SEABROOK, S.C. — Spanish moss hangs like streamers in the muggy August heat as Mark Sanford pulls into his family farm, driving a 2006 Suburban that seems too dilapidated for a former governor, too spacious for a single man.
He is pulling a trailer.
Sanford has come here the week before Labor Day, because, as he put it, “I need to pick up some stuff.” Also, the hour-plus trip from his home in Mount Pleasant will give us uninterrupted time to talk.
On this day the 59-year-old Republican has not yet announced that he is running for president, although the president is acting as if he has, enthusiastically tweeting about “Mr. Appalachian Trail.”
Last year, in the heat of a primary race, the president tweeted that Sanford, the former South Carolina governor and congressman, “is better off in Argentina.”
Ten years past that scandal, Sanford clearly doesn’t agree.
“It felt like Rome was burning, every single day.”
He’s no longer engaged to the Argentinian woman that he once famously called his soulmate, no longer married to the wife he betrayed. He’s tried to escape that shameful chapter of his life — heaven knows, he’s apologized enough — but he’s learned, like Bill Clinton before him, that there’s no statute of limitations for ridicule.
He got it when he ran for Congress in 2013 and won a fourth term, temporarily silencing the wags who said his political career was over. He’s prepared for it again, “if I decide to run,” a phrase he has used all day, as people pat him affectionately on the back and get up from their meals to shake his hand.
“You gonna run?” asked a man selling peaches by the side of the road. “You need to get Trump out of there.”
Sanford laughed. “I don’t know,” he said. “I’m still struggling with it.”
The iffyness was amusing, in light of what we’d come to pick up: furnishings for his latest campaign headquarters, a grimy beach cottage smeared with graffiti.
For any other man, the ramshackle cottage, the head-shaking odds, could be a metaphor for how far he’s fallen.
For Mark Sanford, it’s just a sign that he’s back.
Down on the farm
The higher you climb, the farther you fall, and Sanford fell hard and fast in 2009, going in the space of one week from a rising-star Republican with a picture-perfect family and genuine prospects for the presidency to an ostracized adulterer whose all-too-public musings about love turned him into a national punchline.
Ten years ago, he was pronounced politically dead. But then there was a rustling in that coffin, and Sanford emerged, chastised, repentant and seemingly forgiven, at least by his sons and a meaningful portion of the South Carolina electorate.
America loves a redemption story, and redemption stories play especially well in the South, which, after Utah, has the nation’s highest percentage of weekly churchgoers, Sanford among them, even back when he was behaving badly.
Some in his district remain skeptical. “I used to think of him as a ‘Mr. Smith goes to Washington’ character. But he changed, as most politicians do, over the years,” a former supporter told me.
Sanford has changed; that, he admits. But he believes he’s changed for the better. “I know something about grace,” he says.
So I’m eager to hear the story, how he got from There to Here. He obliges, even though he’s not especially eager to tell it; that particular water, to his mind, being under the bridge.
“Here’s what I know,” he says, as we’re driving down the two-lane coastal roads that lead to what he calls “the farm” and what most everyone else would call “the plantation.”
He is wearing a short-sleeved khaki shirt, with noticeably wrinkled sleeves, and faded blue jeans. His tan would make a dermatologist cringe. He is personable and solicitous, frequently asking if the car’s temperature is OK. I’d give him five stars on Lyft.
“I look at pictures of myself back then, as RGA (Republican Governors Association) chair, being asked to speak around the country, to raise money for this or that. In the eyes of the world, I was an up-and-comer,” he said.
“I look at those pictures now, and I’m thinking, I was just a child. I didn’t know anything about anything. And oddly, I have more to offer as a human being, in terms of judgment, perspective, grace toward others, empathy, a whole range of things that makes me a better human being, a better leader, than I’ve ever been before.”
He pauses, and then, sounding like someone who does not really think he will be president, says, “But I’ll probably have a smaller canvas to paint on for the rest of my life, as well. But that’s the mysterious journey called life.”
Say what you want about his sins, once they were exposed under the hot lights of the South Carolina State House, in the news conference mocked around the world, Sanford owned them.
“What had always worked so well for me on my way up was disastrous on my way down.”
The apologies started with that stream-of consciousness monologue delivered on June 24, 2009, the same day that a reporter confronted him disembarking from a flight from Argentina, although his staff had told the public Sanford was hiking on the Appalachian Trail.
He apologized for 18 minutes in that news conference, and for much of the next 18 months, to the chagrin of his family and his friends.
He was sorry in handwritten notes to supporters and reporters, in speeches at Rotary Clubs and church dinners, to people he met on the street.
“People started to tell me, ‘Stop with the apology tour.’”
