Podcast: The Republican Taking on Trump in 2020 (Yes, They Do Exist)

TRANSCRIPT: The Republican Taking on Trump in 2020 (Yes, They Do Exist)

Bill Weld:

In New Hampshire in September, I went up 11 points, and Trump went down 17 in one month. New Hampshire. Give me two more of those months, and I'm ahead.

Ian Bremmer:

What's it like to be politically homeless? To wander from town to town in a cardboard box, looking for a place to hang your ballot when you're not on board with Trump, but when AOC also scares the hell out of you? Hello, and welcome to the GZERO World podcast where you'll find extended versions of the interviews from my show on public television. And today on the podcast, I'll examine why the reshaping of America's political parties is not only hollowing out the center, but also presenting the Grand Old Party with a big old problem. To help me dig into it, is a man who's doing something most Republicans consider unthinkable, challenging Donald Trump for the GOP nomination for president. I'm talking about former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, a long shot, a serious long shot, who kicked off his career as junior council during the 1974 impeachment process of Richard Nixon.

Ian Bremmer:

So he's been through this before, and he's also had his eye on the White House for some 20 years now. He gave it a shot last time on the Libertarian ticket, but he says fellow Republicans are now making a huge mistake by sticking with the president who's operating outside the law. Those are his words, not mine. And yet, despite the impeachment process, Republicans are still by and large loyal to President Trump. Why? Well, they're either on board with the program or they're worried about job security. I'm talking about their own. Let's get into that with a Republican who doesn't need either, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.

Ian Bremmer:

And Republican candidate for president, not that one, the other one, Governor Bill Weld. Good to be with you, sir.

Bill Weld:

Thank you.

Ian Bremmer:

Let's talk about impeachment, which is the process that clearly has been getting the most antagonism around all of this. You were an attorney during the Watergate proceedings so you...

Bill Weld:

I not only was an attorney, I wrote the memorandum on what constitutes grounds for impeachment and removal of a president for the House Judiciary Committee.

Ian Bremmer:

Which implies you know a little something about the way this process works.

Bill Weld:

Right.

Ian Bremmer:

So what's different this time around?

Bill Weld:

Well, nothing really yet. We took a long time. And the Nixon impeachment investigation took eight, ten months, so it took a lot longer than this one. Of course, what made the difference was Nixon lost in the Supreme Court on the subpoena. So the tapes showing that he'd been in charge of the conspiracy from day one came out. And he'd been on national television saying, your president is not a crook.

Richard Nixon:

"People have got to know whether or not they're President is a crook. Well, I'm not a crook. I've earned everything I've got."

Bill Weld:

This is the president on television. So he didn't look too good when it turned out all that stuff had not been true. And within days, Barry Goldwater was in his office saying, Mr. President, you have lied to me for the last time, and I'm here to tell you that you have no support in the Senate. Three days ago you had 47 senators willing to go to the end for you. Now you have no support because you've stood revealed as someone who is not telling the truth to the American people, and you forfeited their trust and through them the trust of the Senate. And Nixon almost asked for the pen on the spot. He was gone within days.

Richard Nixon:

I shall resign the presidency effective at noon tomorrow.

Bill Weld:

And Nixon had a sense of shame and a sense of history.

Ian Bremmer:

Which Trump does not.

Bill Weld:

Neither of those does Mr. Trump possess, no.

Nancy Pelosi:

Today, I am asking our chairman to proceed with articles of impeachment.

Ian Bremmer:

And there's nary, if I can use that word, a Republican in the House that says that this rises to the level of impeachable. Now, is that really because they're all just wrong and lying? Or is it that what the Democrats are working to impeach him on is challenging and gray area in terms of what he's done?

Bill Weld:

No, what the Democrats are working to impeach him on are classically impeachable offenses. And I read all the transcripts of every impeachment trial, and I read all the debates in the Constitution Convention of 1787. And what those people in Philadelphia were most worried about, the two things they were most worried about, were foreign interference in the colonies' affairs, and someone who would get the presidency and seek to promote himself by exercise of the presidential power. So the extortion bribery with Ukraine, in addition to being terrible foreign policy because it's an invitation to Russia to please annex Eastern Europe, was just at the core of why the impeachment and removal powers were given to Congress under the Constitution.

Ian Bremmer:

What's your reason for believing that is in any way going change in the Senate?

