Ron Wyden of Oregon, the second-most senior Democrat in the US Senate, has written a book. Not your average political memoir, it’s called It Takes Chutzpah: How to Fight Fearlessly for Progressive Change, and it does indeed look like a campaign handbook, a stylized megaphone blaring its title on the cover.

“I’ve read a lot of politicians’ books,” Wyden says. “They’re just deadening because there’s a lot of bragging. You know, ‘I passed this, and I passed that.’ Then there’s a section where they say, ‘I’m being urged by so many people to run for president.’ And then they feign un-interest, and then the third section is, ‘Here’s my presidential exploratory committee.’

“And I said, ‘I don’t want to do that. I want to write a story about something called chutzpah. It’s about being bold and gutsy and taking on the odds and I’m going to use the examples I gave, which were from my story.’”

Within a book largely written in “seat 17C, Alaska Airlines Oregon to Washington, exit row aisle”, there is indeed a memoir. After all, at 75, Wyden has quite a story to tell. He was born in Wichita, Kansas, to Holocaust refugees, his father the reporter Peter H Wyden. A promising basketball player until injury struck, the younger Wyden became a lawyer then a young crusader for older Americans, via the Gray Panthers; a congressman from Oregon from 1981 to 1996; and a senator since, a chair of the energy and finance committees.

But his big idea is: “Everybody’s got some DNA that’s got some chutzpah in it. That’s the American story. Look at all the founding fathers, Martin Luther King, all kinds of people. And I pick up such interesting stuff … a couple young people have said, ‘Haven’t seen a book written by you elected types quite like this,’ And I said, ‘You made my day.’”

Wyden defines political chutzpah as “the orchestration of instruction, observation, practice and collaboration to bring goals to life”, mixed with the willingness “to self-confidently embrace the possible, despite the odds”. He also offers Ron’s 12 Rules of Chutzpah, from No 1: “If you want to make change, you’ve got to make noise,” to 12: “Political capital doesn’t earn interest and is worth nothing if you don’t spend it.”

He has lived by his own rules. In the House in 1994, his questioning prompted seven tobacco CEOs to declare under oath that nicotine was not addictive, a seminal moment in the fight against big tobacco. In 1996, he and Chris Cox, a conservative California Republican, introduced the amendment to protect internet providers on free speech grounds that became known as Section 230, a measure now under heavy fire from rightwing groups. In the Senate, in 2007, Wyden teamed up with Bob Bennett, a Utah conservative, on the Healthy Americans Act, which became the basis for the Affordable Care Act of 2010, AKA Obamacare, beneficial to millions, under fire from the right ever since.

Battle is about to be renewed. Democrats face opponents more than willing to make noise of their own: Republicans in control of Congress, receiving orders from Donald Trump, heading back to the White House.

On the page, Wyden laments: “In recent years, the perception of chutzpah has been misappropriated and warped by loudmouth Donald Trump and his enablers in politics and the media, who engage in what my chief of staff calls ‘self-aggrandizing fuckery’ and pass it off as chutzpah.”

In person, he says: “I think chutzpah, used by Donald Trump, is malicious. It’s designed to hurt, to bait people, to bully. That business about, ‘I can shoot people on the street, and my supporters will be for me.’ You really want that in a president of the United States? That’s just malicious. So I devoted a few pages [to that] and and my wife said: ‘You didn’t put me to sleep completely.’”

That’s good, because Wyden’s wife knows books – she is Nancy Bass Wyden, owner of the Strand Bookstore in Manhattan – in the same way Wyden knows Republicans, having represented a state he describes as independent-minded if not outright “ornery” long before Trump entered politics a decade ago.

Wyden speaks softly except when making a point strongly held, when his voice rises and his hands seemingly seek a desk or dais to pound. In the same senatorial vein, he deals easily with questions that aim for controversial answers, talking in general terms or deflecting to something else entirely.

For instance: when Democrats held the Senate, progressives seeking to advance voting rights protections pushed to eliminate the filibuster, under which most legislation requires 60 votes to pass. Wyden was among them. Now Republicans have control, 53-47, such a powerful tool for the minority might not seem such a bad thing. Does Wyden still support reform? Yes, but instead of outright abolition he wants a return to the standing filibuster, where senators seeking to block a bill had to physically talk it down.

More pressingly, Trump’s cabinet nominations are set for Senate hearings. Wyden isn’t to be drawn much, though his opposition to Pete Hegseth for defense secretary, Robert F Kennedy Jr for health, Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence and other controversial picks can probably be assumed. More pertinently, he isn’t keen to name Republicans he thinks might defy Trump and oppose such nominees. Mention of Susan Collins, the moderate from Maine, elicits a fond story about how she “hasn’t missed a vote for a gazillion years”, and how “there are times when somebody else has got appendicitis or something, and we just move on, but if there’s a big snow in Maine, we just don’t have any votes so that Susan can keep her record going”.

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Wyden’s career (and his book) feature much such old-fashioned aisle-crossing. But that approach may well be strained anew in the next four years, when it comes to the supreme court. In his first term, Trump installed three hardline rightwingers who duly delivered on long-held conservative priorities, including removing federal abortion rights and ruling that a president – Trump – can be immune from prosecution. Wyden has been a leading voice in opposition, particularly regarding ethics scandals involving justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito and as the author of the Judicial Modernization and Transparency Act, a bill for serious court reform. It might seem quixotic to press on now Trump has won but Wyden’s own rules of chutzpah demand it.

“I have a proposal and it still makes sense,” he says. “You stagger it so that over the next few years, you add the justices [expanding the court from nine to 15], and you give some balance. No one president gets to decide it all.”

As Wyden speaks, reports swirl about a phone conversation between Alito and Trump, concerning a former clerk seeking a job but taking place just as the court considered Trump’s request to delay sentencing for his hush-money criminal conviction in New York, a request ultimately rejected (although Alito was one of four justices supporting his request).

“Certainly the appearances are horrible,” Wyden says of the call, his voice rising a little. “The substance that is known is horrible. And Chief Justice [John Roberts] doesn’t seem to care.”

To be cynical: surely Roberts, an institutionalist but evidently a conservative first, doesn’t have to care?

“No, I don’t agree with that,” Wyden says, still animated, before making the case that popular pressure really might move the needle towards reform.

“A lot of people think political change starts in Washington and then trickles down. I’m just the opposite. I’m bottom-up. Those are the successes that I’ve had, not by being an insider in Washington. My biggest triumphs are from the grassroots. I think that the public is increasingly unhappy about these just brazen conflicts of interest in the court. And I think this [the Trump-Alito call] will be seen as another one.”

Asked to consider the best outcome for progressives regarding the court, from four more years under Trump, Wyden looks back to grassroots action – and chutzpah.

Change happens, he says, “when issues really take off, when senators’ phones … really light up. And I think the court has always been a place that has been treated with great admiration and respect, but I think they [Trump, Republicans and the conservative justices] have really chipped away at it. I mean, it looks almost like two systems. If you’re a billionaire, you’re on your way. If you’re not, it’s a different story, and it takes a big toll.

“So it’s getting that story told, that so much of what you’re seeing and hearing about really moves against the reverence that we’ve historically had for the court. Now [people are] looking at it differently. Look at the abortion issue. You had a bunch of judges go to the witness table and say Roe v Wade [which protected the right] was precedent. First chance, that’s gone. It needs to be pushed back.”

• It Takes Chutzpah is published in the US by Hachette