But there was much to be sorry about, including the six-day disappearance when even his staff didn’t know where he was and various ethics violations related to travel were revealed, for which he ultimately paid $74,000 in fines.
That Sanford was wrecked by “the destruction of ‘09,” as he calls it, was never in question.
He wept through the inculpatory press conference. He spoke of soul mates and love stories and shame. Three months later, when his wife moved back to Charleston with their sons, the Governor’s Mansion in Columbia felt more like a prison than a home during the remaining 17 months of his term, Sanford said.
Meanwhile, the Legislature was trying to impeach him (it only got as far as censure), and the state Ethics Commission had launched an investigation into his travel and use of campaign funds.
“It felt like Rome was burning, every single day,” he said.
But within the inferno were moments of grace.
“I was in Sumter, South Carolina, on my way to a meeting, and I was going up the sidewalk, and I’m thinking, at this point, if I make eye contact with a woman, I might be stoned to death.
“I’m sheepishly looking down at the ground because some woman’s coming at me, and finally, we get to the point of contact, and I look up and there’s this heavyset black woman and she puts her arms out, and she says, ‘You need a hug.’ And she envelopes me in this hug, and I lost it. I’m crying like a baby.
“I can give you a hundred stories like that. There is a remarkable reservoir of human grace that exists.”
Always a Christian, Sanford clung to his faith after his wife filed for divorce, and his governorship ended. He had a close circle of advisers, most of them men of faith, and he started listening to the sermons of a New York Presbyterian pastor, the Rev. Timothy Keller, whose books include one called “The Prodigal Prophet.”
One sermon in particular resonated with Sanford. It was called “Your Will, God’s Will,” and in it, the Rev. Keller talked about how people can’t be told what their faults are; they have to be shown.
Sanford had been shown his faults, as had been the world. He had come to believe that the ordeal made him a leader because “you learn a lot more in the downs than you do in the ups of life.” For a while, it seemed as though his constituents agreed.
He left the governorship in 2011. Two years later, after the scandal, he was a congressman again, winning election and a return to Washington. He was back.
Then, in an upset that Politico called a “stunner,” he was beaten in a 2018 primary by Katie Arrington, a state legislator and Trump supporter.
“He got caught napping in that race against the Arrington girl,” said Neal Thigpen, a retired professor of political science at Francis Marion University, and the venerable dean of political observers in South Carolina.
Thigpen said that Arrington shrewdly realized “there were enough Trumpites in the district to win in a low-turnout situation,” and she went hard after Sanford, with the president’s help.
Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., went to South Carolina to campaign for Arrington, and on Election Day, the president tweeted his support and said Sanford was missing in action and “was better off in Argentina.”
Indirectly, then, the president cost Sanford his congressional seat; it might seem that there’s a score to settle in the upcoming race.
Trump was in the ring even before Sanford formally announced on Sept. 8, tweeting Aug. 27 that “three stooges” were running against him: “One is ‘Mr. Appalachian Trail’ who was actually in Argentina for bad reasons.”
But the president will need to hit harder, and more creatively, if he wants Sanford to stand down.
Games people play
Sanford, the longtime budget hawk, isn’t so much running against Trump as he is the federal deficit, which he believes is an impending catastrophe that will sink America sooner rather than later. Even carrying 10-year-old baggage, he bears an impressive resume.
At 59, Sanford is a youngster compared to the president and other serious contenders. He is fit, articulate, unfailingly polite. He looks years younger than his age and has good hair. More importantly, in a race that will be punishing, Sanford has learned to absorb blows like the palmetto trees that are the emblem of his state.
In 1776, when British troops fired on a fort at the mouth of Charleston Harbor, palmettos repelled the fire. The wood is so spongy that cannonballs could not penetrate the logs.
The fort stood, the British sailors retreated, and today South Carolinians slap images of palmettos on everything from license plates to beer cans.
There are palmettos of varying heights outside Sanford’s “game room,” which, unlike “the farm” it is on, is not a jaw-dropping understatement.
We have come here, to this cabin in the woods, three people on one four-wheeler, after touring the stately brick house that is the heart of Coosaw Plantation. The house has more history than the cabin and less pain; it is the gracious epicenter of Sanford’s childhood, the place where a demanding surgeon-father drilled into his four children lessons of frugality and working a job, any job, until you’re spent.
Sanford had his boys help build the cabin, and the bridge that leads to it. “After all the destruction, I needed to build something,” he says, unlocking the door.
As advertised, the game room contains games: a pingpong table, a pool table and air hockey. But it also functions as an extremely remote closet, storing everything Sanford can’t bring himself to throw away.
