When Aaron Sorkin catapulted The West Wing onto American prime-time television on September 22, 1999, the prestige of the American presidency was in tatters. The impeachment of Bill Clinton was a raw wound. A year later, an agonizingly drawn-out election recount ended with George W. Bush in the Oval Office, despite losing the popular vote.

The West Wing’s vision of liberal, populist President Jed Bartlet (played by progressive mensch Martin Sheen) and his staffers served as a fantasy bubble for battered Democrats—an addictive weekly dose of idealism, collegiality, gravitas, and quasi Shakespearean speeches delivered on a dime. It seems to be providing the same pain-killing function for a new fan base of viewers seeking shelter from the Trump presidency in Netflix binges or by listening to the contemporary podcast The West Wing Weekly.

Sorkin’s show reputedly inspired a generation of young people to plunge into politics—almost certainly disappointing them when they discovered that the world’s problems couldn’t actually be solved by endless rounds of speed-walking and talking. The West Wing boasted a spectacular ensemble cast that included Allison Janney, Rob Lowe, Bradley Whitford, Dulé Hill, Richard Schiff, and Stockard Channing. But the deep talent well extended to even the secondary roles: a teenage Elisabeth Moss played the president’s daughter, and there were delicious turns from Mary-Louise Parker, Anna Deavere Smith, John Amos, Jimmy Smits, and Lily Tomlin. Despite some strong supporting roles for women and people of color, Sorkin had a propensity for white patriarchs—a tendency further reflected in The Newsroom.

When The West Wing launched, Sorkin was best known for writing the movies A Few Good Men, Malice, and a rom-com called The American President. He had no plans to write for TV. Then his agent arranged a lunch with producer John Wells. A friend of Sorkin’s had already suggested that he pitch a series along the lines of The American President, but without the romance. Sorkin would end up creating and writing The West Wing and comedy series Sports Night simultaneously, though he left President Bartlet and company after the fourth season and (he says) never watched it again: “It just felt like I was watching someone make out with my girlfriend.”

Rewatching The West Wing today, it seems at once charmingly dated (a story line in the pilot revolves around pagers!) and surprisingly contemporary. Over the years there have been whispers of a West Wing revival, and Sorkin himself says he’s open to the idea—but only if he can find a way to do it “that wouldn’t feel like A Very Brady Reunion.”

Sorkin talked with me about the legacy of The West Wing, the white supremacist threats that inspired a plotline, his recent scuffle with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and how Donald Trump is a badly written character.

Vanity Fair: So it’s been 20 years since The West Wing hit the screen. The pagers are outdated now, but there are so many elements that feel very current. The pilot has refugees being turned away, and the finale of the first season has a mass shooting by a white supremacist. I feel like America is playing on a loop.

Aaron Sorkin: I’m afraid that you may be right. You think you’ve made progress, but there’s been this tremendous backslide.

Do you miss having that pulpit in this era?

There are times when I think, Gee, I’d love to have a show right now. It would be nice to remember what a confident White House looked like—a group of people who may slip up from time to time, but they are always reaching for the stars. And they’re competent. It’d just be nice to see that again.

Our current president seems to see the White House as a TV show in his own mind.

Well, as a TV character, he doesn’t work. I mean, he works as a reality-show character, but he’s certainly not a hero. He’s not an antihero either—with an antihero, whether it’s Richard III or Richard Nixon, there’s always a feeling that there are layers and complications. There’s always a feeling of, Oh, if only someone had just loved him, he would’ve gone on to great things. That doesn’t exist with Trump.... In the Trump West Wing, there just seems to be a lot of mustache twirling and cowardice.

So going back to your West Wing. Tell me a little bit about the genesis of the series.

The idea behind the show was that in popular culture, by and large, our leaders are portrayed either as Machiavellian or dolts. I thought, Why not do a workplace show in this very interesting workplace, where the people are just as dedicated and just as competent as doctors on the hospital show and cops on a cop show and lawyers on a David Kelley show? Let’s show the two minutes before and after what we see on CNN. And throughout the first season, it became more aspirational. It became about a father and his adult children.

The Bill Clinton–Monica Lewinsky scandal was unfolding around that time?

I delivered the pilot of the script, and the next day the Monica Lewinsky news broke. So that was one of the reasons why the show was delayed a year…. We all felt it’s just a little hard to do something that takes place in the White House right now. The other reason was because at that time, Don Ohlmeyer was running NBC, and they weren’t crazy about the show. Shows about politics, shows set in Washington, had a track record of failure, so NBC was happy to stick it in a drawer. The Don Ohlmeyer regime had some strong ideas. For instance, in the pilot, as you mentioned, there are Cuban refugees in boats, and Josh is pleading their case, wanting to send them help. The NBC executives wanted Josh to actually go out in a boat and pick them up out of the water. They wanted that kind of action show.

