as a foil.
Khanna will accuse Vance of “making his own story — that of having it rough as a kid but getting a credential at Yale — less likely for those growing up here today,” according to the prepared remarks. “Vance may be young, but his ideas are old as they come.”
Khanna clearly sees Vance as the Republican Party’s future, and is seeking to establish himself as a counterweight. On Tuesday, he’s heading to Vance’s alma mater, Yale Law School, where he is expected to take on the topic of the courts, rule of law and Vance’s so-called “attack on free speech,” according to a person familiar.
Vancehas already stirred 2028 talk in interviews — Trump will, of course, be constitutionally barred from election to a third term — and last month, became the first sitting vice president to serve as the Republican National Committee’s finance chair, a perch which will allow him to expand his national fundraising network. He’s sought to carve a space for himself as something of Trump’s attack dog on foreign policy, and his biggest flashpoints in office have centered on foreign policy, including his fiery February speech at the Munich Security Conference, in which he railed against the EU, and his remarkable Oval Office meeting with Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
But in Cleveland tomorrow, Khanna is set to hit Vance on domestic policy.
Khanna — who grew up in the Rust Belt as a son of Pennsylvania, and is meeting with laid off Ohio workers as you read this — will acknowledge that Trump and Vance campaigned against a system that Khanna agrees is “broken.” “They spoke about the hole in the hull of our economic ship,” he’ll say, according to prepared remarks. “But they offer no hopeful vision for the future.”
Here’s a look at some of the lines Khanna is expected to deliver (you can read the full prepared remarks here):
“Vance wants to slash Medicaid, veterans’ benefits, food stamps, and education to pay for even more giveaways. He’s ripping away the means of living — a final insult — from the very factory towns where good jobs were already shipped overseas.”
Vance and Trump “now want government completely out of the way to usher in a New Gilded Age so that corporate elites, particularly the tech titans, can take the wheel. But I say, it is time to turn the tables. It is time to put Silicon Valley in the service of America — not America in the service of Silicon Valley.” (It’s a line that hits differently after Trump offered a tariff carveout on certain Chinese-manufactured electronics, such as those sold by Apple.)
Vance and Trump are steering the nation to a repeat of the Great Depression, Khanna will warn, which “happened because Andrew Mellon — the [Elon] Musk of his generation — was Treasury secretary and convinced President [Herbert] Hoover to slash government, seeing it as an obstacle to the ambitions of enterprising men.”
Khanna, who has long talked about a “new economic patriotism,” will call for “fusing Silicon Valley’s ingenuity with Ohio’s industrial might. Integrating AI and advanced robotics into manufacturing will drive productivity. Let’s have silicon and steel, software and hardware, chips and ships — bridging our coasts and our heartland to launch a new American economic era.”
If Democrats’ approach to the Trump era has largely been scattershot, Khanna’s speech is a kind of ur text that lays out a more cohesive rebuttal. Billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel, who hired Vance at one of his firms years ago, and Khanna will call Vance’s “mentor and benefactor,” also catches some strays. Khanna will say that Thiel subscribes to what amounts to “techno-libertarianism today — the same ideology [President Franklin] Roosevelt crushed in his battle against the economic royalists.”
Vance is, for now, ignoring Khanna. Asked for a response, Vance’s spokesperson referred Playbook to an Ohio GOP spokesperson, who told us that Khanna is a “far-left socialist from one of the wealthiest and wokest congressional districts in America.” The “speech is nothing but another desperate plea for attention from another elitist politician wholly out-of-touch with Middle Class voters like those in Ohio,” they continued, adding that Khanna “should’ve stayed in California.”
In February, Khanna needled Vance for defending a DOGE staffer over racist social media posts, and asked Vance whether he would ask the staffer to “apologize for saying ‘Normalize Indian hate’ before this rehire … for the sake of both of our kids?” (Both Khanna and Vance’s wife, Usha, are of Indian descent.) That drew a strong rebuke from Vance, who likened Khanna to “whiny children.”
The speech comes as Khanna, known inside the Beltway as particularly ambitious even by Washington standards, is frequently mentioned as a possible 2028 candidate himself.