Sanford’s former wife donated scrapbooks, journals and other sentimental detritus of their marriage to the College of Charleston where it comprises “The Jenny Sanford Collection.”
Her former husband piles his stuff here.
There are photos of Sanford and his family with presidents, movie stars and dictators; front pages of newspapers announcing his wins; board games, CDs, pictures drawn by his children. Amid the celebratory bric-a-brac, there is a little frame of pain that most people would have long since thrown away. A picture of Sanford at the infamous news conference, surrounded by microphones and cameras.
“I keep it around to remind me. To never go there again,” he says.
Jenny Sanford, whose 2018 wedding was featured in Vogue magazine, declined an interview request, saying in an email, “I really have no interest in any press or other involvement in his presidential campaign.”
David vs. Goliath
Two weeks before his announcement, Sanford was telling anyone who asked that he had not yet made up his mind about running for president; that he was talking it over with advisers, friends, and his sons, who range in age from 20 to 27.
Everyone was asking, from the mechanic at the shop where he picked up a dirt bike, to the MSNBC anchor who said, somewhat snidely, “Are you the right person to make a character argument against the president?” (He blew past the question.)
“I’m still thinking about it,” Sanford was telling everyone. “It’s a big decision.”
Decisions, and their consequences, are ever-present on his mind.
Raised an Episcopalian, Sanford’s religious faith has become more important to him in the past 10 years. There was never a “born-again” moment, no lightning strike on the road to Damascus. His is a faith planted by believing parents, grown and nourished with spiritual advisers and with private study. He attends an interdenominational megachurch, Seacoast, that has 14 campuses, including a 2,500-seat sanctuary in Mount Pleasant, the suburb of Charleston where Sanford now lives.
It’s the same church he and Jenny attended together when they were married.
Seacoast’s pastor and founder, the Rev. Greg Surratt, counseled both husband and wife in the aftermath of the affair. He calls Sanford “a principled, sincere guy” who now attends church alone, or with one of his sons. He doesn’t say if he would vote for him. “There are a lot of politicians who attend our church,” he said with a laugh. One can never be too careful.
But he allows that he believes Sanford’s faith, and repentance, is genuine.
“I don’t think that Mark uses faith, church, whatever, to advance his politics,” the Rev. Surratt said.
In leisure, when he’s not riding his bike or running on the beach, a baseball cap pulled low to deflect attention from his celebrity, Sanford reads books on economics and listens to sermons on YouTube. He figures he’s listened to Keller’s sermon “Your Plans: God’s Plans,” delivered in 2004, a hundred times, maybe more, in the past 10 years.
The 42-minute sermon, based on verses from Proverbs, is about how people can make wise decisions with God’s guidance.
Sanford says he made mostly “solid, left-brain” decisions in his life until he made a couple of phenomenally bad ones late in his 40s, such as going away on a Father’s Day weekend and lying about where he was. The disaster that followed came about, he says simply, because “I fell in love with somebody I shouldn’t have fell in love with.”
The train wreck of a news conference, mocked gleefully by people who couldn’t find South Carolina on a map, was the consequence of bad decisions, he says, as was the 2010 divorce, which resulted in the sale of the family’s oceanfront home on Sullivan’s Island, and a new family dynamic that finds the boys with their mother on Christmas, their father on Thanksgiving.
He asks to go off the record when he talks about what that feels like.
Could it be that Mark Sanford is done bleeding in public? He acknowledges that the tendency did him no favors.
“All my life, I was an open book. Let’s throw it out there on the table, let’s talk about it, let’s kick ideas around,” he said, then added, a little more quietly:
“What had always worked so well for me on my way up was disastrous on my way down.”
Jenny Sanford remarried in 2018; of that union and their current relationship, Sanford says he’s glad she’s happy and that he wishes her well. As for his relationship with Maria Belen Chapur, he says simply, “It’s over.” He’s not seeing anyone seriously now.
Lean and athletic, Sanford is a man who likes to keep moving — he walks quickly in front of other people, not looking to see if they’re keeping up, and often orders his meal by phone before he gets to a restaurant, so as not to waste time waiting for food to be prepared.
And now he’s moving on to a presidential race in which most analysts say failure is guaranteed, and he agrees, at least publicly. “I’m not delusional,” he said.
Is the run another bad decision? And if so, what would the consequences be?
It wouldn’t be the end of a remarkable winning streak; that occurred when Arrington beat him in the primary.
The upset showed that Sanford still suffers pockets of disdain within his own party, although he is greeted with what seems to be genuine affection as he travels across the Lowcountry.
