The Unfinished Business of Bernie Sanders

“Forget it,” Bernie Sanders grumbled. “I don’t want to get into process questions!”

It was an afternoon earlier this winter, and I had come to the Vermont senator’s office in Washington to ask him a version of the question that has consumed the Democratic Party, and liberal politics in general, for close to three years now: What does Bernie want?

Back in the summer of 2016, after Sanders’s long-shot presidential campaign had come shockingly close to clinching the Democratic nomination, the question was: What did he want in exchange for dropping out of the race and backing Hillary Clinton? Then, when Donald Trump was elected, the question was: What did Sanders—who’d spent a quarter century in Congress as the quintessential, minimally effective gadfly—want to do with his newfound prominence?

Today, the question has taken its most urgent and consequential form to date: What does Sanders, with his sky-high name recognition and legions of supporters, want to do in the 2020 presidential race?

Suffice it to say, it’s a question Sanders has been pondering ever since Trump won—not just with friends and family and advisers but over and over in his own head. It’s not, however, a question he likes to kick around with reporters. And now, shifting in a chair at the head of a long conference table, he seemed as tightly coiled as the mousetrap that sat on the floor in the corner of the room. (The dirty secret about Capitol Hill is that it’s infested not with lobbyists but with rodents.) I asked whether he was ready for the vicious attacks he’d face in another presidential campaign? “I know you’re well-intentioned, but it’s political gossip!” he replied. Did it give him any pause that a number of Democratic presidential candidates looked like they were trying to steal his platform? “You’re into gossip!” he said.

In some respects, Sanders was the same irascible, iconoclastic figure that afternoon that he’s always been. His nimbus of white hair was typically unkempt; the dandruff on the shoulders of his blue suit was as plentiful as ever. He was as averse to schmoozing as he was when he arrived in the Senate in 2007. In one of his first days on the job, Sanders bumped into then New Mexico senator Pete Domenici in one of the tunnels underneath the Capitol. The two said hello and had what Sanders thought was a perfectly pleasant exchange—until shortly thereafter, when Sanders received a personal note from Domenici profusely apologizing for their curt interaction. “He hates the word, but there’s an authenticity to Bernie,” says Faiz Shakir, a former Sanders adviser. “The curmudgeonliness is the same on and off the screen.”

But in other, more profound ways, Sanders has become an entirely different person. In the nearly four years since he announced his first presidential campaign, he has done more to remake the modern Democratic Party in his image than any politician since Bill Clinton—and that includes Barack Obama, who not only spent eight years in the White House but also was a Democrat. (As his friends and foes often emphasize, the socialist Sanders does not serve in the Senate as a Democrat but rather as an independent who caucuses with the Democrats.) Medicare for All, a $15-an-hour minimum wage, free college—the issues that he championed during the 2016 Democratic primary and that Hillary Clinton dismissed as naive and unrealistic—are now mainstream Democratic Party positions. “We are where we are,” says Shakir, who’s now the ACLU’s national political director, “because Bernie forced the party to rethink everything.”

Having toiled his entire political career as a gadfly, Sanders is now a prophet. “The ideas we brought forth in 2016, which were considered, not only by the Democratic establishment but by the editorial writers, to be extreme and fringe and out of step with where the American people are,” Sanders told me, “are now what is in, by and large, the Democratic national platform and are being adopted by candidates across the country.” What’s more, the Democratic Party’s future—as reflected by the remarkable rise of the 29-year-old New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—has clearly tilted to the left. This development has been as satisfying for Sanders as it was unexpected. “We have had more success in ideologically changing the party than I would have dreamed possible,” he said. “The world has changed.”

But the change has been uncomfortable for Sanders as well. When he launched his 2016 presidential campaign, he did so with few expectations and no fanfare—making his announcement while standing on a patch of grass outside the Capitol that’s known as the Swamp. Leaning on a wobbly platform, he was in no mood to linger or savor the moment. “We don’t have an endless amount of time,” he brusquely told reporters then. “I’ve gotta get back.” As Connecticut senator Chris Murphy later recalled to The Washington Post: “I remember that day when he left the caucus meeting on a Tuesday and went outside to do his announcement in the Senate ‘swamp,’ with like no prep, and I was like, ‘This is a presidential campaign? This is going to be a disaster.’ ” The New York Times buried its article about Sanders’s entering the race on A21.

