Who are you?
So, I’m Bill Weld.
I’m actually running for the Republican nomination
for president against Mr. Trump.
I’m the real Republican.
I think Donald Trump is the ‘RINO,’
Republican in name only.
I was governor of Massachusetts for a couple of terms,
spent 7 years under Ronald Reagan in the Justice Department.
I’m a fiscal conservative, an economic conservative.
I do believe that, just like every taxpayer and every family
in America, the United States government
should balance its budget.
I think he’s been a disaster,
ripping up treaties that he didn’t understand,
insulting our allies,
cozying up to our enemies.
He says, ‘I’m a nationalist,’
and a nationalist is someone for whom the most important thing
is that everybody hate other countries and other peoples.
For a patriot—and for him to claim the mantle of patriotism
is ludicrous.
For a patriot, the most important thing is to love your own country
and your fellow citizens.
That is not Donald Trump!
If you’re Muslim,
if you’re Black,
if you’re Hispanic,
and you’re American,
Donald Trump has virtually no use for you
’cause you’re not part of his ‘lily-white,’
dare I say,
‘Aryan Nation,’ the one that he would prefer.
So he is the opposite of a patriot.
Sonny Jim is my favorite curse word.
It’s an old Boston phrase.
You know, abortion—the most important decision
a woman’s ever gonna make for herself is whether
to bear child or not,
and the idea that these recent statutes,
Alabama and Georgia,
elsewhere, fully supported by the Trump administration, say that
a rapist has rights superior to the rights of the woman he raped.
It’s totally unthinkable,
like a lot of things that come out of
the Trump administration these days.
It takes us back to the Stone Age.
No, no, I—our ticket in 2016,
I ran with Gary Johnson on the Libertarian ticket,
and we got four and a half million votes,
which was triple the previous best showing of that party.
And if you think about it, a vote for the Libertarian Party is gonna be
either a change vote or a protest vote.
It’s not business as usual in Washington, D.C.
So the polling showed that 3 out of 4 of our votes came from Mr. Trump.
I think his calling up the president of Ukraine
and berating him 8 times in a single conversation,
shortly after Mr. Trump had ordered the suspension
of $400 million in military aid to Ukraine, who were engaged
in a bitter armed conflict with Russia.
He said he wanted the president to
facilitate the digging up of dirt on Hunter Biden,
who’s Joe Biden’s son.
And that amounts to the President of the United States basically
election rigging it in his own favor.
It doesn’t get much worse than that.
Well, I don’t know, Nick Nolte.
Young Robert Redford, although my hair wasn’t that long.
Probably Nick Nolte.
It probably would be climate change because that’s an existential threat
to the planet.
What we have to do is put a price on carbon.
That would collect about $200 billion a year
at a price of $40 to $50 a ton,
and that would then be remitted to the taxpayers
so that this would not be a tax.
It would be a fee on carbon.
Not really a lot.
I came in very early for LGBTQ rights.
One of the first acts I did as governor was to create
a commission on gay and lesbian youth
because we’d had just an epidemic of teenage suicide
by gays and lesbians who were just bullied to the point of suicide
in middle school and high school.
And everyone had turned, you know, a cold shoulder to that.
They didn’t wanna take it on as a cause,
and I absolutely took it on as a cause.
I love my wife to pieces.
She’s the most compelling person I’ve ever met and
extremely kind person,
always thinking about other people and animals,
truth be told, and grasses, and rocks.
She’s just brimming over with empathy.
Mark Twain said, ‘Write what you know.’
I wrote what I knew: politics and law enforcement.
The first one was kind of a cops and robbers novel.
The second was a sequel,
the same character when he gets to Washington as a senator.
The third one was totally different.
It’s about my love of the land.
I often say the outdoors is my cathedral.
And it’s a coming of age novel with a 15-year-old boy as the central figure,
and that has a very
tough surprise ending.
And you’re just gonna have to buy the book.
What are you gonna do about global warming?
I think virtually all the Democratic plans
on global warming are deficient
because they’re measuring only how much money they’re gonna spend.
You have to focus on the outcome,
and that’s what putting a price on carbon, along the lines
I’ve discussed, would do.
Now that was your question to the other candidates.
Here’s a question from another candidate, selected at random:
Well, I think we can’t do nothing in the face of these
mass murders, which have picked up in intensity since Mr. Trump
has been in office.
I think we need to have red flag
statutes that will give either family members
or co-workers who spot something odd about someone, a gun owner—
One of the shooters in one of the mass
murders had carried around a list in high school of
all the people he’d like to kill.
You can’t have that guy
carrying a weapon.
They think I’m patrician and from privilege and that I therefore act
that way, and don’t act boldly, and don’t act decisively.
That’s a bad miscalculation.
The first time I met Jack Kemp,
who, of course, was a legendary quarterback for the Buffalo Bills.
He was kind of a political hero of mine.
I think we need to have less government in the system.
But it also needs to be acknowledged that
the Affordable Care Act added 20 million people to the rolls
of the insured.
That’s a major step forward from the point of view of cost containment.
I have espoused the creation of health savings accounts
so people could put away money on a tax-advantaged basis,
and people should be able to make their own decisions.
They should be able to buy drugs in Canada
and not have the government
tell them no. They should be able to buy insurance across state lines
and not have the state insurance commissioners tell ’em no.
So put more power back in the hands of the people
and their doctors.
Do you support the so-called public option?
Yeah, I’m getting there. I would say I’m getting closer to that.
Not, not there yet, I’m still examining that.
Well, they don’t have to.
I sometimes rail against the white men who Congress charges
with making decisions, for example, on behalf of women who they
don’t know, who live 1,200 miles away.
But I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with it.
Anything wrong with being a Muslim, or a Hispanic,
or a woman of color in Congress.
Mr. Trump seems to think there’s something wrong with all
three of those things ’cause he, of course, wants us to hate
everyone who’s not a white man.
I often get 5 to 6 if I’m on a campaign schedule,
preferably 7 to 8.
I’m a bomb thrower in the political sense and would very much
shake things up in Washington, D.C.
I turned everything upside down when I got in as governor.
And I went from Massachusetts being literally bankrupt
to having a huge surplus and being able to spend money on
my priorities, which were education, social services.
I reduced taxes 21 times,
and people appreciated that.
I’m hopeful that millennials and Gen Xers will be attracted to my
banner, and a reason I would give is that you folks are the ones
who are gonna bear the brunt of trillion-dollar deficits.
You’re never gonna see Social Security unless something is done
about those deficits.
And you’re the people who are gonna bear the
brunt of climate change if nothing is done to forestall it.
So I think those two issues
alone are enough reason for you all to come out and
vote, and I invite you to vote in the Republican primary
and to cast a vote
for me, which is by definition
a vote against Mr. Trump,
because I don’t think he’s set a tone that you would want
in this country.
It really is a tone filled with resentment, fear,
anger, even hatred is not too strong a word.
That’s not what you want.
We’re all better than that.
So I hope you consider my candidacy.
Thank you very much.