The Other Republican

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This is Radio Atlantic.

I'm Isaac Dover.

20 Democratic candidates meet to debate this week.

10 on Wednesday, 10 more on Thursday.

All of them vying for the chance to face off against Donald Trump.

But there's someone already running against Trump, one lone challenger in the Republican primary, former Massachusetts governor Bill Weld.

Weld is a vocal critic of President Trump and one of the rare Republicans calling for impeachment and also actually for him to resign.

And it should be said, Weld is uniquely qualified on the topic.

He began his career in politics as one of the first lawyers hired on the committee that was investigating Watergate for the House.

We sat down to talk history, the state of the Republican Party, and how he thinks he can actually make waves in the primary.

Take a listen.

So Governor, can we start with, I guess it was your first job was when you were working for the impeachment inquiry for Richard Nixon.

You were the associate counsel then?

Associate Minority Counsel for the House Judiciary Committee, which decided to conduct the impeachment inquiry.

And how did you end up there?

It was,

you know, a carom shot, a congressman, Tom Railsback from Illinois, called up somebody I knew in Boston and said they were looking for reasonable Republicans to come work on the minority staff, and so I was nominated as that.

How did you establish your reputation as a reasonable Republican?

You know, the guy who called me was a state representative named Marty Linsky, who later joined my administration years later as governor, but a close political friend and advisor, and he made the connection.

But what was it that had made you stand out?

You were how old at that point?

I was not very old.

I was 28.

But already had made people in Massachusetts think that when the call comes from Washington, we need reasonable Republicans, that it's

it's you.

I think I'd already helped to form a group called the Lincoln Union in Massachusetts, which was an affiliate of the so-called

Rip-On Group.

And there was a so-called reasonable Republican newspaper called the Ripon Forum, of which I was a dedicated reader.

So it was just a couple dozen of us in Boston.

And one of the people who was working with you on the committee was Hillary Rodham?

Yes.

I was the first person hired.

She was the second person hired.

We reported for duty the same day.

The only other guy there was John Doerr, chief counsel.

And what do you remember of her from that?

Well, I worked closely with her.

We were both on the constitutional and legal section.

I remember her as being very reasonable, very bright,

very chipper, good sense of humor.

Did it feel then that you were sitting there as a future governor, future presidential candidate with another future presidential candidate?

Not one bit.

We were Grundoons.

No other word for it.

Grundoons is a word that I actually don't know.

Oh, it means a low-level helper.

And so what was the job?

Well, our job was to analyze the evidence.

We all listened to every minute of the Watergate tapes.

So one of the possible articles of impeachment was the Watergate conspiracy.

So that became Article 1.

Article 2 was Mr.

Nixon's efforts to corrupt the FBI and the CIA and use them to try to divert the course of the investigation or even to kill the investigation.

At one point he suggested to Mr.

Haldeman and Mr.

Ehrlichman that the federal agency should go to the people in charge of the Watergate investigation and say that it was trenching on national security matters and as a matter of national security should be shut down.

Aaron Powell, I should say we are sitting in the Watergate right now.

Is that strange?

That's where the Atlantic's offices are.

Is it strange to be in the Watergate?

Yeah, I know exactly where that office is in the basement.

Gonna go visit?

Not on this trip.

But your job on the committee was to do what specifically, day-to-day, what were you doing as part of that?

Well, both Ms.

Rodhams and my job was to work on a legal memorandum as to what constitutes grounds for impeachment and removal specifically of a President of the United States.

And were there points where you were saying Oh, I'm surprised, I wouldn't have thought that we would get to this conclusion that this would be grounds or that something you thought maybe going into it would look like the legal grounds?

The beginning was very interesting because John Doer said to the two of us, Bill Hillary, he said, look, it's Friday afternoon.

We've got to get a definition of what constitutes grounds for impeachment.

So I won't bust your tops here, but why don't you have the memo on my desk Tuesday morning?

So we spent the weekend in the Library of Congress looking for answers in the law books.

There are no answers in the law books because it's a completely political process and a political question that no court would ever touch.

So, you know, come to find out the answer was in the newspapers in Philadelphia in 1787 about the trial of Warren Hastings, a viceroy of India, a contemporary trial for impeachment.

And that was the closest we came to

breathing life into high crimes and misdemeanors.

But there were all kinds of policy arguments about whether it had to be a crime, that sort of thing.

