This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation between Perry Bacon and Senator Chris Van Hollen on September 30 at Persuasion 2025 DC, a conference put on by Way to Win and Swayable, two left-leaning groups.

Perry Bacon: So I’ll start with when I was young and had more hair, I covered Capitol Hill for The Washington Post. You were a House member then—you were DCCC chair, everyone knew you, and you were very smart. Everyone regarded you very highly. The rumor was that Nancy—mostly right—might hand things off to you when she decided to move on from leadership. That didn’t happen, at least not on the timetable people expected.

But here’s what I wanted to ask: At that point, I would’ve described you as very intelligent and very hardworking. What I would not have described you as is bold. And now people are describing you that way. So let me just bluntly ask: Have you changed? Has the situation changed? Did I misread you? Talk about Chris Van Hollen in 2025—what’s happened?

Senator Chris Van Hollen: Alright, Perry, maybe a little bit of all the above. I decided to go into politics because I believe in a values-based, principled approach. I’ve always taken that approach, whether in the House or in the Senate. What’s happening now is that we’re watching a country drift away from its principles, away from its values. We have a lawless president trying to take away freedom of speech and lock people up without due process. In that environment, it’s incumbent on all of us to step up.

I’ve tried to step up in the ways I can, both here at home—you mentioned Kilmar Armando Ábrego García in the introduction. A lot of people said, don’t do that, keep your finger in the wind, don’t enter that conversation. But I will not apologize for fighting for people’s constitutional rights.

I also believe we need a foreign policy that actually reflects the values we claim to hold—whether that’s dealing with Putin’s aggression in Ukraine or the humanitarian catastrophe in Gaza. So I haven’t changed my values or principles. I still have a principle-based approach. But the world, Perry, is rushing in the other direction.

And I agree with the comment that there’s no cavalry coming. It’s up to all of us to decide what each of us can do to stand up to this authoritarian president. And beyond that, we need to call out those who cave in, who are complicit—because when they do, they put all of our rights at risk. So I’m mad as hell about the moment we’re in, and that’s what you’re seeing.

Bacon: You said a lot of great things here. Let me follow up. OK—so you’re thinking about going to El Salvador. Do you think, in your head, Hakeem Jeffries probably doesn’t want me to do this, the polling says we shouldn’t raise the salience of immigration compared to health care? Or do you think, this is so important I have to do it anyway?

Senator Van Hollen: I was angry and I just on luck decided to go because I do believe fundamentally that when you violate one person’s right to due process, you put the rights of everybody at risk. And so what actually happened was Bukele, who by the way calls himself the world’s coolest dictator, was meeting with Trump in the White House. You may remember that scene. And when he came here, I wrote to the ambassador from El Salvador and I said, I want to talk to Bukele while he’s here in Washington about Kilmar Armando Ábrego García who just got disappeared by the Trump administration and is in CECOT. Well, they blew me off. I wrote in that letter that if he didn’t meet with me here, I was going to go there. So I got on the plane, went down there. At first they refused to let me meet with him. We got in the car, we tried to see the CECOT, they actually set up a roadblock with soldiers specifically to prevent me from reaching him.

When we came back to San Salvador, I had a press event and there a lot of local press there and pointed out that the Salvadorian government was violating international law by denying him access to talking to his wife, his lawyer. And lo and behold, a few hours later I got to see him and I got to call his wife later on, Jennifer, to hear that he was alive.

So to your question, it was really on instinct, but I think there is an important lesson there because there were a lot of pollsters and pundits who said, don’t go, you shouldn’t go because we don’t want to talk about immigration. Well, we should talk about immigration, immigration policy. But there’s one fundamental piece of this that I think every American........

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