But it is also the strongest acknowledgement yet from Democrats that Vance is Trump’s likely heir apparent, and that the Democratic Party must tackle him as a serious obstacle — not the “weird” lightweight they once disparaged him as — if they are to mount a credible comeback in 2026 and beyond.
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SUNDAY BEST …
— Commerce SecretaryHoward Lutnick says tariff-exempted electronics like smartphones will become subject to targeted tariffs at a later date, on ABC’s “This Week”: “We need to have these things made in America. We can’t be reliant on Southeast Asia for all of the things that operate for us. So what [Trump]'s doing is he’s saying they’re exempt from the reciprocal tariffs, but they're included in the semiconductor tariffs, which are coming in probably a month or two. … So this is not like a permanent sort of exemption.”
— White House trade adviserPeter Navarro on how Trump’s tariff pause has unfolded, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “This is unfolding exactly like we thought it would in a dominant scenario. … The world cheats us. They've been cheating us for decades. They cheat us with tariffs, higher tariffs, but more importantly, they cheat us with the so-called non-tariff barriers. … So, we have a strategy here where the president says we're going to charge them what they charge us.”
— Navarro on Musk calling him “dumber than a sack of bricks”: “I’ve been called worse. Everything's fine with Elon.”
— Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins in cuts to the Emergency Food Assistance Program, on “Fox News Sunday”: “The Democrats are struggling right now for a unifying message. They think this could be it, even though it's completely false. They've made up this narrative. It is not true in reality. And never — not once — will a child go hungry in this country under any sort of USDA program or with President Trump in control and in power.“
— Sen. Cory Booker (D-N.J.) on whether Kamala Harris should run for president in 2028, on NBC’s “Meet the Press”: “You know, I know Vice President Harris. I don't think she's concerning herself with 2028. … Honestly, I don't care about 2028. I care about stopping the hurting of American people right now. And Democrats, in general, we should not be concerned about the party's future; we should be concerned about people's present, and that's where I'm focused.”
TOP-EDS:A roundup of the week’s must-read opinion pieces.
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Guards transfer deportees from the U.S to the Terrorism Confinement Center in Tecoluca, El Salvador, Monday, March 31, 2025. | El Salvador presidential press office via AP)
9 THINGS FOR YOUR RADAR
1. IMMIGRATION FILES: Behind closed doors, White House officials have repeatedly cited an aspirational goal for the number of deportations they hope to carry out this year: 1 million, WaPo’s Maria Sacchetti and Jacob Bogage report. Analysts suggest that target is “unrealistic, if not impossible,” but White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller “has been strategizing with officials from the Department of Homeland Security and other federal agencies on an almost daily basis to meet that goal.”
How to do it: “One strategy to quickly increase numbers, officials have said, is to find ways to deport some of the 1.4 million immigrants who have final deportation orders but cannot be deported because their home countries won’t take them back. The administration is negotiating with as many as 30 countries to take deportees who are not their citizens, two officials said. In a recent court filing, the administration said it hopes to send ‘thousands’ of immigrants to these destinations, known as third countries.”
Update on Abrego Garcia … The administration confirmed in a court filing yesterday that Kilmar Abrego Garcia is alive but remains in a mega-prison in El Salvador after immigration officers admitted to mistakenly deporting the Maryland man in March.
In a two-page statement submitted just 10 minutes before Saturday’s court-ordered deadline, Michael Kozak, a top State Department official, gave no information about what U.S. officials have done or planned to do to facilitate Abrego Garcia’s return, which has been ordered by a federal judge, POLITICO’s Kyle Cheney and Josh Gerstein report. Abrego Garcia is “detained pursuant to the sovereign, domestic authority of El Salvador,” Kozak wrote — a statement that, as Kyle and Josh write, is “unlikely to de-escalate a brewing showdown between the administration” and federal judiciary. Another hearing on the case is set for Tuesday afternoon.
2. CALIFORNIA DREAMIN’: Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) headlined a massive rally in Los Angeles yesterday, attracting an estimated 36,000 attendees, according to organizers — his largest rally ever.