This time around, a Sanders presidential announcement would, of course, be front-page news; it would be carried live by the cable networks—unless, that is, Sanders decides to make it official from Jimmy Kimmel’s or Rachel Maddow’s set. If Sanders does run, he will enter the race not as a long shot but as a top-tier candidate—anointed by some as the front-runner. The world for Sanders has indeed changed, and all the attention and all the expectations seem to be getting to him. His advisers had initially expected him to decide about a presidential run last November, shortly after the midterms, and then make an announcement, that he was getting in or sitting out, in December or January. They fully expected him to jump in the race.

But when I met with him in Washington a week before Christmas, Sanders still did not know what he wanted to do, and the indecision was taking a toll—not just on his potential campaign team, many of whom were raring to go but were also getting antsy about missing out on opportunities with other candidates, but also on Sanders. “Bottom line, look, I am not a complicated person. I’m really not,” he said to me, although it seemed like he might have been talking to himself. “And I believe that the job of an elected official, the job of the president, the job of Congress, is to represent the needs of working people, not just billionaires.”

Sanders often says that making it to the White House has never been a lifelong ambition. “I’m not one of those sons of multimillionaires whose parents told them they were going to become president of the United States,” he told New York magazine last year. “I don’t wake up in the morning with any burning desire that I have to be president.”

When I asked him in his Senate office what about being president did appeal to him, he gave a rote, somewhat listless answer: the opportunity it would give him to “create an economy that works for all people, not just the few”; to be “a leader who brings our people together”; to lead the fight against climate change. “The enormous capability of a president to bring change is something that is kind of awesome, and that is enticing,” he said, before adding: “Maybe just a few more questions.”

“Most of the people in politics have wanted to be president since they were 16. They’ve built their lives around their ascension to higher office,” one Sanders adviser says. “That was never Bernie. He was himself for seven decades. And now he’s in a position that at no point in his life did he ever think he’d be in.”

Last October, on a chilly afternoon in Kenosha, Wisconsin, Bernie Sanders was weighing his presidential decision by seeing just what another presidential run might be like. He was in the midst of a nine-day, nine-state campaign swing as he stumped for Democratic candidates in the run-up to the 2018 midterms. In some ways, the tour was a victory lap, a testament to just how far Sanders has come. Before the 2014 midterms, Sanders told me, he’d offered to appear on behalf of Democrats across the country. “I said, ‘Well, I’m thinking of going here,’ ” he recalled. “They’d say, ‘No! Don’t! Please! Go someplace else! We don’t want you!’ ” But now, thanks to his 2016 presidential campaign—an effort that may not have resulted in the Democratic nomination but that did, according to at least one poll, make him the most popular politician in America—Sanders was in high demand. “This time we had so many requests we had to scale them back,” he boasted.

More than a validation, the barnstorming tour was a test. Although Sanders never really stopped campaigning after the 2016 election—frequently venturing beyond Washington, D.C., and Vermont to 32 states for, say, a health care town hall in West Virginia or a “people’s summit” in Chicago—this current endeavor was a different beast entirely. It was designed to simulate the rigors of a presidential campaign—specifically a presidential campaign of a politician who, like Sanders, had risen to an elevated status. His staff had created a 7,000-item punch list—everything from who’d be speaking at each event to who’d be fetching Sanders from the airport—and hired, as advanced lead, a glamorous, no-nonsense woman who’d spent the summer coordinating Beyoncé’s global concert tour. (“I went from ‘On the Run with Beyoncé’ to ‘Marching to the Polls with Bernie,’ ” she said.) It was early mornings and late nights, multiple rallies each day, and a private jet to ferry Sanders from one state to the next. It was, in other words, an opportunity for Sanders, who will be 78 when the Iowa Caucuses are held next February, to, as one of his staffers put it to me, “take things out for a spin”—to gauge whether he had not just the proverbial fire in the belly but the literal stamina for another White House bid.

