\n Elizabeth Warren, Steve Bannon, Pete Buttigieg and \u2014 at least as of a few years ago \u2014 JD Vance<\/a> have agreed on this: A short, ultra-private antitrust lawyer plotting a war on tech companies and monopolies from her new office at Columbia Law School understands what Americans are demanding out of their government.\n <\/p>\n \n When then-President Joe Biden named her chair of the Federal Trade Commission<\/a>, Lina Khan was too much for many leading Democrats. Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer declined meetings when she was chair, people familiar with the matter tell CNN. Former Vice President Kamala Harris, once she took over as the 2024 nominee, conspicuously didn\u2019t speak about Khan and avoided appearances with her on the campaign trail.\n <\/p>\n \n Now, Khan is getting constant calls from Democrats, many of them thinking about presidential runs, who are sounding out problems or workshopping potential solutions. Schumer headlined a press conference in Washington to introduce a bill that would break up meat processing companies, inspired by Khan\u2019s methods and with her input, but which a Schumer aide noted also drew on years of his own consumer advocacy.\n <\/p>\n \n Khan, 37, hasn\u2019t changed so much as the world around her has. Many Americans are furious about rising costs, affordability, technological changes and soaring profits for the rich. And President Donald Trump has used federal power in ways that were once considered off-limits in both parties.\n <\/p>\n \n If Trump could extract a \u201cgolden share\u201d for the government from US Steel<\/a>, Khan argues, if he could demand proposed mergers<\/a> and prosecutions<\/a>, and if he could invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798<\/a> as legal justification for deportations, just think what a prepared, populist progressive could do.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cSometimes there can be a political perception that the Democrats are the nerdier ones who just haven\u2019t been able to figure out how to talk to regular people,\u201d Khan told CNN in an interview at Columbia. \u201cThe way that this administration came in \u2014 with not just having a very clear agenda, but mapping that agenda onto very specific legal authorities that they were ready to hit the ground running with immediately \u2014 just showed a level of mastery over governing authorities and levers that I think, frankly, our side has a lot of catching up to do.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n What Khan has in mind for the next Democrat in the White House isn\u2019t a 1,000-page blueprint like the Heritage Foundation\u2019s Project 2025<\/a>. It\u2019s more of an overall strategy rooted in her specialty: excavating long-forgotten laws already on the books, then finding ways to apply them to 21st century companies that Khan argues are as much as monopolies like Standard Oil<\/a> ever were.\n <\/p>\n \n As Biden\u2019s transportation secretary, Buttigieg found common ground with Khan flexing authorities against airlines to get refunds<\/a> and pushing back on late flights.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cDemocrats\u2019 vision should not be about picking up the shards of what this administration destroyed and try to tape them back together,\u201d he told CNN. \u201cWe should be unsentimental about the things that don\u2019t work and bold in fashioning a new and better way of governing.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n New Jersey Sen. Cory Booker, another potential 2028 contender, also praises her ideas and invokes President Franklin D. Roosevelt.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWe need to get back to the time of FDR, when everybody from farmers to factory workers knew the Democratic Party was fighting for them, that Republicans were the elite party and we were the party of working Americans,\u201d he said.\n <\/p>\n \n In other words: Whomever emerges as the party\u2019s nominee two years from now could be running on Khan\u2019s track, with her influence, indirectly or via a top role she\u2019d have in a future potential administration.\n <\/p>\n \n Which is why Warren said part of her time these days is spent giving Khan\u2019s number to the many prospective candidates who come asking.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIf you\u2019re a leader who wants to deliver on affordability, it\u2019s a smart move to call Lina Khan,\u201d Warren said.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThe array of people that reach out, in terms of not just people who code as progressives,\u201d Khan said, \u201cis encouraging.