Sanders, donning an L.A. Dodgers cap, told the crowd that the U.S. is in a moment of “extraordinary danger,” and warned that Trump is moving the country “rapidly toward an authoritarian form of society,” L.A. Times’ Laura Nelson reports.
The big swing through California comes as progressives in the state face new challenges not just from conservatives, but centrists “who cast the left as contributing to problems around homelessness and crime,” POLITICO’s Melanie Mason reports. “And Democrats in California now find themselves merely trying to hold onto gains they have made amid major threats to federal funding from President Donald Trump, an escalation of deportations and aggressive rhetoric on crime.”
3. THE STEALTH TRADE WAR: Even before Trump’s volley of tariffs set off a tit-for-tat trade war, Beijing was employing “an array of bureaucratic blocks and tricky third-party sales deals to quietly curtail agriculture and energy exports from the U.S.,” POLITICO’s Phelim Kine, Ben Lefebvre and Marcia Brown report. These tactics, refined over years, specifically target exports from deep-red states like Iowa and Nebraska, and are “immune to possible workarounds for tariff barriers.”
Beyond exports like soybeans and chicken, a “potentially bigger problem is Beijing’s decision to restrict its exports of critical minerals to the United States. That move hits makers of U.S. clean energy and petrochemicals, making it more difficult to produce everything from electric vehicle car batteries to the plastic used for picnic cutlery.”
On tariffs overall: 42% said they favor the new U.S. tariffs on imported goods, while 58% oppose.
On tariffs and prices: 75% said the tariffs will increase prices in the short term. In the long term, 48% said they’ll raise prices, 30% said they’ll decrease prices, and 22% said there was no impact or they were unsure.
On tariffs and the economy: Nearly two-thirds think the new tariffs will make the economy worse in the short term. But on a broader time horizon, there’s more disagreement: 42% said tariffs will make the economy worse in the long term, 34% said they’ll make it better and 23% said there was no impact or they were unsure.
Trump’s goals vs. approach: Americans are nearly equally divided on whether they support Trump’s trade goals, with 51% liking his goals and 49% disliking them. But on how he’s pursuing those goals, it’s more lopsided: 37% said they like his approach and 63% dislike it.
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5. LET’S GET DOWN TO BUSINESS: Amid the Trump tariff tumult, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has declared that the U.S. economy needs a “detox.” But as POLITICO’s Victoria Guida writes this morning in her new Capital Letter column, Bessent’s ‘detox’ doesn’t have much to do with trade. It’s about reducing government spending, and — despite all the noise around Elon Musk’s DOGE — that project hasn’t really started.”
What Bessent wants: “When I talk to people who know Bessent — I spoke with nearly a dozen, mostly on Wall Street — they say getting the federal debt under control is an animating issue for the former hedge fund manager. … From parsing his remarks and talking to people who know him, I gather the plan goes something like this: you cut spending through Congress — meaningfully, which will help cool inflation, but gradually so as not to snuff out growth. You use tax cuts and deregulation to help offset the drag on the economy. And you use tariffs to raise revenue and diversify employment opportunities in the private sector that can be taken by people leaving government jobs.”
But but but: “A lot of things would have to go right to pull that off,” Victoria writes. Still: The spending conversation is “about to get louder. And Bessent figures to play a leading role.”
6. BACK TO SCHOOL: Democrats’ decadeslong advantage on education disappeared during the pandemic, as voters soured on the party amid Covid school shutdowns. But the party sees a new opening in the form of a brewing backlash to Trump’s funding-slashing education agenda, as POLITICO’s Juan Perez Jr. and Mackenzie Wilkes report. The next step: agreeing on a strategy.
“Democrats are deploying multiple strategies they hope will get voters to listen, but some party stalwarts like [former Chicago Mayor Rahm] Emanuel want Democrats to present a muscular alternative to Trump that emphasizes traditional learning and breaks with pandemic-era positions,” Juan and Mackenzie write.
