By contrast, underneath Sasse’s Nebraska-nice façade is a guy who’s actively embracing radical ways to blowtorch D.C.’s sclerotic institutions. “The Republican party doesn’t have any identity,” Sasse says. “Trump could attack it because it was rotten. The Republican party leadership isn’t about anything big.”

Sasse, by contrast, does have some big ideas. After idly lamenting how Trump narrowly bested Marco Rubio in Virginia on Super Tuesday, Sasse mutes Fox News and outlines his latest thought experiment: “I’ve been playing with the idea of proposing a constitutional amendment for retention elections. When you have Congress at an 11 percent approval rating, and you have incumbency rates of 90 percent, obviously what that tells you is that there’s no campaign finance reform that’s going to make people vote against their own interest. There should have to be an election, just straight-up, it should simply be a public election—do you want your congressman and senator back or fired?” he says. “A stand-alone yes or no question. It’s 51 percent of the people wanting you back against no one. ‘Throw the bums out’ would win constantly right now. That’d be great. Functionally, it would get you more than term-limits.”

He continues, “What that would really do is not create the radical chaos of all these people losing, it would create all sorts of people running for office with a purpose. They would run for the purposes of solving a big problem like an entitlement crisis by essentially pre-pledging to be in Washington for one term. I think it has the potential to be transformative of the electorate and expand the pool of lay governance.”

But before he can get around to hatching constitutional amendments, Sasse is pretty occupied sounding the alarm about Donald Trump. The following evening, Trump supporters would show up at a speech Sasse was giving to the D.C. GOP and attempt to shout him down.