Bill Weld:

Well, senators have a little bit more time to think about things, and at that point the egg will be fully cooked. People have this misconception that the Senate is going to say, oh, we've heard enough. We don't want to hear any more evidence. We're going to vote. No. The house appoints managers who serve as prosecutors of the case in the Senate. I testified in the Senate on the Clinton impeachment as a defense witness. Sex is not an impeachable offense. I said, it's got to involve the office in some serious fashion, and that's why we want to remove people from office. And so it went back and forth. And there were arguments made, but at the end of the day, it wound up 50/50 in the Senate. So there was some crossover there.

Ian Bremmer:

In the 'Me Too' era with an intern that is working for the government, for the White House, today's era, you feel comfortable making that statement again?

Bill Weld:

Yeah, absolutely. I don't have a 'Me Too' matter in...

Ian Bremmer:

I'm not suggesting that, no, [not] at all.

Bill Weld:

Just for your information.

Ian Bremmer:

No, no, no. I'm actually just suggesting that I think that's a much more controversial claim to make in today's environment.

Bill Weld:

Well, the question is for what do you remove a president? And it's not personal conduct. It's interference with the scheme of government contemplated by the Constitution. And he's certainly doing that. No one has ever argued before that Congress has no power to oversee or to investigate the executive branch. No one. Certainly not Nixon on his worst day. He hung out there and wouldn't hand over the tapes as long as he could. But then when the Supreme Court, the ultimate arbiter of what the rule of law requires said the President is not above the law, he complied immediately.

Ian Bremmer:

That's hard to imagine that the present president would do that.

Bill Weld:

Oh, he's not going to do anything willingly. He's going to make it as miserable for everybody else as he possibly can because, my judgment at least, he doesn't care about anybody else. All he cares about is himself, his own comfort, his own advancement, the fact that people praise him all the time. He needs that. He's driven by demons, I mean, the poor guy. I think he's got a lot of fear and anger pushing him forward at all times.

Ian Bremmer:

So you're saying you feel a lot of empathy for President Trump. This is what I'm hearing.

Bill Weld:

Well, I think it's fair to say that he had absolutely no preparation for the job he has now. And it shows. And both domestically and particularly in foreign policy and dealings with other parts of the world, he has not even a child's understanding of what's at stake. The most important foreign policy issue for us, for the country as a whole is probably nuclear non-proliferation. Here's Mr. Trump encouraging other countries to develop their own nuclear weapons programs. It just doesn't compute.

Ian Bremmer:

You said it's the most existential crisis that we have. Why do you believe that?

Bill Weld:

Because if things go wrong it's a nuclear war, and countries including the United States could get blown to bits. It's kind of like the climate issue. It's planetary. It's not just one country's foreign policy and who's going to be top dog.

Ian Bremmer:

So the American nuclear umbrella, the American bases around the world, the forward deployments, all of that, do you think it's important to maintain the level of security-

Bill Weld:

Yes, absolutely. The price of having so many countries not have their own nuclear weapons programs is that they have to understand the US has their back. So we can't present, as we've been doing under Mr. Trump, as an unreliable ally. And Mr. Trump, of course is against free trade, but he should understand that allies are valuable force multipliers when it comes to keeping the shipping lanes and the air lanes open for free trade for traffic in goods, which will always benefit the United States. Free trade always benefits the United States because we have the most productive workforce in the world by a mile, much more productive than China's, for example.

Ian Bremmer:

Now you have a lot of policies, whether it's about abortion or it's same-sex marriage, it's climate change, that would make you not sound like a traditional Republican. Why are you running as a Republican this time around?

Bill Weld:

Well, I think it's good to have an alternative who's an economic conservative. I don't think Mr. Trump can even pretend to be an economic conservative having added $9 trillion to the accumulated deficit and run trillion dollar annual deficits quicker than anybody else ever did. And I don't know whether you know this, but when I was in office, I was ranked the most fiscally conservative governor in the United States. So that's a nice contrast, and I'm on the winning side of that one as far as the traditional Republican orthodoxy goes. There's just a bunch of stuff that has to be done in Washington right now that it goes beyond economics. We have to prevent the polar ice cap from melting. Mr. Trump's policy there is 'hoax.' We need to have more immigrants, not fewer, in order to staff up our agricultural and construction industries. Mr. Trump's one word policy again is 'wall.'

Bill Weld:

And now we have to do something about all the workers' jobs we're going to lose to artificial intelligence. He's not doing anything about that, but it's very easy to address that and we get into depth if you like. That's not being done in Washington just because everybody's at swords' points. And again, my record, whether you know it or not, was reach across the aisle, get bipartisan legislation done.