So far, the results were encouraging. Subsisting on a few hours of sleep each night and a steady diet of bananas, grapes, and hotel fruit cups, the septuagenarian senator showed more verve and pep than his cadre of aides who, in some cases, were five decades his junior. The day before he arrived in Kenosha, he was in Iowa, where a young supporter asked him: “Bernie, are you tired yet?” “No!” Sanders barked back in his Brooklyn accent. “I’m just waking up!”

In Kenosha, Sanders was appearing at a union hall to stump for Randy Bryce. A mustachioed ironworker and labor activist who went by the nickname “Iron Stache,” Bryce was running for Paul Ryan’s old congressional seat. He’d supported Sanders in the 2016 presidential race, speaking at Wisconsin rallies, and Sanders had been an early backer of Bryce’s congressional bid. When Bryce traveled to Washington to seek Sanders’s advice about his campaign, Sanders had warned him that things could get nasty: “Randy, you run and you threaten these people, they’re going to throw millions of dollars against you in ugly, personal, destructive type ads.” It was another instance of Sanders’s prophetic tendencies. A GOP super PAC supporting Bryce’s Republican opponent, a former Ryan aide named Bryan Steil, had indeed spent millions attacking Bryce over arrests for drunk driving and marijuana possession, as well as labeling him a “deadbeat” for delinquent child-support payments to his ex-wife. By the time Sanders arrived in Kenosha, two weeks before Election Day, Iron Stache was a dead man walking—badly trailing in the polls and relying on his ex-wife to defend his honor. “D.C. politicians are putting our family’s personal business all over the news and television, right where our son can see it,” she’d said in a statement.

Standing on stage in the union-hall ballroom, with Bryce sitting on a stool just to his right, Sanders did his best to help in what already appeared to be a lost cause. “They do ugly ads because they have nothing positive to say,” he told the crowd of several hundred people that had gathered, sounding as frustrated about Bryce’s travails as he does about income inequality.

After his speech, Sanders retreated to one of the union hall’s side rooms. There, an older woman approached him with a plate of cookies. “I made these for you!” she gushed. While Sanders had no difficulty whipping up the crowd just minutes earlier, small talk was evidently a chore, and he recoiled from the woman and her baked goods. “Thank you,” he stammered, before bellowing for an aide to take the cookies. He brushed past her and went to do a TV interview. When the interview was over, one of Bryce’s campaign aides sauntered over to Sanders. “Have you met Randy’s mother?” the aide asked, motioning to the woman who’d given Sanders the cookies. The senator looked stricken and hesitated for a moment. “Yes, of course I did!” he exclaimed, suddenly turning on the charm. He told the candidate’s mother how proud he was of her son and they posed for a picture. Pulling her close, Sanders said, “Hey look, after he wins and he takes you down to Washington when he gets sworn in, okay? We’ll get together then. All right?” Bryce’s mother eagerly nodded. “Thank you,” she said. “Thank you again, sir.”

Bryce approached to say goodbye to Sanders. “Thank you for everything,” he said. Sanders grabbed Bryce by the shoulders. Although the senator had long ago warned Bryce that the campaign would be rough, he appeared on his trip to Kenosha taken aback by its brutal turn—as if chastened by the reminder that, in running for office, a person can lose more than merely an election. He looked at Bryce with what seemed like a mixture of pity and pride. “Go get ’em,” Sanders said. Then he left the union hall, hopped into a waiting van, and headed to the airport. Two weeks later, Bryce lost to Steil by 12 points.

Some supporters think Sanders's smartest move would be to hand over the keys to the movement he built and anoint a successor.

When Bernie Sanders ran for president four years ago, it was something he didn’t initially want to do. Before the 2016 campaign, he’d tried to persuade Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator and his closest friend in the Senate, to run against Clinton. It was only after Warren told him no that Sanders decided to enter the race himself. “He said, ‘Okay, I have to do it, because someone has to represent this viewpoint,’ ” a Democratic strategist with ties to Sanders told me.