And, you know, I initially thought, yeah, maybe it should have to be a crime, otherwise it's not serious.

And someone pointed out, I think it was Hillary Rodham, what if the president took up a life of pleasure in another country and refused to come back to the United States?

That would be an oath of his office and not a crime, because there's no statute.

So it turns out that a violation of the oath of office is the path to analyze in terms of whether a president is subject to removal.

And ultimately, we concluded that President Nixon, in giving this phony instruction about national security, to try to squash an investigation that impinged on him, that he was violating his duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed, which is a core function of the executive branch.

The executive executes the laws, and our Constitution depends on the laws.

And I think Mr.

Trump is smack dab in the middle of that, except much worse than Nixon.

You mentioned the newspaper articles you pulled.

So did you go back to the office with the old newspaper clippings?

Oh, no.

It took us weeks to figure out there were no answers in the law books.

I remember early on there was a fellow named Joe Woods who was in charge of the Watergate part of the investigation.

And,

you know, everyone made fun of then-Congressman Gerald Ford, who'd led an effort to impeach Bill Douglas from the Supreme Court earlier.

And Congressman Ford said at the time, an impeachable offense is whatever a majority of the House and two-thirds of the Senate say it is.

So everyone said, oh, poor Jerry Ford, he played too much football in college without a helmet, that sort of thing.

And in or about April or May of that year, after 40 lawyers had almost gone blind looking for the answer to the legal question in the law books and everywhere else and arguing and making policy arguments, Joe Woods held a press conference and among other things he said was, you know, that definition that Congressman Ford offered, it's really a terse but profound definition of what constitutes an impeachable offense.

Aaron Powell, Jr.:

I want to fast forward a little bit through your career.

After you were in Washington for working on impeachment, you went back to Massachusetts, you ran for office, you lost your first run.

Yes.

The whole Watergate experience had been like one big white-collar conspiracy trial, so it was fascinating.

And I had been in corporate law prior to going down to Washington.

And when I came back, I told my firm firm I want to go into litigation, which I did.

And then in 1978, four years later, I ran for state attorney general.

And my platform was we have to make greater use of a statewide investigative grand jury to uncover white-collar offenses because they don't appear, you know, like a murder or a bank robbery on page one of the newspapers the next day.

No one knows that a crime has been committed.

So you need to investigate, investigate, investigate.

And that didn't do so good.

I lost almost 80-20.

Matter of fact, I hold a record both for the biggest loss and the biggest win in Massachusetts political history.

Is that a distinction you're proud of?

Yeah, I guess so.

But I enjoyed that campaign.

And a couple of years later, Reagan got elected president.

And I was about the only Republican in Massachusetts that had seen the inside of a courtroom very much.

So I got appointed U.S.

Attorney, and that really was my big break.

And then you do that, and then

you're elected governor in 1990.

You start from people not registering you in the polls, essentially.

Aaron Trevor Bowie, I was not even an asterisk when I started, and I had an 80-20 loss under my belt.

So no one took me seriously.

And the man who had beaten me 80-20 was a candidate on the Democratic side.

So people said, what are you running for?

And I said, because I want the office.

And you won.

And I won.

You won.

You won coming in after Michael Dukakis.

And by 1994, your re-election, that's the one that's the biggest margin in Massachusetts history.

That, though, is

20-plus years ago.

Right.

Walk us through what you've been doing with yourself since then.

One of the things that you did along the way was in 2006, you politically came to New York

and

you were briefly a candidate for governor of New York and covered that race a little bit then.

You did not come out of the state convention as the nominee.

You also, in 2016, were the vice presidential nominee on the Libertarian ticket.

But what what else, those are the political things that have been

done.

Neither one of them took more than six months.

So I've been in business since leaving the governorship.

Much of it international, particularly the last 15 years, representing technology and

resource companies that do business around the globe.

I've spent a lot of time in Asia, not just East Asia, but Central Asia, places like Kazakhstan.

I spent a lot of time in Africa.

Right now I'm involved in the Democratic Republic of Congo, which is

helping with mining one of the world's largest copper mines there.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: What's your part of that?

Obviously, you're not there with the big ass.

I'm kind of a conciliary to the CEO, looking out for trouble.

It has a lot more to having been head of the criminal division, the Justice Department, than with having been governor, because if you're a major foreign company doing business in countries abroad, there's always a risk of a Foreign Corrupt Practices Act and somebody with their hand out.