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders had already called Khan the best FTC chair in modern history when, backstage at a rally in Queens a week before last year\u2019s New York City mayoral election, he kept asking her for ideas about what Zohran Mamdani should do in City Hall<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n The morning after he won, Mamdani named Khan a transition co-chair<\/a>, but that title sounds more honorary than the direct role she had infusing the administration with her sensibility, setting up groups of lawyers to pore through the city charter and agency codes, helping pick staff and joining nightly calls of top advisers.\n <\/p>\n \n If they can make her aggressive progressivism work in the financial capital of the world, Khan and Mamdani believe, they\u2019ll be able to make it work anywhere: in cities across the country, but also among those Democratic presidential contenders she\u2019s still trying to convince.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cShe is not satisfied with an answer that says, \u2018We have not done this before\u2019 or \u2018This is not how we do things,\u2019\u201d Mamdani told CNN.\n <\/p>\n \n His first encounter with Khan, Mamdani recalled, was at an event in the Bronx organized by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez that he attended as a new assemblyman. Khan talked about price gouging, he remembers, and what laws she was activating in ways to fight the companies involved.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn a moment where it feels like so much of this work is abstract, that we struggle to translate it to the needs and interests of working-class Americans, here is an example of how we can do exactly that \u2013 and we can do so by listening to those very people about the ways in which they\u2019re being priced out of their day-to-day lives,\u201d Mamdani said.\n <\/p>\n \n Khan officially wrapped up her role at Mamdani\u2019s 100-day mark but remains involved as an adviser. One of her biggest staff picks was recruiting Sam Levine, the new city consumer and worker protection commissioner, who remembers showing Khan where to get coffee at the FTC when she first arrived as a summer fellow. Levine was the director of the FTC\u2019s Bureau of Consumer Protection while she was chair.\n <\/p>\n \n Now, his creaky office in a nondescript building close to the New York Stock Exchange is the nerve center of making already nervous national companies see an unpleasant future. Mamdani and Levine are going after hidden hotel fees, landing settlements with fast food chains for violating workers\u2019 scheduling rights, and targeting food delivery apps by securing a settlement to give $5 million to delivery workers.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cPeople should want to go into government to solve problems. And you should go into the government, I think, with a conviction that you are going to find a way to solve them,\u201d Levine told CNN. \u201cAnd you\u2019re either going to find a tool you have, or you\u2019re going to find way to get that tool.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Just 32 years old <\/strong>when she was confirmed as the youngest FTC chair ever \u2013 going from the intern desk she used as a summer fellow in law school to the leadership suite in under five years \u2013 Khan quickly became known for sending skeptical and sometimes reluctant agency lawyers diving into the archives.\n <\/p>\n \n In 2023, the FTC challenged patents it said were improperly listed, pushing drug manufacturers to allow generic, cheaper versions of some asthma inhalers. And Khan dusted off a 1973 rule originally inspired by book-of-the-month club enforcement and tried to use it to require sellers to make it easier for people to click to cancel online subscriptions<\/a>.\n <\/p>\n \n She went after Amazon<\/a> for fees charged to businesses selling on the platform. She also moved to stop<\/a> a $24.6 billion acquisition of the Albertsons grocery chain by Kroger on the grounds that it would raise costs and reduce consumer choice. The acquisition was eventually abandoned<\/a> after a federal judge blocked the deal.\n <\/p>\n \n Today, Khan says the \u201caffordability part of the conversation\u201d inside the Democratic Party must be \u201cpaired with accountability.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cWhere delivering affordability is going to require conflict with, or taking on, entrenched powerful interests: Who\u2019s willing to do that?\u201d Khan said. \u201cAnd I think that\u2019s going to be part of both the kind of credibility question, but also: Can you be effective when it is some of the same actors who are hiking up prices?\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n These days, Khan has become so popular in a certain hyper-aware corridor of the left that she sometimes gets emails asking for signed photos to be given as wedding presents. Mark Cuban, the billionaire former \u201cShark Tank\u201d investor working on lowering prescription drug prices<\/a>, said in an email that he felt Khan should have been more aggressive against insurance companies but credited her for going \u201cafter scammers who targeted vulnerable people\u201d using images of celebrities.