Former Governor of Massachusetts Bill Weld has formally announced that we will run against President Donald J. Trump for the Republican presidential nomination in 2020.
According to local television station WMUR, two months after Weld launched an exploratory committee to pursue the possibility of challenging President Trump for the nomination, he is now an officially declared candidate.
Weld made the announcement Monday evening in a three-minute video. In the video, a narrator recounts Weld’s experience leading Massachusetts and shows clips of some of Trump’s most least flattering comments.
In an interview following the announcement, Weld said he is not in the race simply to hurt Trump’s reelection chances.
“I think it’s do-able,” Weld said. “The aim is to defeat him, and I wouldn’t feel right if I allowed him to go unchallenged.”
Weld, 73, called himself a “happy warrior,” while saying that Trump has “demons.”
“Why does he feel obligated to attack little people personally?” Weld asked.
Weld Is a Long Shot
The video says that Weld was the first Republican governor of Massachusetts in more than 20 years, calls him a “crime fighter” who as governor cut taxes, reformed the welfare program and balanced the state’s budget, while making the state safer. The video shows clips of his television advertisement during his 1990 campaign for the office.
Weld is a long shot to defeat the president for the party’s nomination, and has been a long time Trump critic. His video announcement also included some of Trump’s most controversial moments, from the infamous “Access Hollywood” video of Trump using lewd language to boast of his sexual groping and kissing of women without their consent, to the president’s comments in the wake of the violence in Charlottesville, Va., where he said “there were very fine people on both sides” of the clashes between supporters and protesters of the city’s Confederate monuments.
At that announcement, as he headlined the “Politics and Eggs” speaking series in New Hampshire, he called Trump “compulsive” and “irrational” and argued that “we have a president whose priorities are skewed toward promoting of himself rather than toward the good of the country.”
He also lamented the state of the GOP, arguing “the president has captured the Republican Party in Washington. Sad. But even sadder is that many Republicans exhibit all the symptoms of Stockholm Syndrome, identifying with their captor.”
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.
While for this run, Weld likes to paint himself as a Republican loyalist, he only recently returned to the Republican Party after serving as the 2016 Libertarian Party nominee.
There is no reason whatsoever to think that he would fare any better in a bid to take down the wildly popular incumbent president.
