Ex-Mass. governor tosses hat in ring
Bill Weld, the maverick former governor of Massachusetts, announced Friday that he would form an exploratory committee to challenge President Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s 2020 nomination, presenting himself as a dissident voice in a political party that has abandoned its mainstream roots.
Weld, 73, is the first Republican to announce he will run against the president. But Weld is unlikely to pose a major threat to Trump. A moderate who ran for vice president in 2016 on the Libertarian ticket, Weld’s candidacy might be more of an act of protest than a conventional national campaign.
But appearing in New Hampshire, Weld called it a moral duty to stand against “the hard heart, closed mind and clenched fist of nativism and nationalism.”
“I hope to see the Republican Party assume once again the mantle of being the party of Lincoln,” Weld said, according to video posted by the news station WCVB. “It upsets me that our energies as a society are being sapped by the president’s culture of divisiveness of Washington.”
Weld had made little secret in recent months of his interest in challenging Trump in 2020, either by running for the Libertarian Party’s nomination or by contesting the Republican presidential primaries. He met repeatedly with Republicans organizing opposition to the president, and this month he was reported to have changed his voter registration back to Republican.
Several other Republicans are contemplating challenges to Trump in the primaries, including Gov. Larry Hogan of Maryland and former Gov. John Kasich of Ohio. Trump’s aides have taken the threat of a primary challenge seriously enough to undertake a close review of the rules for the Republican nominating convention and to begin scrutinizing state party chairs and potential convention delegates for political loyalty.
Weld, a former federal prosecutor from a prominent Boston family, has spent most of his career as the kind of Republican that used to dominate politics across the Northeast. A fiscal conservative who has long supported gay rights and abortion rights, Weld could have some appeal to moderate Republicans who feel alienated from their party as it continues to swing far to the right.
But partisan Republicans also have ample reason to regard Weld with suspicion. He endorsed Barack Obama for president in 2008 over John McCain, before flipping back to the Republican side in 2012 when his friend and longtime ally, Mitt Romney, was the GOP nominee.