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cThat was a big deal that she didn\u2019t get credit for,\u201d he said in an email.\n <\/p>\n \n New Jersey Rep. Josh Gottheimer, the vice-chair of the bipartisan Problem Solvers Caucus who works with many business-minded moderates, told CNN that he worries about both the policy and political impact of moving more in Khan\u2019s direction. He\u2019s among the Democratic leaders worried about how many tech leaders turned hard against Democrats in 2024<\/a> because of what they felt was too much regulation.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cYou may fire up some portion of the base, but you\u2019re also going to alienate a lot of people who, while they want competition and success for everybody, they also believe that you can start a business and be successful in America,\u201d Gottheimer said.\n <\/p>\n \n Not every potential 2028 contender is jumping on board with Khan. During Harris\u2019 presidential campaign, Maryland Gov. Wes Moore appeared for an interview with CNBC\u2019s Andrew Ross Sorkin<\/a>, who noted there had been \u201ca lot of calls from the donor class\u201d to move away from Khan. Sorkin then asked Moore if \u201cwe are going to hear about a shift in terms of (Harris\u2019) regulatory views.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI think we will,\u201d Moore replied. \u201cI think we have to.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Asked recently for Moore\u2019s views about Khan, a spokesman for the governor replied: \u201cHe doesn\u2019t have thoughts about her one way or the other.\u201d\n <\/p>\n \n Rahm Emanuel, the former Chicago mayor and chief of staff to former President Barack Obama, said that while he agrees with many of the problems Khan is pointing to, he is less convinced by her proposed solutions.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIn every period of time in history when we\u2019ve had a concentration of wealth and an economic structure that is only accentuating that, the government has been a countervailing force,\u201d Emanuel told CNN, citing consolidation in health insurance companies and retail especially.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cRather than say \u2018Lina Khan,\u2019 which has its own explosion, the guiding light should be where Teddy Roosevelt was more about regulation and Woodrow Wilson was more about breaking out: that spirit is important, and that mindset,\u201d he added.\n <\/p>\n \n Jim Kessler, the executive vice president of the centrist Democratic think tank Third Way, told CNN that Khan is \u201cvery smart, and she\u2019s very creative, and Democrats with national ambitions should be talking to her and taking her viewpoint into account,\u201d but warned against voters seeing that as going after things they like, such as fast Amazon deliveries.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cIt is critical that future national Democrats talk about issues that voters care about, not what intellectual elite progressives care about,\u201d Kessler said.\n <\/p>\n \n Democrats aren\u2019t the only ones with Khan on their minds.\n <\/p>\n \n Last April, Steve Bannon, the outside Trump strategist, called Khan one of the more important political figures in the country and said Democrats might have won in 2024 if they\u2019d listened to her more. There\u2019s even a photo of them standing next to each other, smiling after a tech competition event in Washington.\n <\/p>\n \n Also on a list of onetime Khan fans: Vance, whom she got to know when he was an Ohio senator.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cAt that time, he was very focused on issues of corporate power in the technology sector and he was very substantive,\u201d Khan said.\n <\/p>\n \n She said she couldn\u2019t remember exactly the last time they spoke, but she does remember how Vance came publicly to her defense not long after being put on the ticket in 2024, in those days when Democratic opponents saw a window to come after her and he was eager for the opportunity to turn the screws of populism against Harris.\n <\/p>\n \n \u201cI don\u2019t agree with Lina Khan on every issue, to be clear, but I think that she\u2019s been very smart about trying to go after some of these big tech companies that monopolize what we\u2019re allowed to say in our own country,\u201d Vance told CBS<\/a> in August 2024.\n <\/p>\n \n It\u2019s unclear where Vance, the likely front-runner for the 2028 Republican nomination, stands these days. Asked whether the vice president stands by that quote or his work with Khan when he was in the Senate, spokesman Buckley Carlson declined comment.\n <\/p>\n\n Affordability and \u2018accountability\u2019
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