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Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld announced Monday he is officially entering the race for president, becoming the first Republican to challenge President Donald Trump in the 2020 race."Ours is a nation built on courage, resilience, and independence. In these times of great political strife, when both major parties are entrenched in their 'win at all cost' battles, the voices of the American people are being ignored and our nation is suffering," Weld, who had previously formed an exploratory committee, said in a statement."It is time for patriotic men and women across our great nation to stand and plant a flag. It is time to return to the principles of Lincoln -- equality, dignity, and opportunity for all. There is no greater cause on earth than to preserve what truly makes America great. I am ready to lead that fight."In 2016, Weld was the vice presidential nominee on the Libertarian Party ticket with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. He previously served two terms as the governor of Massachusetts in the early 1990s.Weld ran for Senate in Massachusetts in 1996 and lost against John Kerry. He later moved to New York and in 2005 unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor.Weld told CNN's Jake Tapper on "The Lead" that it would be a "political tragedy" and he would "fear for the Republic" if the country had six more years of Trump as President."I really think if we have six more years of the same stuff we've had out of the White House the last two years that would be a political tragedy, and I would fear for the Republic," he said."I would be ashamed of myself if I didn't raise my hand and run," he told Tapper.Weld said he will not run as an Independent if he does not win the Republican nomination.Trump enjoys a nearly 90% approval rating among Republicans, according to Gallup. When asked about the President's historically high approval rating and whether Weld believes he can beat him in the primary, Weld said, "Yeah, I do.""Particularly in New Hampshire, where I'm spending a lot of time, it's one vote at a time and one voter at a time, and you gotta meet 'em," he said.Weld described himself as a "Republican who works across the aisle and gets things done," and said he would have a "bipartisan Cabinet" if he won the presidency.He said he is an economic conservative, adding that the US "deserves to have some fiscal restraint and conservatism and cutting spending in Washington, DC."He added that he feels Trump "mocks the rule of law.""I spent seven years in the Justice Department trying to keep the politics out of law enforcement, he's trying to put it in," Weld said.He added: "He has difficulty conforming his conduct to the requirements of law. That's a ... serious matter in the Oval Office."Weld also slammed Trump's attitude toward climate change and his confrontational style toward the press.And, while Weld sees blame on both sides of the aisle for the divisiveness coming from Washington, he said Trump is the "grand master" of the problem."I've never seen such bitterness in this country," he said.
Former Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld has officially launched his campaign to be president of the United States. Weld, a Republican, is the first in the party to step forward and challenge President Donald Trump. Unhappy with the direction of his party in the era of Trumpism, Weld is trying to do something about it."It is time for patriotic men and women across our great nation to stand and plant a flag. It is time to return to the principles of Lincoln -- equality, dignity and opportunity for all. There is no greater cause on Earth than to preserve what truly makes America great," Weld said in a statement.This is much more than any other Republican can say in 2019. For all the head-shaking and side comments about why they don't like President Trump, most in the GOP have stood by him and turned a blind eye to his record. Many congressional Republicans keep registering their support for the White House by voting in favor of Trump's policies and avoiding most direct confrontations.Meanwhile, countless Republican voters continue to support Trump (though fewer voters now identify as Republicans) -- and the conservative press is generally supportive of what he does. With Gallup reporting that Trump has around a 90% approval rating among Republicans, the notion of defeating him is difficult to imagine.Theoretically, Weld's challenge could have an impact on Trump's re-election. Major intraparty challenges to incumbent presidents can be damaging for either party. Sometimes they help persuade an incumbent president to step out of the race, such as President Harry Truman in 1952 after Sen. Estes Kefauver's strong performance in New Hampshire, or President Lyndon Johnson in 1968 after Sen. Eugene McCarthy came in a strong second in the same primary.When former California Gov. Ronald Reagan tried to defeat President Gerald Ford in 1976 -- coming close with a campaign that called on the party to move toward conservatism rather than playing to the political center -- he dampened