Opinion | Billionaire Donors Have It Out for This Legal Prodigy, but President Harris Will Need Her

Until about a week ago, a big question in Democratic politics was whether a potential President Kamala Harris would keep Lina Khan — the pathbreaking young lawyer loved by progressives and loathed by some of Harris’s billionaire donors — as chair of the Federal Trade Commission, the agency that enforces antimonopoly law.

Some wealthy Harris backers have called for Khan’s replacement, including the LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, who donated $10 million to a Democratic super PAC this year. On the financial news network CNBC, Barry Diller, chair of IAC and Expedia Group, said he’d lobby Harris to get rid of Khan, whom he called a “dope.” He later apologized for the insult, but not the promise to use his influence against her.

Because Harris’s economic views seemed fuzzy and her ties to Silicon Valley are strong, some on the left worried she might give in to the pressure. Those fears were heightened when Gov. Wes Moore of Maryland, a close ally of the vice president, was asked on CNBC about jettisoning Khan, and suggested that Harris might break from President Biden’s aggressive approach to antitrust. “There are going to be different dynamics that are going to require different philosophies,” said Moore.

But it increasingly looks as if anti-Khan forces might be disappointed. As the broad outlines of Harris’s economic approach have emerged over the last week, it seems at least as populist as Biden’s.

Her plan to combat price gouging features an aggressive role for the F.T.C. At the Democratic convention, especially on the opening night, “corporate greed” was a scourge, and speaker after speaker sought to link “freedom,” the central theme of Harris’s campaign, to programs that protect the middle class from the depredations of concentrated wealth. Even the ordinarily pro-business secretary of commerce, Gina Raimondo, blasted “monopolies that crush workers and small businesses and start-ups.” And as Lauren Feiner pointed out in The Verge, the Democratic platform mentions “competition” 18 times, twice as often as it did four years ago, and emphasized policies that Khan has been closely involved with. Suddenly, Khan seems more likely to be a linchpin of a potential Harris presidency than a casualty of it.

To grasp why she matters so much, you have to understand how Khan, a 35-year-old legal wunderkind, became both so revered and so abhorred. Khan is a heroine to many on the left; Pramila Jayapal, chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, told me that Khan is her caucus’s favorite guest speaker. But she’s also respected by many populist conservatives, including Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, Representative Matt Gaetz of Florida and the vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, who called her “one of the few people in the Biden administration that I think is doing a pretty good job.” What brings Khan’s fans together is suspicion of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech, even if the reason for their suspicion differs.