GOP’s Weld wants Trump to be removed
Bill Weld, the former Republican governor of Massachusetts, thinks President Trump should be impeached. And he’s not saying that just because he’s running against Trump for the Republican nomination. He’s saying that as a former federal prosecutor who worked on the Watergate case against Richard Nixon.
“I think he should be removed,” Weld told The Chronicle’s “It’s All Political” podcast Tuesday, noting that he worked as a lawyer on the staff of the House Judiciary Committee in 1974, researching what legally constituted impeachment.
Weld said the framers of the Constitution were most worried about two things: “foreign interference in our affairs, and someone who
would corrupt the office of the president by advancing his own personal interests as opposed to the country that he serves first.”
“Both those things are very much present in the Ukraine caper,” said Weld, who was visiting with a campaign contributor in Atherton as part of a threeday swing through California. “So it’s in a way, it’s a classic, quintessential impeachable and removable offense. And that clause in the Constitution is not an afterthought — they needed that there in order to persuade people that they weren’t having a king.”
Assuming Trump survives the impeachment trial, Weld said he thinks his toughest Democratic competitor in November would be a more centrist candidate like former Vice President Joe Biden or Minnesota Sen. Amy Klobuchar. Weld said Trump would probably beat progressives like Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren or Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders, partly because he would incesssantly call them “socialists.” Sanders identifies as a democratic socialist, while Warren has said she is a capitalist.
If Weld isn’t the GOP nominee, he won’t vote for Trump.
“I think he’s too erratic,” Weld said. “So, if it’s just Mr. Trump and a Democrat, I’d have to swallow hard for the two most liberal (Warren and Sanders), but I think I probably could work my way to voting for the Democrat.”
Weld voted for Barack Obama over Republican Sen. John McCain in 2008 and ran as vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket in 2016, which was headed by former New Mexico GOP Gov. Gary Johnson. They won 3% of the vote.
Weld’s presidential campaign hasn’t profited from Trump facing impeachment charges in the Senate. He’s barely charting in the polls, he didn’t make it onto the ballot for a variety of reasons in about a dozen states, and he’s got just $208,043 cash on hand, according to his last campaign finance report. Trump has $83 million in the bank.
Weld’s narrow path to relevance in the GOP nomination contest relies on doing, as he puts it, “better than expectations” in the Feb. 11 New Hampshire primary. If that happens, he says, he’ll “get a little puff of wind.”
He says several states holding primaries on Super Tuesday, March 3 — including California, Massachusetts, Vermont and Colorado — are “attractive.”
They’re attractive because voters in those states might be more receptive to someone like Weld, who is part of a dying generation of moderate Republicans. Weld, 74, who served as Massachusetts governor from 1991 to 1997, supports abortion rights and samesex marriage, and promised to tackle climate change as his “first priority.”
However, Weld’s strategy in New Hampshire is fraught. He’s counting on the 40% of New Hampshire voters who are independents to vote for him in the Republican primary. Under the state’s rules, registered voters can cast ballots in either party’s primary.
But Weld acknowledged that some of those independents “might very well” be more intrigued by casting ballots in the more competitive Democratic primary.
“And the argument I’m making,” Weld said, “is that if you vote in the Republican primary you can be sure that your vote is coming out of Mr. Trump’s total, whereas if you throw a dart at the Democratic field and try and predict who’s going to be the nominee, you’re voting against other Democrats. You’re not just voting against Donald Trump.”
Weld has bigger problems in California, where only registered Republicans can vote in the Republican primary. His connections to the state go back to more moderate former Republican governors including Pete Wilson — Weld cochaired the national finance committee of Wilson’s shortlived 1996 presidential run — and Arnold Schwarzenegger.
“People in the old days used to say that I was a natural for California: progun and progay,” Weld said. But the state Republican Party is far more conservative now, and it now represents just 24% of registered voters in California.