And I can be quite convincing about the consequences of having your hand out in a situation like that.

For example, we have a duty to put a press release about this tomorrow unless it's withdrawn.

And you're going to have a long white beard by the time you get out of prison if you try to travel anywhere that has an extradition treaty with the United States, which means you can never go see your girlfriend in the south of France where I happen to know that all your swag is already buried, because we would do our homework.

I would imagine in a lot of these countries they look at you crossways when you say you can't take a bribe or you can't pay a bribe.

Aaron Powell But that's why it helped having been head of the criminal division of the Justice Department.

And

particularly in Asia, people think someone who's been a governor, a senator, they think that their power

never ebbs, because in Asia it never does ebb.

Whereas in the United States, when you're out, you're out.

Aaron Powell,

you say you're from the party of Lincoln.

That's your line.

What does that mean?

Aaron Powell,

it means that you appeal to the better angels of people's nature as opposed to appealing to the worst impulses in them and trying to stir up those impulses by sowing division and strife and trying to set everybody's teeth on edge, which is exactly what Donald Trump does every day of the week.

And, you know, I grew up in a time when the two parties in Washington worked cooperatively across the aisle.

Divisions between the parties stopped at the water's edge.

And I worked for Senator Javits of New York during that period of time.

And people like Howard Baker of Tennessee was already in the Senate.

Lamar Alexander was a staffer for him when I was a staffer for Senator Javits.

Chuck Percy had just been elected.

It was an exciting time in the Senate.

And if somebody was going to give a big speech, the galleries in the Senate were full of people who wanted to hear the speech and see if they were persuaded by it.

And nowadays, if someone's going to give a speech, it's just an attack ad for television.

So it's done in the chamber at 3 o'clock in the morning, and the the chamber is dark and no one else is there and the rules of C-SPAN are you cannot remove the camera from the person's face so you can't see that the chamber is dark and this whole thing is just a political trick.

I don't know when the last time that I was in the House or Senate galleries and actually saw somebody,

any kind of a crowd for a speech.

It's been a long time.

It's been a long time.

I think things started to go downhill with the 94 election, which is itself quite a bitter, bitter election.

And I remember visiting with Newt Gingrich when he was the minority leader before he won that election.

And the Democrats had a saloon door on his office so he couldn't have private meetings.

And I don't know.

There's still a couple of those around the Capitol.

I'm just guessing, but I'm guessing that Newt didn't forget that when he got elected Speaker the next year.

Donald Trump said at a fundraiser about a year and a half ago, a lot of people don't know that Abraham Lincoln was a Republican.

Do you think he's part of the party of Lincoln?

No, not at all.

Not at all.

Matter of fact, in the 1850s, the party, the Whig party, which was the predecessor of the Republicans, split in half.

And the southern half, the pro-slavery half, was called the Know-Nothings.

And they were characterized by huge anti-immigrant discrimination and by violent rallies and conspiracy theories.

Carbon copy of the Trump campaign in 2016, the other half, the northern anti-slavery part, joined John C.

Fremont and the Free Soilers.

and four years later they elected Abraham Lincoln, the President of the United States.

So those are your two factions.

And the Trump Party today is the Know-Nothing Party.

The other half, which seems to be slimmer today but I think could come back, is the party of Lincoln,

which was called the Free Soil Party, but then became known as the Republican Party.

Aaron Powell, what would you think that Lincoln would make of Donald Trump?

I think he would be appalled.

Lincoln was a deeply civilized and decent man.

As things stand now, is your campaign against Trump, is it against what the Republican Party has become?

Aaron Powell, well, those may be one and the same thing in Washington.

It really, I mean, there's a lot of things that I think need to be done that I think the president, Mr.

Trump, because of his disinterest in policy and perhaps inability to come to grips with policy questions in an organized and well-informed manner,

has no interest in.

You know, I'd like to balance the budget.

I'd like to cut spending.

I think that would send a good message internationally.

I'd like to repair some of the irreparable damage that's been done to our relationship with our military allies.

I'd like to return to a policy of free trade among nations as opposed to slap on putative tariffs first and take that as your negotiating position and then go try and scare everyone to death.

It's all in the art of the deal.

Take a completely unreasonable position, and if you're unreasonable enough, they'll have to come to you.

That's not my idea of how a president of the United States ought to act.

But isn't that where the Republican Party is right now?

The Republican Party...

No, it's where Mr.

Trump is.