The characters do sometimes go out into the world and get involved. And President Bartlet calls himself a “liberal and a populist.”

He’s like my father a little bit. I’m glad that so many people felt that he was relatable, because he’s a Latin-speaking, Nobel Prize–winning economist from New England who was a professor. So on paper he is everything half the country is supposed to despise.

He sounds a bit like Elizabeth Warren when you put it that way.

You’re right about that. Listen, sometimes the characters went out of the comfort zone of the four walls of their office, but they didn’t ever become action figures. The action almost always happened off-screen, whether it was a war or a rescue. And what we’re watching isn’t the bullets; it’s the humans that are discussing strategy and consequences and what it means.

Rewatching it in 2019, you see this idealistic, educated president and contrast that with Trump. But back at the original time of viewing, it was enjoyed by its liberal fans as both a respite from and a rebuke to George W. Bush’s White House.

Our first season was Clinton’s last year, and then the rest of the series was George W. Bush. At times there were episodes inspired by something that had happened in the Bush White House, but I tried hard not to do episodes that were ripped from the headlines. I thought those were still disposable. I also wanted our guys stay in their parallel universe. The moment when the parallel universe fell apart was 9/11. I couldn’t have everyone in the world [go through 9/11] except these characters.

You reacted very quickly, didn’t you? Your 9/11-inspired episode (“Isaac and Ishmael”) aired three weeks later.

I lobbied hard for our third-season premiere to be postponed indefinitely. I didn’t think that we were in the mood to see Josh and Donna flirting. Why do we care about this world in which 9/11 hasn’t happened? In the Bartlet administration, why aren’t there security concerns? Why isn’t Sam writing a rousing speech about unity, and about how our darkest days are always followed by our finest hours? But I was turned down in my request to postpone the premiere indefinitely.

So what I did instead was an episode that wasn’t part of our timeline. It didn’t pick up where the last season left off. It was its own thing. And in this episode, we wouldn’t say 9/11; we wouldn’t say bin Laden or al-Qaida or anything. We just knew that something terrible had happened recently, and that the White House has been on lockdown. Within that framework, I just wanted to imitate the sound of the conversations that we were having at our kitchen tables.

Diane English told me that when she originally made Murphy Brown, Republican politicians would send in their headshots, vying for cameos. Did people do that for The West Wing, even though it existed in a parallel reality?

They did—including a candidate for president, the governor of Texas. His campaign called, and they wanted him to play a pizza delivery guy on the show. They thought, Wouldn’t it be funny if they order a pizza and George W. Bush comes and delivers it?

The speed of the dialogue in the series became infamous.

You know what? I didn’t realize that I wrote dialogue at a faster pace than is common until people started telling me. It all felt normal to me. It was just the way that I wrote. My parents started taking me to see plays starting from when I was very little.… I care as much about what a line sounds like as I care about what it means.

The velocity of the walking combined with the talking makes it feel even faster.

The walking is a result of the talking. Tommy Schlamme, both with Sports Night and The West Wing, recognized that basically I write people in rooms talking, and that there needed to be some visual interest on television. So he would say to me, “Hey, this scene that’s all in Brad’s office, would it be okay if they left the office, walked down here, got a cup of coffee, dropped this report off on a desk, walk by Leo’s office, and then came back?” That’s how that started, and then I started writing the scenes that way.

You did a cameo on 30 Rock in which you did a walk-and-talk with Liz Lemon. After having to do it yourself, did you feel bad for inflicting it on your actors?

Yes! And oftentimes there were long lists of names, places, and dates that I’d give them. Sometimes they had to speak in another language…. [laughs and dissolves into a coughing fit].

A lot of the actors in that cast are great comedy performers. Did you know from the start that you wanted the show to be funny?

I have always felt that if you can tell a serious story “funny,” you’re doing yourself a favor. And that with the kind of hubris that these characters have, there was going to have to be some comedy. There are a lot of funny people in the cast. Listen, Brad Whitford is never so happy as if he can be in a pair of yellow waders trying to sit down at his desk chair and missing.

Vanity Fair ran a piece about how The West Wing influenced a lot of the people who would take over D.C. during the Obama years. The show presumably gave them an unrealistic idea of what government would be like.

Maybe they can change government into something closer to that unrealistic idea. That’s the whole point about writing heroes who don’t wear a cape. You can say, Okay, I get that only a TV show can solve the world’s problems in an hour...but in terms of decency and character, why can’t we do that? Why shouldn’t that be first of all the definition of patriotism, and not hugging a flag or some kind of bumper sticker patriotism?