enthusiasm for Ford going into the general election and helped create a path for Jimmy Carter to succeed.Sen. Ted Kennedy's campaign in defense of traditional liberal values was not enough to push him over the finish line in the 1980 Democratic Convention. It did, however, seriously deflate the enthusiasm of the party's base when President Carter had to face off against Reagan in November.President George H.W. Bush had to deal with former Nixon speechwriter Patrick Buchanan in 1992, who called for the party to embrace the "culture wars" with zeal and zest. The conservative populist couldn't defeat Bush, but he helped strengthen the skepticism and frustration that existed among the right with this Republican president.Of course, the problems that incumbent presidents have faced were caused by many factors besides the primary challenge. The fallout over Vietnam, for instance, was much more relevant to Johnson's decision not to run for re-election than McCarthy's competition. And Carter would have struggled in 1980 because of the stagnant economy and Iran hostage crisis regardless of Kennedy. But the challenges certainly didn't help.It is unlikely that Weld's primary challenge will be able to have the same impact. To be sure, he is a serious political figure. He won 71% of the vote in his 1994 gubernatorial re-election, a serious number within the still heavily Democratic Bay State. Before that, he served as US attorney general for Massachusetts and headed the criminal division of the Justice Department under Ronald Reagan.However, he has had trouble in other runs. He was unsuccessful as the vice presidential nominee for the Libertarian Party in 2016 with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson. He lost in a bid for the Senate in 1996 to John Kerry and in 2006 when he ran for the Republican nomination as governor of New York.But more daunting is the fact that the solidity of Republican partisan loyalty is so strong these days, and the party has shifted so much in a Trumpian direction, that it is unclear whether there is any space within its tent for voters to support someone other than the President.Trump's base is in such a frenzied state of mind that some Republicans are surely fearful about what they would need to withstand if they took on the President. The fact that none of the higher profile potential opponents -- John Kasich, Jeff Flake, Larry Hogan or Chris Christie, for instance -- have decided to throw their hats into the race so far speaks volumes about the President's strength within his shrinking party.Weld's fate in the primary is a major test for where the Republican Party stands at this turning point in its history.
MANCHESTER, N.H. – Bill Weld acknowledges that he’s the longest of long-shot candidates as he prepares to challenge President Trump for the GOP primary nod.But the former two-term Massachusetts governor points to another one-time GOP long shot who twice won New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary – the late Sen John McCain, R-Ariz.In an interview with Fox News on Tuesday – the day after he formally launched his campaign to be the GOP's 2020 standard bearer – Weld pointed to McCain’s tireless style of politics, which fueled his primary victories in New Hampshire in 2000 and again in 2008, when he captured the nomination.“John McCain made that work here twice. Not once but twice. He was the underdog both times,” Weld pointed out.Weld – he's so far the lone GOP politician to announce a primary challenge to Trump's re-election campaign -- faces a sharp uphill climb to defeat the president, who remains popular with Republican voters in New Hampshire and across the country.Still, Weld said he can beat Trump, emphasizing that he’s used to being the underdog, as he was in his state's gubernatorial election some 30 years back.“When I ran for governor of Massachusetts, I was less than an asterisk,” Weld said. “And I went out to every event all summer long and into the fall and I was often all by myself. And little by little, people said, ‘This kid keeps showing up.’ And the same thing would be the plan here” in New HampshireMinutes before he sat down with Fox News, Weld was implementing his plan, going table to table to talk with voters at Manchester’s Airport Diner, seen by many as a must-stop for White House hopefuls. He had just come from the fabled Red Arrow Diner in downtown Manchester, his first stop in a two-day swing through the Granite State.Weld was in New Hampshire just two days after Trump’s re-election campaign announced it had raised $30 million in the first three months of this year -- it now boasts a war chest of more than $40 million.Asked how he can compete, Weld said that “my calls have been going well. I’m been making some finance calls. I’m calling some people who were supporters of Mitt Romney, people who were supporters of Jeb Bush, and they’re supportive.”He added, “I don’t think New Hampshire is a primary you can buy.”Weld has made visits to the state almost every week since announcing in February that he was setting up a presidential exploratory committee. And he said that’ll continue.