Gary Johnson, full-time Libertarian presidential candidate and onetime cannabis entrepreneur, only appears to be running on a happiness platform of high times and low taxes.

In fact, this ostentatiously chill 63-year-old is fueled, just like Donald Trump, by outrage over immigrants. Except he thinks they are getting a raw deal.


Johnson was sitting placidly in a Manhattan hotel conference room last week — bodhisattva smile on lips, ear buds dangling around his neck — when I asked him whether he thought Trump was a legit small-government candidate. His grin dissipated like sativa smoke.

“Well, no, I don't think [Trump] represents smaller government!” Johnson told me during a taping of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast. “I mean, just what he's talking about when it comes to immigration, in a state that’s 50 percent Hispanic, are doors not going to be knocked on in New Mexico, my door included? But when they get to my door, gee, I'm white, so — well, but maybe we’d better check your basement or your attic to make sure that you’re not harboring any illegal immigrants. … Absolutely, it’s racist. When he calls Mexicans murderers and rapists, that is incendiary.”

Despite his pitch for Bernie Sanders’ voters — and his claim that he’s gunning for Trump and Hillary Clinton voters with equal fervor — it’s clear which candidate harshes his mellow most. Johnson has mildly negative things to say about Clinton (“The answer to everything is just bigger government”), bon mots for Bernie (“We come to a T in the road when it comes to economics, but on the social side we're simpatico”), but it’s his former party’s presumptive nominee who clearly offends his live-and-let-live sensibility. And he speaks about Trump’s pledge to evict 11 million undocumented immigrants — the core of his victorious primary campaign — with the bitterness born of serving two terms as Republican governor of New Mexico, the state with the highest proportion of Hispanic residents in the nation, at 42 percent.

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Johnson’s keystone position on immigration — open borders and open arms for Mexican working families — is a nonstarter for the vast majority of Republicans (and most Democrats, for that matter). But his response to Trump is as visceral as it is rooted in policy: He’s known Latino friends on both sides of the New Mexicco-Arizona border who have been targeted by Arizona’s restrictive 2010 immigration law.

“They've got a sticker on their back of their window of their car, ‘I’m an American,’” he said. “They have resigned themselves to carry their papers. It’s just the way it is, is what they say. That is deeply offensive to me, as an American, that an Iraqi war veteran who is Hispanic, is out for a job, and he doesn’t have his papers, and he’s close to the border, and somehow he’s going to get rounded up.”

Until recently, Johnson was an electoral curiosity — and the Libertarian convention in Orlando last month that selected Johnson and running mate Bill Weld had a not-ready-for-Disney vibe, featuring a striptease by a candidate for party chairman who made up in girth what he lacked in eloquence. By contrast, Johnson is a serious, even studious semi-outsider in the Jerry Brown mold — and like Brown he likes to live in the political shadowlands of fringe/not-fringe. “We're fringe, totally,” he says of himself and Weld, the former moderate Republican governor of Massachusetts — ambiguously. “We're fringe? Come on.”

Last time around, in an inhospitable 2012, Johnson garnered precisely 0.99 percent of the vote. But 2016 (rumor has it) is a vastly different election with a full 40 percent of voters pining for a reasonable third-party choice — and he has been polling in the 8-to-10-point range against two uncommonly unlikable major-party candidates.

But 40 is not Johnson’s magic number: He needs just 15 percent in a poll of national polls to make it onto the national debate stage, which he thinks will cement the Libertarians as the third party. Once there, he aims to be a buffer between the two major party titans and a civilizing force, promising to kiss Trump in a daisy-in-the-rifle-barrel gesture.

It irks him that his name has thus far appeared in only a handful of recent polls, despite the fact that he could have a significant role in a handful of states, particularly in the Libertarian-friendly West. “The crux to this whole thing is just getting my name in the polls,” he told me. “Come on. Put us — put our names in the poll. We're on MSNBC last night, Lawrence O'Donnell, and across the screen all night long is running a new poll, by MSNBC, Trump and Clinton, and he's saying, ‘You guys should be included in the polls.’ Well, come on, Lawrence. How about your own network including us in your poll, if this is what you're saying?”