I mean, I think a lot of Republicans in Washington aren't even thinking beyond, oh my goodness, this guy we've got in there now, he's a poser, but he's our poser now, and I can't rock the boat, or maybe I won't get re-elected.

I'm not sure it goes any deeper than that.

Some of these people are friends of yours.

Yes.

What do they tell you privately?

I have conversations with Republicans in which I hear dismay and disapproval of things that Trump is doing or of Trump himself and publicly don't hear that.

So, what are you hearing privately?

And what do you say to them when you have been public about this?

Obviously, you're running against him.

You have taken this stand and you wish other people would.

Aaron Powell, yeah.

No,

everybody agrees with me in private.

Keep doing what you're doing, kid.

It's a great service to the nation.

The country needs you.

Keep it up.

Lamar Alexander is an old friend of yours, senator from Tennessee.

Right.

He is not running for re-election.

He

theoretically

could say more publicly what he wants to.

He disagrees on some policy issues.

Well,

you almost know from public events that Lamar has to be dismayed because he resigned from leadership in the Senate because he wasn't allowed to go across the aisle and look for constructive solutions.

So, Lamar's a guy who likes to get things done and very much worked across the aisle.

He worked for Senator Howard Baker when I worked for Senator Javits, and I've known him ever since.

And he's just a

prince of a fellow.

But he's leaving the Senate, and he's of an age where, you know, it's not surprising that he would

leave the Senate.

And I suppose he could take some Parthian arrow shots over his back on the way out.

But,

you know, that's not really his personality.

He's a more studious person than that.

If you want someone who's going to be a bull in the china shop on my side, that's me.

But there isn't part of the reason why so much focus landed on Justin Amash, the congressman from Michigan, who has now spoken out against Donald Trump and said there should be impeachment.

Read the Mueller report.

He read it.

He's dismayed by it.

is that he is the only one.

He's the only Republican of all the Republican members of the House and all all the Republican members of the United States.

That's in Washington.

I mean, I'm a two-term governor, and I think I'm probably well beyond what Congressman Amash had said in terms of my focus

on Mr.

Trump.

But I welcomed his statement as well.

I thought it was great.

It seems to be hard to believe that there is actual

opposition to Donald Trump in the Republican Party when we don't hear of it other than these kinds of conversations where we say, oh, privately, it's really going on.

That's what they're doing.

Well, you know, the tale of the Emperor's new clothes.

You think all those people who congratulated the emperor on his new clothes when they could see he was buck naked, you think they really think he had new clothes?

Or did they just not want trouble and they were afraid the emperor would cut off their head if they say you don't have any clothes on?

That's not really a tale of bravery that you're telling of here.

No, no.

No.

You know, and I think the worm will turn.

I think if the president persists in saying, yeah, I'd take dirt.

Would I call the FBI?

That's not how the world works.

Then, you know, the next day he said, of course I would call the FBI.

That's nothing but a flat-out lie.

You know, he says during the campaign, well, we need to have some punishment for women who seek an abortion.

Oh, I never said that.

This is a flat-out liar.

Is it a lie or is it a bad thing?

Those are lies.

Those are lies.

We were talking before we started about

you feel like the fever will break in the Republican Party.

That's what you're saying?

The worm will turn.

Well,

it may not.

You know, I'm not sure it's going to break.

I don't think the start of the break will be in the Republican Party.

I think it'll be in the

country at large.

And my job is to expand the electorate of people who will vote in the Republican primary.

So I'm going to be reaching out to millennials, to women voters.

I think the recent abortion statutes are just unconscionable.

And it's not just suburban women who should be dismayed by that.

It's all women because it implicates a question of gender equality.

And to say that a woman who is raped has to carry the rapist's child to term

is just totally the chattel theory of women.

It's viewing women as carriers, and women should be insulted by that.

And that is something that the Republican Party and the administration of Mr.

Trump is trying to engineer for the cynical purpose of getting to the Supreme Court and get Roe v.

Wade overturned.

So I think there should be an avalanche of female voters against Mr.

Trump, and I think that's true in the primary.

And, you know, we've got two elections here.

Someone who wants to vote against Mr.

Trump can vote against him twice, once in the primary and once in the general, and that goes for Democrats and independents and not just for Republicans.

Do you think, though, that that's really there?

The idea that the Republican Party is not Donald Trump's party seems far-fetched at this point.