But in 2020, not only is Warren running; so, most likely, are a host of other Democrats—Ohio senator Sherrod Brown, Hawaii congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard, Oregon senator Jeff Merkley, to name a few—who are so similar to Sanders in their worldviews that they’ve been dubbed “Bernie 2.0’s.” There are some Sanders supporters who believe that the best decision he could make for 2020 would be not to run himself but to anoint a successor—a woman, a person of color, someone who isn’t in their late 70s—and then turn over to that candidate the keys to his movement. Will Bunch, the Philadelphia Daily News columnist and an ardent booster of Sanders in 2016, recently urged Sanders to sit it out in 2020, arguing that there is “a sense that white dudes from the baby-boomer-and-older-generation have been running things for far too long, and that America needs some new blood.” Indeed, while Sanders emerged from his defeat in 2016 with newfound prominence and power, a loss in 2020 would almost certainly serve to diminish him—and perhaps his legacy.

“There’s a legitimate and rational argument,” says one Democratic strategist close to Sanders, “that if you care about being a movement leader, which is what he’s historically been, you’re better positioned and stronger to say, ‘I’m not going to run, but I’m going to decide who to endorse and throw the movement’s weight behind.’ ” At times, Sanders himself has seemed open to this idea. When I asked him in October if he felt like he could “hand the torch off” to another presidential candidate in 2020, he replied, “I think there are some very strong and smart and good people in the Democratic Party. Absolutely.”

Indeed, passing the torch could actually be liberating for Sanders—and not just because it would give him more time to spend with his seven grandchildren. “I do think his DNA, where he’s been over the course of his life, is he really likes agitating,” says the senior Democratic strategist. “There’s a freedom to it: the freedom of being an agitator versus the weight of being a standard-bearer. If you’re a standard-bearer, you have to start making compromises.”

And yet the idea of passing the torch has obvious downsides. For one thing, would any of the Bernie 2.0’s—to say nothing of the more centrist candidates, like Cory Booker or Kirsten Gillibrand or Kamala Harris, who are now singing from the Bernie hymnal—be as committed to his issues as Sanders is himself? “If Bernie’s not on the debate stage, the center of gravity shifts,” says one Sanders adviser. “How much will others stick to issues we care about if they don’t feel the need to compete with us?” What’s more, even if the other candidates were true believers, would they be as good at spreading the gospel as Sanders? “No one articulates these issues in the same way as him,” says the Sanders adviser.

And then there is the not insignificant issue of Sanders himself. Although he has built up enough of a devoted following in the past three years that it’s doubtful he’ll ever again speak to an empty room, would the crowds be as big, the livestream viewers as numerous, the Sunday-show invitations as plentiful (Sanders had never been on Meet the Press until 2015) if he were no longer at least a potential presidential candidate? It’s not that Sanders craves the limelight or keeping his new celebrity friends. “Bernie has such a view of the world," says Mike Briggs, Sanders’s former communications director, "that he’d see Harry Belafonte not as a great singer, but as someone who’s done a lot for justice.”

For Sanders, who spent most of his political career as a lonely voice in the wilderness, the opportunity of these past three years to be heard, to call attention to issues that no one used to care about, has been as gratifying as anything. “He still cares immensely about the hour-and-fifteen-minute, eat-your-spinach speeches he gives,” Briggs says. “He likes the huge crowds, but he was happy making the same arguments to a hundred people at town-hall meetings in the Northeast Kingdom.”

But, of course, Sanders is only human—and even he is not immune to the warping effects of fame. “I think things have changed dramatically from 2014 when the press wasn’t covering him. That kind of below-the-radar presence lends itself to a level of humility,” says a Democratic strategist with ties to Sanders. “Then you become a huge star, people are shouting your name in huge crowds, the media is fawning all over you, and you start riding on private jets. When Bernie started his campaign, his whole thing was, ‘We’re not going to win. I just want these issues taken care of. I want there to be a progressive voice in the race. We have to push Hillary.’ Then it’s December or January and it’s like, ‘Holy shit we can win this thing.’ And you start to think, ‘I can be president,’ and it goes to your head a little.”