Like most politicians who champion legalizing drug use, Johnson has about him an air of disciplined sobriety. When I ask him how he first came to weed, he speaks about his actual addiction — extreme endurance sports. This is a guy who has climbed Everest, runs marathons, tools the mesa on a mountain bike and smoked to relieve the pain of a back-breaking paragliding accident in 2005.

He first got high at around age 17 to calm his nerves before school track meets. “As an athlete in high school, it was just, wow,” he told me. “I use the term ‘enlightening’. ... The only thing in danger, when it comes to consuming marijuana, [are] bags of potato chips. They’re susceptible to damage.”

When I asked for a tutorial on marijuana varietals, he chuckled, and adopted his most indulgent Mr. Rogers tone. “Indica is go-to-sleep marijuana and sativa is clean-your-house marijuana with a smile,” he said.

Johnson’s Wikipedia page said he partook only from 2005 to 2008 to ease his recovery. But he told me he still smokes, from time to time (though he recently stepped down as CEO of Cannabis, Inc., a Nevada-based firm that intends to sell medical marijuana and recreational weeds in states where pot is legal).

When I suggest that Trump (a teetotaler addicted only to adulation and meatloaf) might benefit from the occasional joint, he nods his head in the affirmative. “Well, perhaps, and that doesn't just apply to Donald Trump,” Johnson said, though he thinks consumers would be too smart to buy Trump-branded weed. “They won’t fall for that one.”

Make no mistake: Johnson, who wants to scrap the tax code and impose an across-the-board 20 percent cut on federal expenditure, including the Pentagon, doesn’t like Clinton’s spend-more approach to government. But his opposition seems more doctrinal and less personal than his dislike of Trump. “At the end of the day, hasn’t Hillary Clinton been the architect of our foreign policy, and how has that worked out?” he asked, pointedly.

And like Weld, his iconoclastic veep hopeful, he’s decidedly meh about her email scandal. “I mean, issues are up for grabs, but, come on,” he said. “Hillary Clinton — is she guilty of her email whatever? Well, was there criminal intent? I don't think so.”

He pivots immediately to Trump, conscious of his need to say something symmetrically soothing. “Donald Trump occasionally says something that makes sense,” Johnson added. “I don't want to say everything that he says doesn't make sense, but occasionally he does say something. Maybe you can tweak my memory as to what that might be.”

That said, he knows that the key to viability — and that Shangri-La of 15 percent — is to Hoover up disaffected Democrats who are, after all, more receptive to his pro-immigration, pro-gay marriage, and weed-for-all platform. And those votes currently reside in the political domain of one Bernard Sanders, who is very much working the Gary Johnson side of the street.

“I want everybody listening to this go to the website, ISideWith.com,” Johnson said. “You answer 60 questions and at the end … you get paired up with the presidential candidate most in line with your views. … My results are, of course, that I side with myself all of the time.”

Next, the punch: “But next in line of all the candidates left, I side most with Bernie Sanders, at 73 percent. Now, obviously, we come to a T in the road when it comes to economics, but on the social side, we’re simpatico,” he said.

“Bernie Sanders supporters are going to have, in my opinion, the same results that I’ve got. Take that quiz and guess what? Next to Bernie, I’m going to be your guy.”

Actually, Johnson is nobody’s guy but his own. And his goals are, by his own lights, bigger than the nasty little business of American politics.

“I think that everybody is in search of Zen … and very simply, Zen is just being in the moment,” he said. “So, whatever gets you there, whether that’s music, whether that’s golf, whether that’s reading, writing, you name it, find out what it is — your job [is] liking what it is that you do.

“For me, athletics puts me in the moment — mountaineering,” he added. “Hey, when all you've got to think about is shitting and pissing and drinking and sleeping and breathing, you know what? That’s a wonderful state to be in.”