Aaron Powell,

I'm saying that I don't think the country is going to remain hypnotized to the extent it is hypnotized.

We were talking about Barack Obama in 2012 campaign saying the fever would break, and it was not something that he actually truly believed.

He was talking about what had happened with the opposition to him, the Tea Party opposition aides would say afterwards that it was something that was good to say on the campaign trail.

And the fever didn't break.

Donald Trump gets elected.

I just wonder whether...

You are

somewhere between an idealist or an optimist and maybe a Pollyanna thinking that things all.

Well, it's possible, I suppose.

I do have my view, which is that the American public is not so stupid that they're going to remain hypnotized by a man who's a huckster or lower than a huckster.

But he won.

I mean, if you think he's a huckster.

No, I know he won.

Whatever you think that.

We're not talking about whether he won.

We're talking about whether he's going to win again or be removed either before then by the impeachment process or at the ballot box.

My view is he's going to be removed one way or the other.

We're going to take a quick break and come back with more with Governor Bill Weld.

Charlie Sheen is an icon of decadence.

I lit the fuse and my life turns into everything it wasn't supposed to be.

He's going the distance.

He was the highest-paid TV star of all time.

When it started to change, it was quick.

He kept saying, No, no, no, I'm in the hospital now, but next week I'll be ready for the show.

Now, Charlie's sober.

He's going to tell you the truth.

How do I present this with any class?

I think we're past that, Charlie.

We're past that, yeah.

Somebody call action.

AKA Charlie Sheen, only on Netflix, September 10th.

And we're back.

One of the other major players in what the Republican Party is now is Mitch McConnell, the majority leader.

Do you think he's a force for good?

Well, I've been intrigued by Mitch over the years.

I know him reasonably well, and I certainly supported the senatorial Republicans, including times when he was

in charge of them.

I do think he plays a long game, a deep game in politics, so he's a good analyst of how to get things done politically.

On the other hand, I was not in favor of what he said when President Obama got elected, which is my job is to make sure this president fails.

Yeah, it's a one-term president.

Yeah, I remember my father, who's a Republican, when Jack Kennedy was elected, he certainly was no fan of Jack Kennedy, but

he proposed a toast at our family dinner to President Kennedy, who has a big job.

It does seem that

if we're talking about the Republican Party and Donald Trump, we're not just talking about Donald Trump.

We're talking about what Paul Ryan did as Speaker, what Kevin McCarthy as minority leader is doing now, what Mitch McConnell has been doing as majority leader.

No?

No, I think Trump has had a bad influence on the party and that actions have been taken and not taken as a result of the position of Donald Trump sort of

astride the Republican Party.

No, it's a totally unacceptable state of affairs.

Aaron Powell, what's it stand for at this this point?

What is the Republican Party now?

You mean apart from Donald Trump?

I'm afraid when people think of the Republican Party these days, they think of Donald Trump, and my aim is to change that, offer them an alternative.

Aaron Powell, you are beyond saying that Trump should be impeached.

You've said he's gone beyond Nixon.

You called for him to resign.

So what do you say to the Republicans who are sticking by him through all of this?

Well, you know, I know I'm not going to be able to persuade everybody, not those who are dug in with Trump.

That's why I say my strategy is not to try to charm his base.

It's to enlarge the electorate and go around the dug-in Trump supporters.

And I'm not saying everyone that supports Donald Trump is not a good American.

He's got a lot of energy.

He has a raw animal cunning.

If I thought he could

really deal with the complex issues that are at the door of the President of the United States, I'd feel differently.

But

I don't think he's up to it.

And

he projects a lot.

And I think at some level he knows

what's going on inside his head, which is why he proclaims himself a stable genius.

Because he knows people are saying he's unstable.

He must know at some level that he is unstable.

And he's such a genius.

Do you think Donald Trump knows that he is unstable?

Yeah, I do.

That's why he says, I'm a stable genius.

And he says, I'm a Wharton genius.

And he's such a genius that he had Michael Cohen, his lawyer, threaten to sue the University of Pennsylvania if they ever made either Donald Trump's grades or his aptitude scores public.

That's the mark of a stable genius, all right.

Would you, you worked at the Justice Department, your prosecutor.

Would you think that he has committed some crimes here?

Would you want to see him prosecuted out of office?

Oh, absolutely.

No, I've devoted my career to the rule of law and to keeping politics out of law enforcement.