Ian Bremmer:

So I mean, getting those massive trillion dollar deficits passed, I mean, that's not just Trump. That's of course Republicans in his party.

Bill Weld:

Oh, completely. And the Democrats, everybody in Washington. Now my motto...

Ian Bremmer:

So one thing we can agree on right now is spending lots of money.

Bill Weld:

Well, they can agree on it. But I always say as my motto that there's no such thing as government money. There's only taxpayers' money, so you have to be a steward of it. And those people in Washington, almost to a person, they think, no, no, this is government money. This is my money, and I get to spend this and this will make me more loved by my constituents because everyone loves having money spent on them. And it's sick. It's just sick. And that's where you get your trillion dollar deficits.

Ian Bremmer:

So what do you think the Americans should be spending their money more wisely on right now? Where would you see some serious cuts?

Bill Weld:

Well, everything. I think we can be more innovative in the military area. And I'm in favor of robust engagement abroad unlike Mr. Trump who's an isolationist. But even I think we got to do this on a budget. We fought the Cold War on a budget and won it, so it can be done. But that's one area.

Ian Bremmer:

So you'd reduce defense spending up to over 20%. Under Trump, you'd reduce it.

Bill Weld:

Well, I think there's room for innovation there, but you don't know until you look. And my approach is what's called zero base budgeting. You look at every budget item in the proposed budget. And if it can't justify itself by how it performed last year, you zero it out. That's why it's called zero base. And that's why I got the reputation of being the most fiscally conservative governor in the United States because these bureaucracies, these sacred cows, I just zeroed them out and there's massive savings there. It's not the old shibboleth waste, fraud and abuse. People who use that phrase really don't know what they're talking about. That's just scotch tape. But if you look line by line and take the things to zero that should be zero, you get huge savings. I had to close a 16% deficit in one month when I came into office, but it was easy.

Ian Bremmer:

What was the most controversial thing that had to be cut that got you backlash?

Bill Weld:

Yeah. Well, it didn't get me backlash, but the most controversial was furloughing 8,000 state workers my first day on the job. But I never got so much as a postcard saying, "Where are those state workers?" The state payroll...

Ian Bremmer:

Because your address wasn't listed. What's wrong with this?

Bill Weld:

It's funny. All the years I was a prosecutor, I always had a listed phone and no one ever called me. The day I was elected governor, I learned the difference between terror power and the power to confer benefits because my phone started ringing off the hook at 6:30 in the morning. I had to get an unlisted phone that first day, before the end of the day.

Ian Bremmer:

And you can argue that you can be fiscal conservative, you can be Republican. But of course, last time around you did not run as Republican. Last time around, you ran as a libertarian.

Bill Weld:

Even more fiscally conservative.

Ian Bremmer:

Yes, but a third party run.

Bill Weld:

Yeah, that's right.

Ian Bremmer:

And one that frequently is used to get new and innovative ideas out there, but not one that usually has much of a shot at becoming president.

Bill Weld:

But I'm completely on board for that idea. I'm not running as a third party candidate now. I'm running as a Republican, which I've been since I was 18 years old, except for two years with the Libertarians. But you could think of it as a third approach, because I would have a bipartisan cabinet. When I was in office, I never asked anybody whether they were a [Democrat] or a Republican when I was interviewing them for a judgeship or anything else. And it didn't make any difference. I tried to choose the smartest people I could find, usually women. My cabinet was eight women and three men. Women outworked the men. And it didn't make any difference that I didn't know what party they were because after about a year, they would become Bill Weld to Paul Cellucci people, and we'd all work together.

Ian Bremmer:

So several states right now are not even running primaries on the Republican side. Arizona, South Carolina, Nevada. You say it's the work of Trump's psych offense.

Bill Weld:

Well, it's no secret that the Trump campaign and the Republican state committees are one and the same. The Republican State Committee in every state is now the Trump organization. They just moved them over. So that's hiding in plain sight, that fact. And yeah, it's not a good idea to cancel a whole lot of primaries. So the only one that hurts me basically is Alaska, which is very Libertarian leaning. I've had a long relationship with Lisa Murkowski, the senator there, Republican senator, and she actually won on a write-in in Alaska. So I think I might consider a write-in there on that one.