“I could be in New Hampshire all day, every day and still sleep in my own bed in Massachusetts every night,” he said.Independents – some 40 percent of the state’s electorate – are allowed to vote in either the Democratic or Republican presidential primaries, which could help Weld as he tries to pull the ultimate upset in the GOP nomination race.“I’ll probably be here part of every week between now and next February,” he said. But Weld also insisted that his message could also resonate on the West Coast and in some of the Rocky Mountain states.Weld, who’s been a very vocal critic of the president, told Fox News: “I think I can do a better job than he can. I can cut spending. I have the political will to do it. I did that in Massachusetts. ... Mr. Trump, whatever his other virtues might, he is not an economic conservative.”What's more, Weld said he "wouldn’t turn my back on climate change and global warming the way Mr. Trump has. ... The Republican Party should not put its head in the sand on climate change.”The president's re-election campaign adviser and daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, said the president’s 2020 team hasn’t been worried at all about a Republican primary challenge.“I don’t know why someone would be dumb enough to challenge Donald Trump,” she told Fox News recently when asked about Weld. “I don’t know why anybody would waste their time and money on the Republican end trying to challenge the president. We’re not worried about that at all.”Weld also isn’t making any friends with the New Hampshire GOP.State party chairman Steve Stepanek points to Weld’s insistence that he wouldn’t support Trump in the 2020 election, and to Weld’s time in 2016 as the Libertarian Party vice presidential nominee (Weld re-registered as a Republican earlier this year), and asked, “How can he call himself a Republican.”But Stepanek – he was New Hampshire co-chairman of Trump’s 2016 campaign -- said Weld would get a fair shake, adding that “essentially I am neutral in the primary as far as Governor Weld is concerned.”Former Ohio Gov. John Kasich, another vocal Trump critic, has also been mulling a GOP primary challenge against Trump. So has Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan, who heads to New Hampshire next week to headline “Politics and Eggs,” another important event for White House hopefuls.“I spoke to both of them in the last few days. Very pleasant conversations,” Weld shared.Asked if he would exit the race if either Kasich or Hogan jumped in, he quickly answered: “I wouldn’t get out. I’d compete, but it would be an honorable competition.”He said multiple primary challengers “could be good for President Trump, sharpening him up a little bit so that he wouldn’t take everything for granted. ... It might be harder for President Trump to duck debates if there were three other candidates here."
Bill Weld, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts who is mounting primary challenge to President Donald Trump, insisted Wednesday he is running to win his party's presidential nomination, not just weaken Trump.Weld, who ran against Trump in 2016 as the vice presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, outlined his strategy to take on the president in an interview on CNN’s “New Day." The former Massachusetts governor said his candidacy would hinge in part on winning the first in the nation New Hampshire primary, then focusing on New England and the mid-Atlantic states before doing a swing through the West and the Rust Belt.While he acknowledged winning in the South would be “tough,” he asserted that “the rest of the country is fair game” and argued that if he was able to beat expectations or even pull off an upset win in New Hampshire it could have “a domino effect on other primaries around the country — almost an electrical effect.”Weld also suggested that California moving its 2020 primary up from June could serve as an advantage to him as well.“Mr. Trump and California don't seem to get along well,” he said, so “I think there is promise there.”He said the “last question” was the Rust Belt, an area Trump dominated in 2016 and one that Weld said Democrats “ignored” toward the end of the last presidential campaign. Weld specifically predicted he could win in Wisconsin.When “New Day” host Alisyn Camerota pointed out that history was not on Weld’s side for winning the nomination, he countered by pointing out that in the last five elections when a sitting president faced a primary challenger, the incumbent president lost reelection, compared to winning reelection when they did not face a primary challenge.But, he said, it was not merely his intention to damage Trump’s standing in the general election.“My strategy that I just laid out for you, that’s a strategy to win. That’s not a strategy to weaken anybody. And, you know, I'm in this, I think, for the best reasons,” he said.Weld made his longshot bid official earlier this week, offering GOP voters the alternative that multiple prominent Never-Trump Republicans have asked for, though none have yet endorsed the former governor.Weld asserted that part of his path to the GOP nomination lies in winning over independent voters or Republicans millennials, Gen Xers and suburban women that the GOP has lost ground with. He said Wednesday he’d been encouraged by voters he has spoken to since announcing his intention to run in February.Weld also suggested he could garner votes from liberal Democrats indifferent toward their own sprawling primary field.