During an exit interview in November, 2016, just weeks after the election, David Remnick asked President Obama who the future leaders of the Democratic Party might be, and who could realistically challenge Trump in 2020. A surprising figure Obama named was Pete Buttigieg, the mayor of South Bend, Indiana, who, at the time, was only thirty-four. In recent weeks, Buttigieg’s profile has risen dramatically, and he has collected campaign donations at a surprising clip, considering that he lacks the national profile of a senator or governor. The field of Democrats running for President is enormous, but Buttigieg stands out for a few reasons. He’s a Navy veteran, born and raised in the city he governs, so you could say that he has real heartland credibility. He’s also the first gay Presidential candidate with a real shot at the nomination. Buttigieg is a millennial who graduated high school in the year 2000 and, if elected, would be the youngest President by far. In a conversation with Remnick for The New Yorker Radio Hour, the Democratic hopeful discussed his experience as a small-city mayor, a Navy officer, and a gay man.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

Listen: David Remnick interviews Pete Buttigieg on The New Yorker Radio Hour.

David Remnick: Mr. Mayor, I have to begin with a kind of good-news, sort of bad-news question. One day after Barack Obama met, that one time, with Donald Trump, I had an interview with the outgoing President, in the Oval Office. It went for a couple of hours. The White House was like a funeral parlor. We talked a long time about the election just past. And, at one point, I said, “Mr. President, what do you have on the bench? What does the Democratic Party have on the bench?” And he did a long kind of Obamaian pause, and then he said, “Well, there’s Kamala Harris, in California.” And I think he kind of made a routine mention of Tim Kaine, and then he said, “And then there’s that guy in South Bend, Indiana. The mayor. I think he was a Rhodes Scholar,” he said, and then he couldn’t quite place the name, or maybe he didn’t dare try to pronounce it. What’s been your relationship with Barack Obama?

Pete Buttigieg: You know, I first spent a little time with him when he travelled to South Bend. He was on his way to Elkhart—Elkhart County, as you know, the R.V. capital of the country, and something of a bellwether economically, and went through horrible circumstances in the Great Recession. And so he was coming toward the end of his Presidency, to take a bit of a victory lap and remind everybody how successful the auto rescue had been, because Elkhart was doing great by the end of his term, and they had arranged for me to spend some time with him in the vehicle as he went from South Bend airport over to Elkhart—about a half-hour that we got to chat. It’s the only time in my life I wished that commute would be longer instead of shorter. And that was the first time, other than a handshake or a photo, that I’d really visited with him. But really, you know, obviously, I admire him, and really admired a lot of the people we brought in to work with him.

How do you think his Presidency fell short, if it did, and maybe led to a Trump Presidency, if it did?

Well, I think his Presidency was very constrained. In a tactical sense, of course, it was constrained by the partisan makeup of the Congress, and, I would also argue, by, in many cases, bad faith on the part of the Senate and House Republicans, who, it turned out, were not very interested in compromise or in working together. And that also created some constraints that I would say mattered not in the naïve sense of then making the wrong call but just literally how far you could go. I mean, for example, if you want to—if you wish, as I do, that there had been at least a public option as part of the A.C.A. You got to remember that it was only for a matter of months that he even had sixty votes in the Senate to work with. So, I think they they went as far as they could in the direction of progress, given a lot of institutional constraints. But I think there was an even bigger kind of global constraint that affected that Presidency, which was that it was still part of a forty-some-year era that you might call a Reagan consensus, when a conservative or neoliberal economic worldview really dictated how both Republicans and Democrats were supposed to behave. So for some of the same reasons that, you know, a Republican President like Nixon was doing a lot of pretty progressive things on domestic policy that would have still placed him a little bit on the right side of the spectrum, as it was in America at the time, the seventies. You know, Democratic Presidents in my lifetime, Clinton and Obama both, I think, have been operating in a fundamentally conservative framework, and it’s something we should remember when we think about the shortcomings of the things that didn’t happen that we wish would.

Well, you know, you said this very recently, to the Washington Post, I believe it was: Donald Trump got elected because, in his twisted way, he pointed out the huge troubles in our economy and in our democracy. At least he didn’t go around saying that America was already great, like Hillary did. Now, I know you’ve backtracked a little bit about that latter bit, but you’re saying something pretty large there. What is it?

Yeah, so, I know that that quotation got circulated a lot. It’s something I said last year and I think appeared in the profile in January, and it got circulated, unfortunately, a little bit without context. But the point I’m making here is that a Presidency like this doesn’t just happen. A figure like Donald Trump doesn’t just become possible unless there’s a real sense of brokenness in our political and economic system that makes it possible, not only for racist and xenophobic appeals to get more traction but also for a lot of people who have been historically Democratic to vote a different way, almost as a vote to burn the house down. And, you know, you saw a lot of people—people aligned with labor, people who had been in the habit of voting Democratic—who were really angry at the system, or what they perceived the system to be, both economically and politically. And so, even though pretty much everything the President said wasn’t true, when he said, for example, you know, that elections were rigged, in the sense of, you know, busloads of immigrants coming to vote, obviously, that was false, but it’s not false that elections are rigged, in the sense that the districts are drawn to where most of their outcomes are decided in advance and politicians choose their voters, rather than the other way around. You know, when he said the economy was rigged, obviously, I think it’s clear to many of us that he’s among the class of people that helped to rig it. But there was also some truth to that. And so, to the extent that we, the Democratic Party, in 2016, were perceived as saying that the system was fine—so he was saying, I’m going to blow up the system, and we were saying, Trust the system. A lot of people, especially people in industrial Midwestern communities like mine, didn’t find our message to be convincing because the system really had let them down, in the sense that, you know, the rising tide rose, just as we were promised it would, but most of our boats didn’t budge.