Former Massachusetts governor and 2020 presidential candidate Bill Weld says he will not leave the Republican Party if he fails to secure its White House nomination against President Trump, he tells Hill.TV in an exclusive interview.
“I will remain in the party, I’m not saying I would endorse the president,” Weld said when asked what he would do if Trump prevailed in the primary. Weld is currently running a long-shot bid to unseat Trump.
A recent Monmouth University poll found that just 8 percent of Republican and Republican-leaning voters would support Weld in a match-up against Trump. Only another 30 percent of respondents would even consider Weld as their choice.
“Republican voters appear to say ‘no thanks’ as the potential for a nomination challenge to Trump becomes more real,” Patrick Murray, the director of the independent Monmouth University Polling Institute, said in the release of the poll.
Weld countered to Hill.TV that “at the same time 54 percent of all the voters say they’re definitely going to vote against him in 2020, so you don’t get elected that way. Eighteen months is an awful long time in politics, and I think people may wake up to the idea that the current situation in Washington is really not healthy. The president isn’t really joining issue with Congress on anything they’re doing.”
Weld has been a vocal critic of Trump, making the case that the president is morally unfit for office and has perpetrated multiple crimes.
Weld said on Friday that Trump “wants to be reappointed president by the Republican National Committee, and he doesn’t want any interference in that hallowed process,” and that “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.”
– Saagar Enjeti
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