“One of the questions is how many Democrats are going to say, I would like to cast a vote directly against Mr. Trump instead of throwing a dart at one of 15 — very good — but still one of 15 Democratic candidates,” Weld argued, saying he’d heard as much from voters.Regardless, Weld faces a primary in which the party machinery is firmly under Trump’s control. The Republican National Committee in January passed a resolution pledging its “undivided support” to Trump, and Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel warned last February that though any potential challengers “have the right to jump in ... they will lose horribly.”Trump hasn’t yet commented publicly about Weld’s challenge, and his campaign told CBS News on Tuesday that it was “unconcerned” about Weld’s candidacy.
MANCHESTER, N.H — As soon as former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld walked into his first New Hampshire diner as an official Republican presidential candidate Tuesday, he spread his arms and proclaimed, “I am back.”Two people clapped in a nearby booth. The rest of the crowd at the Red Arrow Diner appeared oblivious to the tall redhead in a leather jacket adorned with a Weld 2020 button.Weld, who served as Massachusetts governor from 1991 to 1997, announced Monday that he would become the first — and possibly only — challenger to President Trump in the GOP primary.His campaign marks the first time since 1992 that a sitting president has faced a primary challenge, but it also tacks on another chapter in Weld’s often-meandering political career. After failed bids for an ambassadorship to Mexico and governor of New York, Weld endorsed Barack Obama in 2008 and had a spot on the national Libertarian Party’s ticket in the last presidential election.Now, along with a campaign camera crew; his wife, Leslie; former New Hampshire Republican Party chair Jennifer Horn; and Bob Durand, who served as Weld’s secretary of environmental affairs, Weld visited three diners in the state to launch his presidential campaign.A handful of supporters greeted him at each stop, and Weld chatted up other diners about sports, the weather, and tenaciousness of the fisher cat, an animal native to the Granite State.“People are usually like, ‘What is a fisher cat?’ But [they] don’t realize how ferocious they can be, sort of like me and this campaign,” Weld said.Along the trail, Weld took questions from voters. He confirmed he would pardon Edward Snowden but said he was unsure about WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange. He said he’s supported gay rights since he served as governor.Bill Chisholm, a Trump supporter from South Carolina who was visiting his brother in the area, expressed skepticism about the longevity of Weld’s campaign.“You don’t really believe you will be in for a while. This will be short-lived,” Chisholm said.“No, I think we will surprise some people,” Weld responded.Indeed, Weld was often asked about how he would take on Trump. In an exchange with another Republican at the Red Arrow Diner, Weld joked he would probably have to come up with a nickname for Trump — perhaps a reference to Don Corleone, the fictional character from The Godfather?“I mean, he is going to have a doozy [of a nickname] for me, are you kidding?” Weld said.In addition to hiring Stuart Stevens, the lead strategist on Mitt Romney’s 2012 presidential campaign, and Horn, Weld said two other New Hampshire staffers have accepted offers to join his campaign in May. He also plans to open an office in Boston’s financial district next month.In an interview inside a Nashua diner, Weld said his first goal for his nascent presidential campaign was to win the New Hampshire primary, but he also plans to raise more than $12 million and run a national campaign.He’ll focus on all six states in New England, the mid-Atlantic region, and the Pacific Northwest, he said, and he plans to make his first trip to California later in the month.But when asked whether his goal was to prevent Trump from winning reelection, he replied, “my goal now is to win the New Hampshire primary.” Weld said his model is former senator John McCain of Arizona, who won the New Hampshire primary twice, including in 2000, when the state party favored his opponent, George W. Bush.“There is no substitute for going over the party apparatus to win over voters,” said Weld, who followed a similar strategy when he won the GOP nomination for Massachusetts governor in 1990.But the party has changed over the last four decades. The ranks of the New Hampshire Republican Party are decidedly supportive of the president. The new chairman, Steve Stepanek, has disparaged Weld for running as the Libertarian Party’s vice presidential nominee in 2016.“I am in second place,” Weld joked about the two-person contest. “Kamala Harris would love to be in second place.”
