The profile of U.S. Senator Chris Van Hollen ‘83 H ’14 (D – Maryland) has grown considerably in the year since he sat down with The Phoenix for an in-depth interview last spring. While he was already speaking out on immigrant rights, environmental issues, and advocating for human rights in Gaza more forcefully than most in his caucus at the time, Van Hollen’s more recent rhetoric and proposals have established him as a consistent progressive voice pressuring his party’s leaders.
In a follow-up interview with The Phoenix on Tuesday, April 7, Van Hollen argued that it’s not so much he who has changed. “I think the times have changed around me,” he said, outlining how an administration that began with overreaching executive orders and the dismantling of the federal public service (a large part of which are Marylanders that the senator represents) quickly intensified into what he viewed as an even more severe threat. After President Trump vastly expanded the strength of Immigration and Customs Enforcement into American streets, the agency detained a Marylander named Kilmar Ábrego García and sent him to what the senator calls a “gulag” in El Salvador. Van Hollen “got angry and stayed angry.”
As a senator in the minority party without control of the White House, though, Van Hollen was limited in his institutional power. He travelled to El Salvador to demand Ábrego García’s release; while his efforts were unsuccessful, he was able to meet with him and confirm his safety. Ábrego García has since been returned to the U.S., though the Trump administration reasserted their commitment to deporting him, this time to Liberia, on Tuesday. The trip to El Salvador helped Van Hollen to understand that he needed to put his anger toward avenues beyond simply talking about “what’s happening inside the four walls of the Congress.”
That same urge has led Van Hollen to release some new policy proposals and emphasize his existing ones. In March, he proposed “a working Americans tax cut” bill that would impose a surtax on millionaires for their income above one million dollars, and offer tax cuts for lower-income Americans. He’s also been calling for the enactment of the “Polluters Pay Climate Fund” legislation, in addition to policies that would ensure that utility consumers don’t end up paying more because of the construction of data centers and that promote transparency about campaign spending.
Still, though, Van Hollen emphasized that policy proposals can only go so far in a moment in which voters of all persuasions seem to want new and more fundamental changes. In his eyes, policy efforts would become more fruitful if the party engaged with the public in new ways.
“The American people are more than willing to mix it up when it comes to different ideas,” Van Hollen said. “What they want, though, are people who are not going to BS them, who are going to be straight shooters, and people who don’t have their finger to the political winds,” he continued, seeming to invoke the growing discussions about the extent to which Democrats should trust political consultants and strategists to frame their messaging. Van Hollen said that his work, which he has referred to as “stiffening the spine of the party,” is directly linked to aspirations to create a politics of connection.
“I think the Democrats have been too much of a hedging party, just looking at the polling data. They’re not supposed to be followers. Yes, of course, I listen to my constituents every day. But I also have the power to try to influence the debate and be a voice to try to change that direction.”
While Van Hollen’s efforts have taken place against the backdrop of the Democratic Party’s desperate attempts to formulate a cohesive response to the second Trump administration, he’s clear that the party should go beyond that.
“In my view, it’s a complete misanalysis of the situation to say, ‘well, the American people, they just want to go back to the pre-Trump status quo,’” he said. “Democrats lost the 2024 presidential election. So the notion that we just would go back to the pre-Trump status quo would, in my view, be a fatal mistake politically, and I think a mistake in terms of the interest of the country.”
While Trump is definitely unpopular, sitting at a -23% net approval rating in one recent poll, Democrats haven’t been able to turn negative sentiments about the president into popularity for their party or its leaders. “That’s the result of a sense that the Democrats have not been fighting back hard enough, and the sense that they, at the end of the day, don’t stand for anything when it comes to issues important to working people.” Van Hollen feels that the party needs to present an affirmative vision for the country that goes beyond a response to Trump. To contribute, he’s advocated for programs that incentivize employee ownership of firms, as well as healthcare policies like “Medicare for All” and those that focus more directly on patient care and preventative care.
Policy is only one element of his vision for a post-Trump progressive politics. A major moment in Van Hollen’s rise to prominence in progressive discourse was his public endorsement of Zohran Mamdani for mayor of New York City in September 2025, a time when many Democratic voices were conspicuously silent about his nomination. The endorsement set up something of a feud amongst Democratic representatives from the Northeast Corridor: Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and other progressives came to Van Hollen’s defense, while Senate and House Minority Leaders Chuck Schumer and Hakeem Jefferies, respectively, criticized the move. Jefferies’ quip in response, “Chris Van Who?,” made clear just how significantly Van Hollen’s position had evolved since his days as a leading budget negotiator for the House Democrats in the Obama era.
“If you want to have a big tent party, it means, yes, you support Joe Manchin as a Democrat who gets elected in West Virginia, but it also means you should support the Democratic nominee for mayor of New York City,” Van Hollen said about his choice to back Mamdani.
Despite these pushes, the past several years of American politics have revealed some of the limits of electoral politics. Widely supported political change has been stalled by filibuster, while the power of PAC money from the AI, Pharma, and other industries and interest groups has only grown. When Van Hollen began to act more forcefully against what he called “the feckless response” of the Biden administration to the humanitarian crisis in Gaza, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) began to publicly oppose him.
This was a telling moment for the senator, both because of the danger it posed to his political career and his ability to resist it. “In politics, there’s way too much special interest money at play, whether it’s from big oil companies, big pharma companies, or from AIPAC,” he said. AIPAC specifically, he feels, increasingly does not represent the opinions of the majority of American Jews; as a result, the group’s power is diminishing as more Democrats pledge not to accept their money and push back in other ways. After AIPAC started targeting Van Hollen and a group of pro-Israel advocates in Maryland critiqued his support for motions to stall weapon sales to Israel, a different group comprised of Jewish leaders and constituents from the state released a letter in his defense. He attributes this to his longtime presence in the state. “My belief is that big money can be overcome by enough resources, but also by big grassroots operation.”
Similarly, he sees this kind of campaigning as a crucial tool in overcoming the plodding, often uninspiring tendency of American politics. Asked about the inevitable limits on the power of people in his position, Van Hollen emphasized, “what I’ve learned over time is that ideas that may seem out of reach today will only be put in reach tomorrow if you start working on them today.” He knows that the policy proposals he’s released will never be passed into law as long as Trump is in the White House, and might not even be supported by the current Democratic leadership. “But [these ideas are] not going to be achievable three, four or five years from now, if we don’t start the debate now.”
It remains clear, however, that progressives hoping for change would be unwise to place their hopes solely in the hands of the Senate. As in last year’s interview, Van Hollen mentioned his involvement during college with a Swarthmore student movement advocating for the school’s divestment from companies doing business in Apartheid South Africa. The movement succeeded, leading to a gradual divestment process between 1982 and 1990. Many years later, Van Hollen was a staffer for the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when Congress passed anti-Apartheid legislation that sanctioned the racist regime in South Africa. The takeaway for him, then, is that “the most significant change in Congress only comes about when you see a push from the outside, when you see a movement.”
“My experiences at Swarthmore taught me to ask the big questions and to question authority, not just for the sake of doing it or the sake of being disrespectful, but to make people question those fundamental assumptions that too often become conventional wisdom that isn’t wise.”
How much tangible success this more outspoken political style will have in the national arena is yet to be seen, but it certainly has entered Van Hollen’s name and ideas into more conversations across the nation. As for how he will try to elevate that profile even further for the 2026 and 2028 elections, Van Hollen said that he intends to be “front and center.” “Exactly what form that takes, we’ll see,” he said.