Advice from Rep. Jahana Hayes (D-Conn.): “Don’t make it about budgets and billionaires. Make it about the one position in the one school that affects this one family.”
Meanwhile, Title IX remains in the spotlight in Maine after a federal judge ordered the White House to unfreeze more than $1.8 million in school nutrition funding in its fight over transgender athletes, per the AP. USDA had blocked the funds, citing Maine’s policy that allows transgender girls to compete on girls’ athletic teams.
7. MIDDLE EAST LATEST: During indirect talks yesterday with the U.S, Iranian officials floated the idea of limiting nuclear powers in exchange for sanction relief, WSJ’s Benoit Faucon, Michael Gordon and Laurence Norman report. The meetings in Muscat, Oman — conducted as Iranian and U.S. envoys negotiated “from separate rooms at a highly secured palatial compound, with Oman’s foreign minister working as an intermediary” — were the “highest-level talks between the U.S. and Iran in years, and both sides issued relatively positive statements afterward.” The next round of talks is scheduled for Saturday, and will reportedly “include discussion on a timeline for negotiations and potentially a general framework for a new nuclear accord.”
8. SOUTH OF THE BORDER: It’s an emerging front in the ongoing tensions between the U.S. and Mexico: water. The two nations are in a standoff over water use between the Rio Grande and the Colorado River, WSJ’s Eric Niiler and José de Córdoba report. Years of drought and increased irrigation mean that, by treaty, Mexico now owes the U.S. “more than 1.2 million acre-feet of water” — and Trump has threatened the country with further tariffs if it doesn't comply.
But that may be easier said than done: Experts say the decades-old treaty did not factor in the impacts of climate change, and “believe only a hurricane that dumps rain on northern Mexico and fills the two reservoirs that feed the Rio Grande will allow Mexico to meet its treaty obligation by an October deadline, which is the end of a five-year water delivery schedule.”
9. THE VALLEY AND THE DIVIDE: “Some top tech leaders have embraced Trump. That’s created a political divide in Silicon Valley,” by AP’s Nicholas Riccardi: “[A]s some in the upper echelons of Silicon Valley began shifting to the right politically, many of the tech industry’s everyday workers have remained liberal — but also increasingly nervous and disillusioned. … Even before some prominent tech leaders shifted toward Trump, there was mounting discontent among some in the industry over its direction.”
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MEDIA MOVE — Gabriella Borter will be D.C. political breaking news editor at Bloomberg News. She previously was a congressional reporter at Reuters.
HAPPY BIRTHDAY: Rep. Jim Costa (D-Calif.) … Celinda Lake … Doug Coutts … Brian Bartlett … Taylor Gross of the Herald Group … POLITICO’s Jack Smith, Amy Carlile, Colleen Luccioli, Matthew Grabis, Helen Haile and Jeffrey Tomich … CNN’s Nathaniel Meyersohn … Will Davis of the OECD Washington Center … Edelman’s Sujata Mitra … Velocity Partners’s Kate Meissner … Maggie Feldman-Piltch … C-SPAN’s Jeremy Art … Alex Yost … John Barsa … Engage’s Nick Schaper … Sally Larson … Rachel McCleery … Bloomberg’s Jeannie Baumann … AP’s Ayanna Alexander … Julia Brunner … Jonah Cunningham … WaPo’s Lateshia Beachum … Dean Hingson … Rebecca Pearcey … SKDK’s Mia Motley … Emily Loeb … Deena Tauster of Rep. Andrew Garbarino’s (R-N.Y.) office … former Reps. Marie Newman (D-Ill.), Susan Davis (D-Calif.) and Ted Yoho (R-Fla.) (7-0) … David Carmen of the Carmen Group … Meredith Stasa … former Sens. Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.) (92) and Bob Casey (D-Pa.) … Steve Ayscue … Kevin Warsh … American Conservation Coalition’s Will Galloway … Morning Consult’s Jeff Cartwright … Amy Goodman … Kasey O’Brien of Middle Seat … Allie Cameron of Rep. Mike Ezell’s (R-Miss.) office … Hannah Eddins of Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-Ala.) office
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