And not just your own. On a recent night in Washington, I met Jeff Weaver at the Dubliner Bar on Capitol Hill. Weaver began working for Sanders back in 1986, when, as the mayor of Burlington, Sanders made an unsuccessful bid to become Vermont’s governor. Weaver started as a driver on the campaign. At the time, he was unemployed and living with his parents after getting kicked out of Boston University for his role in anti-apartheid demonstrations. When Sanders was elected to Congress in 1990, Weaver went to Washington with him, eventually becoming Sanders’s chief of staff; after leaving politics to open up a comic-book store in northern Virginia, he returned to Sanders’s payroll as his presidential campaign manager. Although he’s a polarizing figure in Sanders World—“Jeff’s an asshole,” one former Sanders staffer told me, and this man considered himself a Weaver admirer—there’s no political aide Sanders and his wife, Jane, trust and value more.

Over several rounds of whiskey and a single serving of shepherd’s pie, Weaver did little to hide what he thought Sanders should do in 2020: run. In his mind, nothing less than the future of America depended on it. “It’s once in a hundred years you get a candidate with his politics who has a chance to be president,” Weaver said. It was these one-hundred-year presidencies, he believed, that accounted for so much of America’s progress. “When you have somebody like a Bernie Sanders, or an FDR for that matter, they can institutionalize a lot of change. They can make these dramatic advances and paradigm shifts—the New Deal or Medicare for All and free college—that then just get baked into the system and become part of the country’s fabric.” Weaver paused to take another sip of whiskey. “When you have these moments, this opportunity to institutionalize change,” he said, “it’s actually very important to moving the country forward.”

If Sanders does run, Weaver will almost certainly be a senior adviser, Tad Devine will likely continue to make ads, and Sanders’s very small inner circle will remain largely unchanged.

This could prove problematic for a couple of reasons. Sanders kept his campaign team lean and mean in 2016, first out of necessity and then, after the campaign became a financial juggernaut thanks to online fundraising, because of his general stinginess. (Sanders frequently complained to aides that the campaign shouldn’t spend money on costly metal bicycle racks for crowd control when it could buy cheaper plastic hurricane fences instead.) After the election, from which Sanders emerged as the most popular liberal politician in America, he was flooded with résumés. “He had the opportunity to recruit and build an empire of people who were ready to run through a wall for him and build a progressive staff apparatus around him,” says one senior Democratic strategist close to Sanders.

But Sanders turned away the offers of help. “I think he thinks the more you staff up, the more you lose your authenticity,” says the strategist. “He knows himself better than anyone else knows him, but if you’re going to become the standard-bearer and the president of the United States, at some point you need to figure out delegating, sharing your vision through others, and building an apparatus around you that’s sustainable so you’re not writing every tweet and speech.”

Besides its size, there’s the gender and racial composition of Sanders’s inner circle—which is predominantly white and male. In the run-up to the presidential race, Sanders has been bedeviled by issues of race and gender. The day after the 2018 midterms, he told The Daily Beast that one of the reasons Stacey Abrams and Andrew Gillum—black Democrats running for governor in Georgia and Florida, respectively—lost was not because they were too progressive but because “a lot of white folks out there who are not necessarily racist…felt uncomfortable for the first time in their lives about whether or not they wanted to vote for an African-American.” Sanders’s refusal to fault those white voters was widely condemned by black and progressive activists.

Then in early January, The New York Times reported on accusations of sexual harassment made by former Sanders 2016 campaign staffers that went unaddressed by the campaign’s higher-ups. Sanders’s campaign committee later released a statement pledging: “To be clear: no one who committed sexual harassment in 2016 would be back if there were a 2020 campaign.” But a number of Sanders’s supporters and aides continue to complain that his inner circle is still just a bunch of “white guys.”

When I relayed that complaint to Sanders that December afternoon in his office—a month after the Daily Beast interview and a few weeks before the Times story broke—I expected it to be as welcome as my questions about whether he’d run, but he didn’t get angry. “It’s not all white guys,” he told me, “but it’s an issue, it’s an area that we have to improve. And we are going to make that circle a lot more diverse. So I think that that is not an illegitimate criticism.” Indeed, Sanders has taken steps in recent years to diversify his Senate staff, which now includes a number of women and people of color in senior and junior positions.

