Bill Weld on Nixon, Mueller and How He Plans to Beat Trump in the Primary

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/23/us/politics/bill-weld-donald-trump.html

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William F. Weld and President Trump not only seem to be from different political parties — they seem at times like they are from different planets.

Mr. Weld, the former Massachusetts governor who is challenging Mr. Trump for the Republican nomination in 2020, is betting that there are still enough Republicans and independents who find the president so objectionable that they can be moved do what voters rarely do: defeat the sitting president in a primary.

Mr. Weld supports abortion rights and gay rights, and he wants to talk about issues like climate change, which Mr. Trump has called “a hoax.” He is an intellectual who quotes Shakespeare and the Federalist Papers, which can seem jarring in a political culture consumed with the insults and punch lines on the president’s Twitter feed.

The New York Times interviewed Mr. Weld about the states where he will start campaigning next month, his belief that the president has committed acts far worse than Richard Nixon, and what his high school production of “Julius Caesar” taught him about Mr. Trump’s exercise of power.

The interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Q. You’ve said you were appalled by the Mueller report but also that impeachment is not going anywhere in this Congress. So do you think it’s time to move on and to focus on issues that are more likely to change how people see President Trump, if that’s possible?

A. It’s stated pretty clearly that Mueller found no evidence of conspiracy. Fine. Move on from that point.

The obstruction point is detailed in the report. Indeed, at the end of volume two, they say, “We were unable to form a judgment that he is not guilty of obstruction.” And this is after 80 pages of lurid obstruction of justice evidence, which is well over the bar beyond what Richard Nixon did, well over.

I want to stop there because you worked on Watergate as a lawyer. When you say that what Trump did went beyond the bar of what Nixon did, what do you mean? That’s pretty significant.

A fact that’s gotten too little attention is that a good deal of the analysis that went into the decision by the House Judiciary Committee to vote for the impeachment of Richard Nixon in 1974 was the analysis under what’s called the Take Care Clause.

The president takes an oath to uphold the Constitution. Among his duties specified in the Constitution is that he shall take care that the laws be faithfully executed. Mr. Nixon violated that when he said to Haldeman and Ehrlichman, “We’ve got to stop this Watergate investigation. Tell them it’s national security, so they should just stand down.” That’s failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed.

That’s just one thing. With Mr. Trump you have dozens of things that amount to failing to take care that the laws be faithfully executed. For example, in volume two of the Mueller report, the president is very clearly depicted as instructing senior national security officials, senior national intelligence officials and senior legal officials to lie. And they all say, “Well I can’t say that.” And he says, “Why not?” And they say, “Because that’s not true.” And the president basically says, “Your point?” And that’s just one in a litany of such examples.

You seem to be betting on the idea that character matters to voters more than most Republicans seem to think. But given how much the Republican Party has been willing to overlook with regard to the president’s conduct in and out of office, are there enough people for whom character still does matter?

Many people are saying today, and correctly so, we don’t want people just to bash Mr. Trump. We want to hear what they’re going to do. The point you make about character is a positive point, not just a negative one.

So when I answer that question, I say my point, number one, is I’m an economic conservative. And no one is doing anything about the jobs we’re going to lose with artificial intelligence and drones and robotics and self-driving vehicles. We’re just kind of whistling past the graveyard there. Those are Trump voters who are going to be displaced, the long-haul truckers who are not going to have a job when self-driving trucks come in. You could make it possible for displaced workers to get free instruction for technical skills for roughly 2 years, particularly if you beef up online curricula.

But there are 20 states where unenrolled voters, independent voters, can vote in the Republican primary.

New Hampshire being one of them.

New Hampshire being one of them. Massachusetts being another. But if people speak to issues that are of interest to millennials and Gen Xers and suburban female voters, I think the size and character of the electorate who are going to be voting in the Republican primaries is going to be quite different than you get right now.

Is that ultimately what you want to do here? Take Trump on in the states where independents can vote in Republican primaries?

I hope to win the New Hampshire primary. And if that happens, Katy bar the door as to the future of Mr. Trump. The objective is to win and to fight a national campaign. Do I think that the 20 states that allow crossover voting are tempting targets? Yeah. They’re definitely where I’m going to be spending time.

Beyond New Hampshire, you’re looking at states like …

My first swing, probably in the month of May, will be California, Oregon, Washington. I plan to campaign heavily in all six New England states, and pretty heavily in all the Mid-Atlantic states. Last cycle [as the vice-presidential candidate on the Libertarian Party ticket] I spent a lot of time in the intermountain West states and have good connections in the Southwest, too. So it’s really only parts of the Deep South that would be very tough for me.

There’s conservatism and Trumpism. One is an ideology, the other is more of an attitude. But increasingly a lot of conservatives worry that the two have become inseparably linked. Are they?

They shouldn’t be. Trumpism is frankly devotion to Mr. Trump’s megalomania. I mean, he’s got a lot going on in his head. The man is so angry so much of the time. It’s hard for me to see how one single head could contain so much anger, so much wrath.

He says, “I’m a counterpuncher.” He is not a counterpuncher. He will take off with tweets or action after any slight, real or imagined. My read is the guy is terrified maybe he’s a loser, which is why he lashes out at anybody. I don’t know everything that’s going on there. But I do know that I would not want to have the president’s demons. I feel for the guy in a way. They’re not normal.

When that sinks in, I think it’s possible that the president’s appeal could explode. I played Brutus in the Shakespeare play “Julius Caesar.”

When was this? In high school?

Senior year of high school. So Cassius would come to me and say, “There was a Brutus once in Rome who would have brooked the eternal devil to keep his seat as easily as a king.” So that’s how Cassius got Brutus around to hold one of the 17 knives. I think about that all the time. We’re talking about a king here. Donald Trump wants to be a king.

Having steeped myself both in high school and college in the Federalist Papers, and having studied the Constitution and the history of it, including the position of the anti-Federalists, I am pretty well aware of the extent to which the people who wrote our Constitution in Philadelphia in 1787 had one thought uppermost, with the one exception of Alexander Hamilton, and that would be: We don’t want a king. I dare say that Mr. Trump has not read those debates.

A lot of Republicans will say privately that they believe Trump is weak because the economic policies he has pursued have not helped the working class in the ways he promised during his campaign. They have helped Wall Street and the wealthy far more. Do you see that as a real vulnerability for him?

That’s why I talk about him doing nothing for the soon-to-be displaced workers who you would think are prototypical Trump voters. I’m sorry to sound so negative, but I don’t think he’s been really serious about policy. He’s been too busy flinging around phrases like “hoax” and “wall.” And not a lot of thought is going into what he says.