‘It will be the end of democracy’: Bernie Sanders on what happens if Trump wins – and how to stop him

Bernie Sanders sweeps into his state office in Burlington, Vermont, itching to get on with our interview. When I try to break the ice by asking the US senator how he is, he replies gruffly, “Good,” and motions with his outstretched hand for our conversation to begin.

It’s a Saturday, and Sanders is dressed in his casual weekend uniform of cream chinos, blue shirt and sweater, no tie. I’d been hoping the day would be so cold and crisp in Burlington,the idyllic college town which has been his home since 1968, that he’d be wearing the mittens captured in a cult photo of Sanders huddled against biting winds at Joe Biden’s 2021 inauguration. The ones that launched a quadrillion memes and sent the US senator hurtling into the cyber stratosphere. “I couldn’t believe it, all I was doing was trying to keep warm!” he says, before breaking the bad news. Not only is he not wearing the mittens, “I don’t even know where they are.”

Sanders always seems to be in a hurry. Like Alice’s white rabbit, he’s forever racing against the clock in his battle with the billionaires and corporate interests. He is the most unlikely harbinger of change: a politician who drove young voters wild with “Berniemania” in 2016, when he was already 74; a man with none of the usual TV good looks and smooth talking attached to presidential candidates, but one who, by being absolutely himself, still turned out to be hugely charismatic.

In the past decade, he’s done more than almost anyone to change the political lens in the US, bringing income inequality, poverty and what he calls “uber-capitalism” into focus. And yet before that he was a virtual unknown.

In his 20s and 30s, Sanders worked lean years as a carpenter and freelance writer, alongside campaigning for the