Ian Bremmer:

Your point has been that they're sycophants, but they don't understand where the country is. Now, one of the things that has been, I think, surprising to the media is just how consistently strong Trump's approval rating among Republicans has actually been, hovering around the high eighties right now. So I mean, are these Republicans wrong?

Bill Weld:

Well, it's more than 20 points lower in New Hampshire where I've been spending a bunch of time than those 98 to two polls. If they're going to poll the Republican State Committee and the party faithful and the party leaders and people who voted in the last five Republican primaries, of course they're going to have a 98 to two in a state, like all states, where the Republican State Committee is the Trump organization. So my job and my strategy is to enlarge the electorate that's going to vote in the Republican primary. So I'm focusing a lot on the 24 states that permit so-called crossover voting where Democrats and or independents can take a Republican ballot, and I'm getting traction with that in New Hampshire. In September, I went up 11 points and Trump went down 17 in one month. New Hampshire. Give me two more of those months, and I'm ahead.

Ian Bremmer:

Now we're going to do the lightning round, which means you have to respond to these things fairly quickly. This is what happens when you're running for president. I apologize.

Bill Weld:

This is like the Rorschach test.

Ian Bremmer:

It's like that. That's right. So first of all, how many Grateful Dead concerts have you been to in your life?

Bill Weld:

Just a handful.

Ian Bremmer:

A handful is how big is your hand?

Bill Weld:

It's a pretty big hand. I can pick up a basketball.

Ian Bremmer:

You can?

Bill Weld:

Yeah.

Ian Bremmer:

So a handful is like four or five. Okay. Four or five. Okay, fair enough. Favorite song is what?

Bill Weld:

Dead song? "Uncle John's Band." "Jack Straw from Wichita." I like that a lot.

Ian Bremmer:

Your list of credits includes movie star. Can you tell us briefly about being in "Traffic?"

Bill Weld:

It was nip and tuck at the wire, but I was outpointed for best supporting actor by Benicio del Toro.

Ian Bremmer:

He was great.

Bill Weld:

He was good. He was really good. So Michael Douglas comes up to me and I somewhat pompously said, "And that's never going to solve this problem on the supply side. As long as that demand is out there in our cities, Mexico-bashing is not going to do a damn thing for you." And he said, that's a wrap, and my heart sank. And I learned that his nickname in Hollywood is Steven "One Take" Soderbergh.

Ian Bremmer:

"One Take" Soderbergh. You are on the board of Acreage Holdings, which is a cannabis company. So how many acres you guys have?

Bill Weld:

A lot.

Ian Bremmer:

Yeah. You're growing. Is it good stuff?

Bill Weld:

I'm not in operations there, but it's a big company.

Ian Bremmer:

You ever tried it?

Bill Weld:

No.

Ian Bremmer:

Have you ever tried marijuana?

Bill Weld:

No. I've never smoked a cigarette of any kind in my life.

Ian Bremmer:

Interesting. Okay. I haven't either, but that makes me kind of dorky. So what do you do? Okay, I've got something I need to read to you. "'Time for an ADD,' someone yelled, and the party repaired to the living room. On the way in, Emma touched my arm again and explained this was an acronym for an after dinner drink. My elbow felt hot." Can you tell me what this excerpt is from?

Bill Weld:

That's the shy dawn of love in the heart of Terry Mullally. It's in chapter two of "Mackerel by Moonlight." My first novel set in New York and Boston.

Ian Bremmer:

A political thriller. Very good, "Mackerel by Moonlight," is that kind of "Sleepless in Seattle?" I mean, just in terms of...

Bill Weld:

No, it comes from a debate in the first Congress where Livingston and Calhoun were exchanging insults. And one of them said to the other, who was a brilliant guy but thought to be kind of unsavory and corrupt, "Your record, sir, resembles nothing so much as a mackerel by moonlight. It shines and it stinks."

Ian Bremmer:

Now is that the most erotic passage that you've ever written?

Bill Weld:

No, they go camping out at the Quabbin Reservoir and catch a hen salmon in the cool morning hours. And after that for breakfast, there's nothing left to do but go back to the sleeping bag.

Ian Bremmer:

Governor Bill Weld, great to be with you.

Bill Weld:

Thank you so much.

Ian Bremmer:

Good luck to you, sir.

Bill Weld:

Thanks.

Ian Bremmer:

That's it for the podcast this week. We'll be back in your feed next week. Check out full episodes of GZERO World on public television or at gzeromedia.com.

Announcer:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, places clients' needs first by providing responsive, relevant, and customized solutions. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more.