By the time I got to interview Bernie Sanders, he was very tired, and honestly so was I—not that I could really complain. The Vermont senator had spent the wee hours of Saturday morning on the Senate floor watching his Republican colleagues pass a tax bill that Sanders called "the biggest act of thievery in the modern history of this country." After sleeping only two hours, Sanders hopped on a flight to Dayton, Ohio, to speak at the first rally of the day. It was part of his weekend-long "Protect Working Families" tour, organized by progressive organizations MoveOn and Not One Penny . He then journeyed to Akron to speak at another rally and got back to the hotel around 11 PM Sunday, where he got in a little shuteye before sitting down for our interview the next morning for breakfast with his staff.

Sanders ordered a single English muffin, lightly patting his belly as he remarked to the table, "I've been eating too much lately." In an hour, the 76-year-old was flying to Philadelphia, then going to Reading, Pennsylvania (in a county Trump won by 18,000 votes), where he would deliver his final speech of the weekend.

I began the interview by summarizing the past two days before asking, "So, uh, how do you do it?" He burst into a long, hearty laugh, bringing some energy to a table full of tired people who (him included) hadn't even had their coffee yet. "You know, I got a job to do, and I do it," he said matter-of-factly. "We believed the bill was going to be voted on Thursday night, and that’s why we arranged for Louisville on Friday evening and Ohio on Saturday and Philadelphia on Sunday... When I make a commitment, I like to keep it, and we had a very good turnout in Louisville and thought we would in Ohio, so I felt it was important to keep that commitment, so I got up early, and we did it."

Sanders's weekend tour, which had the hectic feel of the campaign trail, was just as much about pushing back against the Republican tax plan as it was about looking ahead, presenting voters with a platform that extended beyond, in Sanders's words, merely "saying no to Trump." He advocated for the policies that are familiar to anyone who followed the 2016 campaign: raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour, expanding Medicare to cover everyone, raising taxes on the wealthy, expanding Social Security, switching to clean energy, ending mass incarceration (which he pointed out disproportionately affects people of color), closing the gender pay gap, and standing with immigrants.

What was new, however, was Sanders's emphasis on extending compassion to working-class Trump voters. The three states on his tour all went for Trump in 2016, and it seems likely that Democrats will have to take back at least Pennsylvania, and possibly Ohio, to win in 2020. After the Akron audience booed when he mentioned Trump voters, he said, "Let's not boo anybody. Maybe except Trump." (He was completely OK with the crowd booing Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin, however.)

"The reason [Trump] won Ohio and many other states in this country... [is that] there are millions of people who are hurting," Sanders told the crowd, before emphasizing that Trump campaigned on bald-faced lies—but, hey, we've all been tricked before. In my interview with him the next day, he elaborated on why it's so important to him to address Trump voters with compassion.