On recent shows like Veep and House of Cards, the White House inhabitants were monstrous—cynical, manipulative, devious, interested only in power.

I want to be very clear: I am a big fan of Veep and House of Cards, okay? But again, that goes back to how in popular culture, our leaders are portrayed either as Machiavellian or dolts. It was Machiavellian in House of Cards, and both Machiavellian and dolts inhabited Veep. And The West Wing just wasn’t that kind of show.

The idea of a West Wing revival pops up from time to time. Will it happen, and what would it look like?

That’s the problem: I don’t know what it would look like. Sure, I would love to do it. I love these people, and I’d love to revisit the area, especially nowadays, but I simply don’t have an idea that wouldn’t feel like A Very Brady Reunion. I think, in a way, you also have the same problem as [we had with 9/11], which is: Do you create a world in which there is such a thing as Trumpism, or not? And if the answer is not, then what do we care? No matter where you are on the political spectrum, we all have a problem, which is that half of us are looking at our world completely differently than the other half of us. We’re living in a world of just crude politics, corruption in plain sight, out-and-out lying, and a staggeringly, breathtakingly dumb person in the Oval Office.

The TV environment is completely different now than in 1999 when The West Wing launched.

It used to be that at nine o’clock on a Wednesday night, there were three or four things that people would watch. Now there are a hundred, and they’re watching them anytime they want. The new generation, which has made The West Wing a hit on Netflix, thinks that The West Wing is on right now...

The third question I ask someone after I’ve met them is: Do you watch Succession? I’m evangelical about Succession. But it used to be that everybody would be watching Succession; you wouldn’t have to even ask, “Did you see it last night?” [pauses] Are you watching Succession?

I’m definitely watching Succession.

How great is Succession? Holy cow! Theater in America is on television right now. The bad news is there’s so much of it. At the time that The West Wing was on, which wasn’t that long ago, there was no such thing as a television show you’d never heard of. Now you probably haven’t heard of most shows.

In a way, that’s why it’s so interesting to look back at a show like The West Wing, which was such a unifying force at the time—even if that meant unifying some people in rage.

It’s very unusual on television to hear words like Democrat and Republican, or at least it was in 1999 to 2000, when the show went on the air. Television, since its infancy, has been about alienating as few people as possible, which is why in those early sitcoms of the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, people didn’t have a religion. You absolutely didn’t discuss politics…. So I knew that with a show that was talking about Democrats and Republicans...was going to turn off a certain segment of the population.

What I didn’t imagine was [what happened after] there was an episode in the first season, where Elisabeth Moss’s character [Zoey] kisses Dulé Hill’s character [Charlie]. She’s white. He’s not. When I wrote that, I didn’t think that it was a bold moment. It was just a sweet kiss between two characters who had been heading in that direction for a while, and that’s all. And suddenly horrible mail came in...using terrible language and threats. And that’s the reason why [in the two-part second-season premiere] the shooters were from a fictional organization called West Virginia White Pride, a white nationalist group.

Did you have to get security for the cast?

There were some times when I got them security, when Warner Bros. felt it was warranted. But aside from the scary part of the letters written in crayon, when I got that letter that I just described, for instance, after the kiss, I wrestled with whether I should show it to Dulé. It seemed patronizing not to, so I did show it to him. He taped it up on his dressing room wall and wanted to see all the letters like that. He ended up wallpapering his dressing room with these terrible letters.

Earlier this year, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted about a comment that you made about some of the new Democrats acting like young people. She wrote, “Let’s dig into ‘gravitas,’ [because] it’s an ambiguous word, selectively applied. Ever wonder how expression that’s feminine, working-class, queer, or POC isn’t deemed as having ‘gravitas,’ but talking like an Aaron Sorkin character does?”

What happened there was I was on Fareed Zakaria’s show, and I think he was asking me what I thought about the declared candidates for the 2020 race…. I said I like the new crop of young people that have been elected. Then I added, “Now they need to stop acting like young people.” I wasn’t referring to AOC. I was actually referring to—I think it was Rashida Tlaib who said, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” That’s what I was referring to, just because I hate it when the good guys give Fox—that’s all that they were going to cover, the language that she used…. I was also referring to this clapback culture, these public spats on Twitter, especially public spats with people who agree with you.

I wrote [AOC] a letter after that, explaining all the ways in which I’m on her side, but that I want to win. I want these things to become reality. I want to win, and let me know what I can do to help, is all I said. It was the silliness of the Twitter wars that I was referring to. And it was ironic that one got started as a result.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.