A year ago, Hung Cao was a political ingenue without campaign experience or name recognition when he surprised a crowded GOP primary field by winning the nomination for Virginia’s 10th Congressional District.
The retired U.S. Navy captain’s reward was to face incumbent Democratic Rep. Jennifer Wexton in a congressional district President Joe Biden won by a whopping 18 percentage points in 2020. Cao, a Vietnamese refugee who spent part of his childhood in West Africa, didn’t win, but he made it closer than anyone, including Wexton, expected.
Now, Cao is set on his second run for office and has set his sights even higher. He will be running for the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate to take on incumbent Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine, who was Hillary Clinton’s choice for vice president in 2016. Before Cao’s announcement, the University of Virginia’s Center for Politics ranked Kaine in the “safe Democratic” column, noting, “Republicans would need a very outstanding challenger and a strong overall political environment” to change that forecast. Cao talked to the Washington Examiner about the state of play. The following has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Washington Examiner: You ran for Congress last time, and everyone concedes you ran a solid campaign; however, you still lost, so what made you want to run again?
Hung Cao: I’ll be honest with you. Nobody should want to run for office. It’s the worst thing in the world, and I went from a career of honor to politics. So, it’s a different animal. But you have to, right?
I’ve answered a call to duty before. I fought for this country, and I’m watching it being destroyed from the inside out, and people say, “Oh, it’s Tim Kaine’s seat.” No, no, no. This is a Virginia seat. This belongs to Virginia, and when the members are not taking into account what Virginians want, which is the basis of God, family, and country, and they replace it with just pandering to the Chinese and just bowing down to everybody, then it’s wrong. We’re destroying business in Virginia. We’re destroying everything that is American. We’re getting invaded in the southern border. And the Chinese are just really thumbing their noses at us.
Washington Examiner: When you ran the last time, you could have run for a different district, the 7th, and it would have been an easier reach. But you made a decision to run from where you’re from. Explain that decision.
Cao: It wasn’t even something I’d considered. I don’t live there. I’m not a carpetbagger, and if I ran in that [district], that just means all I want to do is be in office.
So, running for this [Senate] seat is the better of all worlds because now, I get to run in all of Virginia, which I love; Virginia Beach and Roanoke are like my second home. I’ve been stationed in Virginia Beach three times, and my in-laws used to live in Roanoke for 30 years.
Washington Examiner: What did you learn from losing last year’s congressional race?
Cao: Well, we learned that Virginia is winnable because think about it. We took a Biden-plus-19 district, and we took it down to 6 percentage points. We moved 13 percentage points. So, how do you think we’re going to do in a Biden-plus-10 state? Really, it’s half the fight.
I think that I’m going to move the Northern Virginia area much more than most people would assume, and that’s why Tim Kaine is coming after me hard. Twelve hours within the time that I announced, he’s already sent out emails to his donors, calling me all sorts of … white extremist and MAGA Republican, a threat to this nation, blah, blah, blah. But he never did that before.
Washington Examiner: Democrats will say you’re a white nationalist, you are a MAGA extremist, and you are going to take women’s reproductive rights away. Those are the three things in the current playbook that the Democrats will use to attack you. What are you ready to say to those three attacks?
Cao: First, the term MAGA Republican; that’s all they know. It’s like their buzzword, and they want to do that. But let’s break it down. Well, what’s wrong with wanting to make America great? Do you want to make China great? I mean, let’s look at why we’re here. We have to bring up America. This is the most incredible country in the world. If you don’t believe that, then you haven’t traveled enough.
I’ve been to 40 countries around the world. I grew up in West Africa, and I’ve seen poverty. I spent seven years in West Africa. I know what poverty looks like. I’ve seen people live in mud huts, and their roof is made of straw, and when it rains, water gets in there. That’s what true poverty looks like. So, I don’t understand what’s wrong with wanting to make our country amazing. So, that’s the first thing. The second thing you said was white supremacist. Well, for crying out loud, look at me. But that’s what they do. They try to label people and put them in boxes, and if it doesn’t fit, then they try to make it fit. And so they call Asians white-adjacent. Don’t forget the Democrats just called a bunch of Muslim parents basically white supremacists because they believe they don’t want the transgender thing pushed on their children. So, if it doesn’t fit their narrative, they just force it in one way or another.
I’m writing a book called Call Me American because in 2022, Jennifer Wexton kept calling me an extremist. So I said, “Look, I earned the right to be called American.” I fought and bled for this country, and you need to call me an American because calling me an extremist is basically nothing short of calling me a terrorist, the same thing you would call a jihadist or anything else. So, that was my attack back on her, saying, “I fought blood for this country, and you dishonor my service by calling me a terrorist,” and then the last thing is what we talked about, taking away reproductive rights.
