Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) defended New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani after he delivered a controversial address on the eve of the United States’s 250th Independence Day.
Mamdani has emerged as the Democratic Party’s most central figure since three socialist candidates he endorsed won congressional races in New York last month. A speech the mayor delivered on Friday morning drew broad backlash from conservative critics who claimed he denigrated the U.S. and presented a historically inaccurate version of the nation’s past.
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“I’m glad he did it, it’s showing that the same country that produced Donald Trump produced Zohran Mamdani,” Khanna said in an interview Saturday. “And Zohran, as you know, is a student of history, so it was significant that he did that with George Washington’s desk with New York being the first capital of this country – people often don’t remember that, Zohran knows that.”
Mamdani delivered the address from City Hall’s Governor’s Room while sitting behind a desk once owned by President George Washington. The 15-minute speech cast a gloomy vision of the U.S. one day before the America 250 celebration, as the mayor elected to frame “American exceptionalism” through a socialist lens in which “monopolies dominate every industry” and “oligarchs buy elections.”
“He was giving a powerful message of linking back to our founding ideals,” Khanna said. “That the Declaration says that we have equality for every person and that this is a nation, really, that is based on that creed and has welcomed immigrants, and he’s claiming that vision as true patriotism.”
The de facto figurehead of the Democratic Party, Mamdani delivered the speech on Friday morning to offer a contrast with the one delivered by President Donald Trump that evening at Mount Rushmore in South Dakota.
In the address, Trump went back to what has become a rallying cry for Republicans in recent weeks: referring to the aforementioned socialist candidates as “communists.”
“A generation after we fought and won the Cold War against the menace of communism, there is now a resurgence of the communist menace in our land,” Trump said. “You can be a communist, or you can be a patriot. But you cannot be both.”
Mamdani’s speech framed American politics through the oppressor-versus-oppressed framework associated with socialist and Marxist thought, and he drew a contrast between immigrants and native-born Americans.
“We see masked agents terrorizing our streets, eating food cooked by undocumented neighbors before spiriting them away in unmarked vans,” Mamdani said. “We see a nation whose immense wealth has been built by those with calloused, dirt-streaked hands, those who toil on factory floors and chisel into stone, and we see a nation that has allowed so much of that wealth to be held instead in the soft hands of a precious few.”
Khanna, one of the more progressive Democrats on Capitol Hill, has opted to defend Mamdani’s speech as more centrist lawmakers have distanced themselves from Mamdani’s socialism.
Gov. Josh Shapiro (D-PA) said Sunday, “I have profound differences from that particular candidate based on the citations that you read there,” when asked about Darializa Avila Chevalier, one of the socialists who won a congressional race in New York City last month.