Still, he was only willing to accept so much criticism. “Everything I say gets people angry,” he told me when I asked him about the response to his refusal to criticize white voters for being uncomfortable about voting for a black candidate. “That’s not an accident. There are people who come from a different political position. So I think if you check the record, you’ll find that over the years I’ve been called a sexist and a racist and a homophobe, all that stuff.”

In a Democratic Party that is increasingly deriving its energy—not to mention its votes—from minorities and women, Sanders remains a critic of identity politics and a firm believer that issues of race, while important, are not as salient and determinative as those of class. “There are people who are very big into diversity but whose views end up being not particularly sympathetic to working people, whether they’re white or black or Latino,” he said. “My main belief is that we need to bring together a coalition of people—of black and white and Latino and Asian-American and Native-American—around a progressive agenda which is prepared to take on an extraordinarily powerful ruling class in this country. That is my view. Many of my opponents do not hold that view, and they think that all that we need is people who are candidates who are black or white, who are black or Latino or woman or gay, regardless of what they stand for, that the end result is diversity.” He hastened to add that “diversity is enormously important,” but there was a bigger goal: “to change society and create an economy and a government that work for all people.”

His balancing act wasn’t just rhetorical. I noticed that one wall of his conference room was decorated with black-and-white photos of bucolic Vermont scenes—barns, mountains, snow-covered roads. On the wall facing it hung three humongous oil paintings of black women.

When Sanders does talk about what he wants right now, he says his 2020 decision will ultimately come down to one basic question: Is he the candidate with the best chance of ending Donald Trump’s presidency? “He really does want to beat Trump in a deeply personal way,” Weaver says. “It’s distressing for him to see democracy going in this Trumpian direction.”

Sanders and his advisers believe he’s uniquely suited to the task of defeating Trump. Part of the reason is Sanders’s appeal to white working-class and rural voters—those same voters Sanders refused to denounce as racist for being uncomfortable about voting for a black candidate in the 2018 midterms. Those who would staff a 2020 Sanders campaign talk not only of taking back Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin—the three states that put Trump over the top in 2016—but of putting Iowa and possibly other Plains states in play. One Sanders adviser even told me that he thought Sanders would compete in West Virginia—a state Trump won by 42 points in 2016. “The untold story of 2016 was Bernie’s strength with rural voters,” Weaver says.

But it’s more than just the electoral map. Sanders has some of the same political skills as Trump. It’s a depressing reality that Trump, for all of his flaws, is a savant when it comes to messaging; he has a gift for boiling down complex issues into simple, visceral, often unrealistic policy proposals—such as building a wall to combat illegal immigration. It’s why some Trump supporters say that you need to “take him seriously, not literally.” Democrats, by contrast, are quite good at developing realistic policy proposals that nonetheless, in part because of their complexity, fail to excite the public. Sanders is a rare exception.

Last fall, for instance, he introduced the Stop Bad Employers by Zeroing Out Subsidies Act (Stop BEZOS), a bill that would force large companies like Amazon to pay additional taxes to fund certain government services used by their low-wage workers. Stop BEZOS was laughably bad public policy and completely unworkable due to the way benefits eligibility works, which many liberal policy wonks pointed out. But Stop BEZOS did deliver a strong message: Giant companies like Amazon should pay their employees a living wage. And, sure enough, a few weeks after Sanders introduced Stop BEZOS, Jeff Bezos announced that Amazon would raise the company’s minimum wage in the U.S. to $15. “[Sanders] is a very American kind of populist,” Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote at the time, “whose specific policy proposals are best understood as props in a larger moralistic narrative rather than well-designed cures for specific ills.” Or, as Sanders told me when I asked him about Stop BEZOS and his general approach to public policy, “What I have always believed, and Trump believes it, too, as a matter of fact, is that the way you bring about change is you garner grassroots support, and then that support filters on up.”