I’m not going to hide being pro-life, but here’s what Tim Kaine is for. He’s for unlimited abortion up to the moment of birth. Seventy-three percent of Americans think that there should be some restrictions, at least in the third trimester.
The other thing is the decision’s already been made by the Supreme Court. The Supreme Court said that this is a state rights issue, and I’m not going to go against the Supreme Court. I’m not Joe Biden [and] going to blow off what the Supreme Court says. It belongs in the states, and that’s where it belongs.
Washington Examiner: How has your background shaped who you are today?
Cao: Let me start with my parents. My parents are amazing human beings. They both went through very, very hard things in their life. At the age of 13, my father’s dad was taken away by the communists, making him the man of the house because his older brother was conscripted by the French to run ammunition to the Laotian border and was killed in a mudslide.
To make matters worse, because the Vietcong took my grandfather away, the French saw that as, “Oh, they’re Vietcong collaborators.” So, they destroyed their house. So, my dad, for about four years, lived on a concrete pad with four poles that held up a corrugated steel roof, to support his mom and his three younger siblings.
His work ethic was so amazing, and he was able to buy them a house later on, and he was able to bribe to get my grandfather out of there. But he still managed to go to University of the Philippines. He taught himself from his younger siblings’ books. He got into University of the Philippines, and he went to Cornell for his graduate studies. And then he came back to be the deputy minister of agriculture in Vietnam.
Sort of similar thing with my mother; her dad was taken away when she was 12 in the middle of the night, and he was the magistrate of Hue City. They took him away. She never saw him again. They killed him. And so she was basically homeless, and because there are 13 siblings, she had to be farmed out to family members to take care of her. It’s really sad.
My parents met in Ithaca, New York. They went to school there when my dad went to Cornell. So, they got married over there and then came back to Vietnam and built a life, and then we left there in 1975, days before the fall of Saigon, and we came here. My father’s friends here in the United States told him it was great he had a Ph.D. in agriculture, but there’s not much you can do here unless you want to be a farmer. So, my friends told him he needed to go to West Africa to work for USAID as a contractor, and he worked for the State Department for 25 years.
I grew up in Africa, and then at 7 years old, my parents had to take me back, myself and my four sisters, so I could learn English because I spoke only French at school and Vietnamese at home. And I went to Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. I was the first class to graduate from there. I went to Naval Academy. I paid back this country for everything I got from it.
I went to Naval postgraduate school. I got my master’s in physics, and I had fellowships at Harvard, MIT. But you know what? You have to pay forward. And that’s why I served for 25 years in special operations, fighting in Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia.
Washington Examiner: Why do you want to [become an elected politician]?
Cao: I don’t think anybody should want to do this because I have a very good-paying job right now for the first time in my life, not living paycheck to paycheck. I mean, I’m a VP of a Fortune 500 company, but what’s all this money going to be worth when we have no freedom? I’ve seen this before. I’ve seen it in many, many countries. What’s money to us if we don’t have freedom, we don’t have freedom to speak what we want to say, or we don’t have the freedom to pray the way we want to pray?
That’s not what we want for our children, and so that’s why I’m doing this. This is not for glory; like I said, I’m going to take a major pay cut. I mean, for the first time, I could take my family on vacation. We have five kids. We can’t afford to vacation anywhere big.
I don’t have to do this, but this is a fight we must take, and the time is now. I don’t want to do this forever. I just want to do it for a few years and hand it off to somebody. But we have to hold the line. We have to preserve the Constitution of the United States. I have seen countries fall apart that don’t have a constitution. That’s why we have to do this.
Washington Examiner: What about critics who say, “Virginia isn’t winnable. You can’t win against Kaine”? Have you sat down with Glenn Youngkin and talked about [how] he upended a blue state in 2021?
Cao: I’m very good friends with Glenn Youngkin, Winsome Sears, and Jason Miyares, the three of them, but I’m glad you brought them up because the last three statewide elections were won by Republicans, right? So, how can you tell me it’s not winnable when the three of them got elected in? It is doable. And honestly, we don’t have the luxury of waiting to run; the time is now, and if we don’t fight for our country and if we don’t run for office or support those who do because it’s not easy, that’s not right. Unfortunately, it takes money to win, especially statewide, and it is on me to get my voice out there, get our message there and say, “Enough. Enough on trampling on our beliefs and everything we believe. Enough of destroying this country.”