Arrington, who lost in the general election to Democrat Joe Cunningham, said coldly of Sanford, “he has ostracized (himself) to the point where there will never be a seat at the table for him.” And in July, after Sanford first floated the idea of running against Trump, the head of the state’s Republican Party, Drew McKissick, said in a statement, “The last time Mark Sanford had an idea this dumb, it killed his governorship. This makes as much sense as that trip up the Appalachian trail.’’
A poll conducted Aug. 9-12 by Charleston’s daily newspaper, The Post and Courier, in conjunction with Change Research, found that just 2 percent of South Carolinians said they would vote for Sanford in a primary against Trump, who garnered 95 percent.
But Sanford has been at 2 percent before — back when he was first running for Congress in 1994. When he won, the front page of the Charleston newspaper proclaimed “Last night, David slew Goliath.”
Could it happen again?
‘Red light blinking’
To slay the Goliath of 2020, Sanford would have to overcome more than the jokes. He would have to overcome his own message, which appeals to doomsday preppers who find validation in bad economic news, but is a tougher sell to most everyone else.
His message is this: The U.S. is precariously overextended, the party is over; belts must be tightened, no matter how much it hurts. Here is a quote: “I believe that unless we do something about the deficit, it has the capacity to undermine the financial foundations on which all of our businesses, jobs and savings rest.”
That was Mark Sanford 25 years ago.
Here he is today, talking to Boyd Matheson, opinion editor for the Deseret News: “We have a financial hurricane coming our way, based on the buildup of debt and accumulating deficits and government spending. And it’s almost as if it’s the three-monkeys routine: I hear no evil, I speak no evil, I see no evil. Nobody’s talking about it.”
Saying that “it’s not just the yellow light blinking; it’s the red light blinking,” he added, “If we wait for the financial markets to bring us back to financial reality, if we don’t take action politically, that process has historically been brutal for all of us and our respective hopes and dreams.”
Critics may find other bones to pick with Sanford, but they can’t say he veers off message.
In fact, he’s largely been a one-issue pony since 1992, when Sanford heard James Dale Davidson, founder of the National Taxpayers Union, speak at a forum at Hilton Head Island.
Davidson, who runs a Florida-based investment firm and describes himself as a “crisis investor,” gave an apocalyptic speech about how debt threatens America, and as journalist Tony Bartelme wrote in “Second Chances: The Mark Sanford Story,” “Sanford left the room a changed man.”
Among Davidson’s books are 1987’s “Blood in the Streets: Investment Profits in a World Gone Mad and 1994’s The Great Reckoning: Protecting Your Self in the Coming Depression.”
His message, delivered to Sanford at the invitation-only retreat called Renaissance Weekend, fell on fertile soil that had been cultivated by Sanford’s father, a Florida heart surgeon who was determined to teach his sons the values he learned growing up on a farm in North Carolina during the Great Depression.
When Sanford was a child, the family mostly lived in Fort Lauderdale, but during the summer and on other holidays, they encamped at the “farm” — an old plantation house on 3,000 acres abutting the Coosaw River, which flows into the St. Helena Sound, and then the Atlantic.
To Sanford, it’s simply “the farm,” the site of his warmest childhood memories, a family retreat, the sacred resting place for both of his parents. Online, it’s an estate, an “historic wedding venue” offered for $3,500 in summer and fall.
The dual purposes of Coosaw Plantation illustrate the anomalies of Sanford’s life. His world, both as a child and as an adult, has flowed from this gracious epicenter where his sons, siblings, nieces and nephews ride horses, hunt, fish, entertain and gather for holidays.
But it’s also a place where his father’s Depression-era values took hold. The boy who slept in a room with his siblings because there was only one room with an air conditioner became the man who carried two pigs into the South Carolina State House to illustrate “pork” spending, and tried (unsuccessfully) to reject $700 million in federal stimulus money. The boy who spend days on a tractor long before he had a driver’s license became the man whose zeal for work won’t let him consider retiring as he approaches his 60s.
Besides, somebody’s got to talk about the national debt, which is $22 trillion and climbing, now bigger than the gross domestic product, the total value of goods and services produced in the country.
Sanford and his advisers figure, baggage and all, he’s just the man to do it. Plus, he’s still got more than $1 million in an old campaign account, which can be used in any federal race. And if there’s anything Mark Sanford hates, it’s waste.
New office, old values
Without naming names, Sanford says he was encouraged to run by a “broad coalition of people who’ve been tied to me politically,” as well as people he encounters as he goes about his everyday life, traveling in a 13-year-old Chevrolet Suburban that contains, among other things, a sledgehammer, running shoes, work boots and an odometer registering 330,000-plus miles.
He says a friend called after his primary loss last year and said, “God just cleared your calendar for a reason.”