Sanders knows that, should he run in 2020, his battle would be with forces even larger than Trump. “How much would the pharmaceutical industry spend not to have Bernie in the White House?” asks one Sanders adviser. “Is there a number big enough to articulate?” And were Sanders to win? “If you thought President Obama faced insane opposition from Senate and House Republicans, you ain’t seen nothing yet,” one former Sanders staffer says. “He’d be trying to dismantle the economic system that benefits the D.C. elite on both sides of the aisle.”

Yet, in order for Sanders to go after the D.C. elite, he’ll have to go through Trump. And while those encouraging him to run believe he’s the Democratic candidate best suited to that task, even Sanders sometimes wonders just how he’d do that.

At the end of a long day last October stumping for midterm candidates in Arizona, Sanders sat in a small meeting room at Arizona State University—where he’d soon address a thousand people at a rally in the student union—and let out a loud sigh when I asked him if he felt Democrats still didn’t quite know how to handle a politician like Trump. “Yes,” he said, and then paused for several seconds. “Look, Trump in a very bad way has redefined the nature of American politics. Every politician in the world stretches his or her point, you know, that’s nothing new. But now that we have a president who is a pathological liar, who can say anything he wants, who does say anything he wants, regardless of whether or not it has any bearing on the truth, that’s something new. All right, how do you deal with that? How do you deal with that? How do you deal with a president who is a racist, who is a sexist, who is a xenophobe, who is a homophobe, and who is a religious bigot?”

Sanders had begun his day in Nogales, along the Mexican border, where he’d met in a budget motel conference room with about a dozen or so immigration and environmental activists. Trump, and cable news, were talking nonstop about “the caravan”—the group of migrants slowly making their way across Central America toward the Mexico-U.S. border—and Sanders wanted these people’s advice about how to respond. One of the activists suggested that Democrats ask Trump what he’s done to help the Central American countries improve the conditions of their citizens so that people don’t feel compelled to leave.

“You’re talking rationally,” Sanders said. “But I want you to put yourself in Trump’s head and what he cares about, and his job is to simply win votes and pit one group of people against the other. You already gave me a rational answer. All right? But I need a political answer.” A local lawyer suggested talking about “the rule of law” and how Trump was waiving numerous environmental laws to crack down on immigration at the border. Sanders nodded and pointed to another activist, who proposed a “welcoming action” at the border where people showed up with food and clothing for immigrants. Then another activist argued that “we have to be not afraid to be rational” and said Democrats should point out just how few immigrants were coming across the southern border.

Sanders wasn’t satisfied. “I’m not sure that I’m getting through to you,” he barked. “This is all politics! It’s like me telling you there’s a guy with a machine gun out there, and if you don’t do this he’s going to bust in here and shoot you all up! It’s not true. All right? But I can create that fantasy. I can tell you that there’s somebody coming down with a machine gun, right? I can get you really scared! And you’re going to come to me: 'How do we protect ourselves?' That’s what it’s about! Right-wing extremism and demagoguery is not based on rationality. It is based on fear." Sanders told the group that their—and his—challenge was to “be really smart and figure out how we fight that demagoguery effectively.”

Ten hours later in Tempe, I asked Sanders if he had any answers. “I think what Trump has gotten away with is saying the economy is booming,” Sanders said. “What we have got to talk about is the economic pain that still exists in America. The second thing I think we have to do is to make it clear that when he ran for office, he lied directly to the people. He said he was going to provide health care for everybody. He said he was not going to cut Social Security. He said he was going to take on the pharmaceutical industry. Absolute lies, not just generalizations, these are lies in the campaign he told people who voted for him. I think we have to expose that as well.”

I asked Sanders if that wasn’t just more rationality. How would any of that counter the visceral nerve Trump touched in some voters when he talked about the caravan?

“Well, I mean, it’s difficult if you are not a pathological liar,” Sanders said. “It is difficult if you will not say anything at any time, just to get a vote. So what your real question is: How could one do politics that are honest, that are respectful, and beat somebody who is an authoritarian demagogue, who is a pathological liar, who will say anything at any time? That’s your question.”

Yes, that was my question, I said.

Sanders paused and suddenly, for the first time on the campaign swing, he seemed tired. “The answer is, it is hard,” he said. “And we better damn well find the answers to that pretty soon.”

Jason Zengerle is a GQ correspondent.