“I Would Vote For Virtually Any Democrat Against Trump”
EVERYBODY, WELL MOST EVERYBODY, KNOWS former Massachusetts Governor William Weld has mounted a primary challenge against President Donald Trump, along with ex-Tea Party Congressman Joe Walsh from Illinois. And everybody knows he and Walsh have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning. Almost 90 percent of Republican voters are sticking with the president. More than half of them believe he is doing a better job than Abraham Lincoln. And to make matters worse, some state Republican parties have already responded by fending off others with canceled primaries.
Weld has a lot to say—and he isn’t shy about saying it—from Attorney General William Barr’s extreme view of executive branch powers to the secret anti-Trumpers in the U.S. Senate.
He’s still worth listening to, in other words.
Weld’s long political career spans five decades, from Richard Nixon’s impeachment and includes stints in both houses of Congress and Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department. Politically, Weld, 74, belongs to a species—the moderate, country club Republican—rarely seen in the wild in recent years, and presumed by many to have gone extinct or at least dormant. His combination of liberal positions on social issues (pro-choice), pro-science views (he believes climate change is a man-made emergency) and fiscal conservatism is a throwback to another era.
He contends that once this president is out of office, either by impeachment or by losing an election, Republicans will look on the Trump years as a bad dream. Even so, he thinks the GOP could be so deeply divided by the Trump experience that it will not survive, but