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld (R) warned in an interview that aired Monday on "Rising" that millennials will have to pay the price for what he said was President Trump's lack of action on the growing deficit and climate change."We've had 2 1/2 years almost to see what he does, and I, for one, don't think it's a pretty picture," Weld, who is the only GOP challenger to Trump in the 2020 presidential primary so far, told Hill.TV hosts Saagar Enjeti and Krystal Ball last week. "Part of what's not pretty is that the president has seen spending go up, or gone right along with spending going up, to the tune of a trillion-dollar deficit every year," Weld said. "His most recent budget added $7.9 trillion to the deficit. Admittedly, it was a multiyear budget, but it gets us up to $30 trillion of deficit.""I think that raises a big issue of fairness because you know who's going to pay for that? The millennials, you guys," he added. "My generation's not going to pay for that, and the burden is going to fall on you all."Weld also pointed to the issue of climate change."The burden of climate change is going to fall on you all if nothing is done, and [those are] two of the major reasons I'm running," he said.
Former Massachusetts Gov. William Weld, who is challenging President Trump for the 2020 Republican presidential nomination, knocked the president Friday as someone who would "rather be a king."“Let’s be honest, the president wants to be reappointed president by the Republican National Committee, and he doesn’t want any interference in that hallowed process,” Weld said on CNN, citing a recent leadership purge at the Department of Homeland Security and an ongoing feud with House Democrats over a slew of oversight investigations. “He looks like he would rather be a king than a president who had to work to earn and preserve the trust of the American people.” Weld has repeatedly hammered Trump as primary season gets underway, saying last month that he has “lost the capacity to govern” in the aftermath of special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation.The Massachusetts Republican has said Trump should be indicted, citing 10 “episodes” that Mueller detailed of possible obstruction of justice by Trump into the special counsel’s and other investigations into Russian election interference in 2016. “The argument against impeaching now is a purely political argument, that we don’t want just a circus between now and 2020, we want the president to be held accountable for he’s done and left undone,” Weld said. Weld, a former prosecutor, said last week that he would have indicted Trump after Mueller’s report was released, slamming Attorney General William Barr for saying there was insufficient evidence to do so.“AG Barr has erred in both his opinion that the President could not be indicted and in his clear attempt to frame a narrative that favors and protects the President,” Weld tweeted as Barr testified before the Senate.
Former Gov. Bill Weld announced on MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell that he’s officially behind impeachment proceedings.“I’ve been slow to come to there conclusion, but I’ve finally come to the view that it is time,” Weld said Wednesday. “I won’t say past time. But it’s time for the House Judiciary Committee, not the whole House to launch an inquiry, not take a vote but an inquiry into impeachment of this president.”He explained that it was for two reasons. His first reason is the laundry list of former federal prosecutors that came out saying that Trump obstructed justice. He noted it wasn’t ten or even 100, but 1,000 former federal prosecutors. He called it “overwhelming” and that as a federal prosecutor, he agreed with it and signed the document.Secondly, he said that people lost sight of what the timeline was for the Nixon impeachment. It was a very long process, and if Congress doesn’t act now, it might be over before they can act.“Lawrence, the unstated premise of your question I think is that nothing’s going to change after the House committee launches its inquiry,” Weld continued. “Inquiries have a way of unearthing information. And voters generally if new information comes to light, they’re going to pay attention to it.”