“That was the beginning of the drumbeat,” he said. “It’s gone on since then, and I’ve been conflicted for a number of reasons” — Trump’s current standing among Republicans among them, and the continued ridicule and vitriol the campaign would invite, turning Sanford into “a human pinata.”
The sermon that he likes helped with the decision. In it, the Rev. Keller explains that God expects people who are growing in wisdom and maturity to make decisions, even if the outcome of the decisions are unclear and unsettling.
If Sanford believes he can be elected president in 2020, he isn’t saying. Publicly, he acknowledges seemingly insurmountable odds, and says a bruising campaign would be worth the scars just to direct the national conversation onto the topic he’s cared most about for 25 years.
“The fact is that we are marching — not even walking, but marching — into a financial crisis that’s going to hurt all of us. If we don’t watch out, it could represent the beginning of the end of our civilization.
“I think the situation is much more dire than people think.”
Like Sen. Elizabeth Warren, Sanford has a plan, but it does not offer forgiveness of student loans and free tuition. The plan he would implement is one he touted several years ago, which he calls “the Penny Plan.”
Formally, it was the One Percent Spending Reduction Act of 2016, and had it passed, the measure would have required that federal agencies cut 1% of their budgets. “Do that for the next five years, and we would have a balanced budget,” Sanford wrote for The Hill in 2016.
After six years, the plan would cap federal spending at 18% of the GDP.
That’s still his plan, with a few tweaks, and it’s pretty much what Sanford wants to talk about in this campaign, with an occasional aside into the wisdom of governing-by-tweet.
Again, he’s never off message. The bills he introduced in the House were primarily about spending: cutting subsidies, cutting foreign aid, asking taxpayers on their returns if they wanted to contribute $3 to reduce the national debt.
Whether voters will respond to this sort of blinders-on governing remains to be seen. Trump enthusiasts are Trump enthusiasts largely because he speaks their language and talks about things they care about: abortion, immigration and jobs. They eagerly await another Trump nominee for the Supreme Court.
Sanford, conversely, “appeared uninterested in many hot-button social issues that fired up conservatives” in South Carolina, Bartelme wrote. That hasn’t changed. And likely won’t.
“If” he were to run, he said.
Whither the futon
But he is running; of course, he is running. Trump knew, even if Neal Thigpen didn’t yet.
The stuff we were there to pick up, the reason for the trailer, was jammed in a blazingly hot storage shed in the woods on the other side of the farm, past the guest houses and the horse barn.
Among the junk there were dozens of “Sanford for Congress signs,” which he left.
He retrieved a couple of old metal tables and chairs, and most conspicuously, a large whiteboard.
“That whiteboard looks like it would be great for mapping out a presidential campaign,” I said.
He laughed.
“You think so?”
From there, the Suburban bumped across the brush to yet another cottage, which he entered alone and then emerged with an old twin mattress. Another was retrieved, along with two twin metal bed frames.
His shirt was soaked with sweat after strapping everything onto the trailer, but when the photographer asked for one more shot, Sanford wiped his hands on his jeans and said “sure.” Without consulting a mirror or smoothing his hair, he obligingly climbed atop a pile of broken concrete and looked nobly into the distance like an exiled king.
Thigpen had mused that, for all Sanford’s talk about farms and frugality, he could never shake the air of “upper-class panache.”
“He looked like somebody who ought to be playing polo rather than running for office,” he said.
Sanford, ever the enigma, doesn’t play polo. He’s never even owned a new car, he told me.
And when we arrived at the graffiti-filled cottage on Sullivan’s Island, a few blocks from where he lived when he was married, he made clear that he’s still the man who would turn away $700 million in federal stimulus money if it were offered. (Even though that, like the marriage, turned out badly: The state Supreme Court ruled that he had to accept it.)
Into the house, he lugged the table and chairs from previous campaigns, the bed frames, and stained and torn mattresses that other people would have thrown out.
His campaign staff might prefer the Marriott down the road, but on long nights, this is where they’ll be sleeping. The comparably luxurious futon that Sanford famously slept on in his congressional office to save money is back at Coosaw Plantation, in the game room.
On the last week of August in 2020, delegates to the Republican National Convention will convene in Charlotte, North Carolina, to crown their nominee, which Sanford says will likely be Trump. The president has joked that he is the “chosen one,” but Sanford seems content to be the redeemed.
“The point being, I know something about grace. I’ve experienced it, it’s remarkably powerful, and it changes the way you look at life.”
Correction: An earlier version incorrectly stated that Sanford served three terms in Congress. He served a total of six, which includes an abbreviated term he won in a special election in 2013.