A progressive Democrat with a history of calling out members of his own party is on the warpath again.
Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) served as a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign in 2020 and was a surrogate for Joe Biden in 2024. He now says that the Democratic Party needs to be ‘honest’ with the American people.
Speaking to ABC This Week host Jonathan Karl on Sunday, Khanna admitted that Biden shouldn’t have run for reelection and said ‘there’s a sense that people want honesty’ now.
‘They want to restore a sense of public service,’ he said. ‘In light of what has come out, it’s painfully obvious President Biden should not have run.’
‘Let me tell you the lesson I learned,’ Khanna went on. We played too much deference to party leaders, to the old guard, to the advisers.’
Pointing to his own progressive bonafides, Khanna stated that members of his party need ‘to be more independent and push back.’
‘I’m known to be independent. I co-chaired Bernie Sanders‘s campaign, and I’m going to be more independent going forward, calling for primary challenges when they’re appropriate, making sure we don’t have Super PACs in Democratic primaries. But that was the lesson that I learned.’
Congressman Ro Khanna (D-CA) served as a co-chair of the Bernie Sanders Presidential campaign in 2020.
President Joe Biden speaks at the International African American Museum in Charleston, S.C., Jan. 19, 2025
Karl pressed Khanna on if he believes there was a true ‘cover-up’ of former president Biden’s mental state during his time in the White House, as argued by Jake Tapper and Alex Thompso’s new book ‘Original Sin: President Biden’s Decline, Its Cover-Up, and His Disastrous Choice to Run Again’, out later this week.
Khanna replied that he does not ‘think it was a cover-up,’ but wishes advisors for the then-president had been more honest with members of the party about his cognitive decline.
‘I don’t know,’ he conceded. ‘I didn’t do the reporting, but I do think that the advisers and people close… to Joe Biden owe an explanation.’
‘I mean, they were on Zoom calls – they were telling all of us that he is capable, that he is going to be able to make the race,’ he explained. ‘Obviously, that turned out not to be correct.’
The former Biden surrogate said his key takeaway in hindsight is that operatives ‘should have pushed back more.’
Former US President Joe Biden looks on as he participates in the first presidential debate of the 2024 elections
While many members of the Democrat party want to talk about the future, Khanna believes that the past can’t be ignored
Still, he says the priority moving forward is for people who were in the know to be honest now and ‘show what happened’ towards the end of Biden’s single term.
‘One possibility is that they kept accommodating, accommodating, accommodating, and didn’t realize how much they had accommodated,’ Khanna speculated. ‘But that’s a question they owe an explanation for.’
While many members of the Democrat party want to talk about the future, Khanna believes that the past can’t be ignored.
‘People realize that I said, look, ‘I made a mistake.’ Here’s the lesson I learned – I was talking about it based on the information I had, and people are fairly – but you have to own up before you can move forward,’ he concluded.