And one thing is clear about Donald Trump is that he wants politics all over law enforcement because he wants law enforcement and the Justice Department to be his personal law firm and watch out for his political skirts.

That was clear from his first conversation with Jeff Sessions, and it goes on to this day.

The

political path that you've laid out for yourself is to rely on crossover votes.

In New Hampshire, that's people who are not necessarily registered as Republicans, but can, because of the way the laws are, they can vote in the Republican primary.

There are 20 states that we're talking about.

20 states permit crossover voting.

Does that mean that you need to convince people who are not Republicans to come into the Republican primary to win this?

It wouldn't offend me.

You know, in 17 out of those 20 states, a Democrat can take a Republican ballot.

The state legislatures really don't care what your background is.

They'll let you vote in either primary you want to.

And I've had a lot of Democrats tell me that they're going to come and vote in the Republican Party so they can vote against Trump twice, and then they're going to go home and take a long, hot shower and re-register as a Democrat the same day.

Does that mean that then you'd be trying to win the Republican primary without Republican voters?

Aaron Powell, no, I want Republican voters too.

It's just I'm not going to tell other people stay out of the Republican primary because I would like to enlarge the size of the Republican Party so maybe it wouldn't be so

maniacally focused on just one goal, which is self-perpetuation.

You know, the policies that Mr.

Trump talks about really are aimed directly at, among other people, younger voters.

So the younger voters are going to pay the price for all these deficits.

The younger voters are going to pay the price if nothing is done about climate change and

the polar ice cap melts and all of our shorelines are overrun.

And why President Trump says, oh, climate change, hoax, a one-word policy, like his one-word policy for immigration, wall.

And, you know, he aims his statements at a very low level of understanding, and I think it's a level he's comfortable with.

Aaron Powell, Jr.: So is the idea that there is this like silent majority of the Republican Party out there, to take a phrase from Richard Nixon,

that is going to rise up and that will

surprise everybody?

I mean, obviously you hope it will.

Silent majority of the country.

Like I say, I'm not trying to charm Donald Trump's base.

Right.

But the Democratic Party thinks that whoever its nominee is is going to be able to capitalize on where Trump is, and that that's for them and not for you or someone else.

I hope they're right.

Because one way to read that there are 23 Democrats running for president is that they see a big opportunity here.

And they think that the Democratic nominee is in good shape to be the president.

And then by that measure, the way to read that you are the only Republican running is that there is a lot of skepticism that someone could beat Trump, at least in a primary.

Okay, well, let people view me as their insurance policy

if they want to.

I can tell you one thing, if I was running as an independent and not as a Republican, I would not be getting any love from

any Democrats or Independents

because they would think all those votes would come out of their column.

What I wonder, though, and maybe this is,

it's not the easiest thing to run for president.

There's a lot of travel.

There's a lot of phone calls, a lot of personal time that gets eaten up.

By the way, I don't mind that.

I enjoy that.

Do you think you're going to win?

Do you actually think you're going to win?

I think I have a good shot at winning the New Hampshire primary, and I think once that happens, all hell is going to break loose.

all hell because you think it'll crack and Donald Trump will be vulnerable all of a sudden?

Yeah, I think he'll be vulnerable in all other states.

Who knows who else is going to get in?

But maybe he's got everybody so cowed that no one else will get in, and then I think I can win.

And you think that there's a part of your brain right now that thinks President Bill Weld sitting behind the desk in the Oval Office that that's coming?

I'm so sorry to say, but I've said for a long time that I could start Monday in that job.

You could.

There's a difference between thinking that you could and

that it's going to happen.

No, no.

My view is the path to victory starts in New England, goes to the mid-Atlantic states, picks up the more

wide open areas of the West.

And the last question is the Rust Belt states.

And do I think I could win Wisconsin?

Absolutely.

That's the home of Bob LaFollette.

And Pennsylvania?

Absolutely.

Spent a lot of time there, a lot of friends there.

How would you campaign against it?

Michigan?

I would have Romney backing there, I'd be quite certain.

Aaron Powell, that would be Romney McDaniel.

No, no, no, no, no.

I mean, that's the...

You're talking about the other Romney.

Remember him, Mitt Romney?

I do remember him now, a senator from Utah, so that's what I'm saying.

His connection to Michigan has tapered off.

No, it's just he's got a legacy connection there.

As I was saying to you earlier, I have a lot of legacy relationships with the former governors who I've served with and worked with over the years.

Mitt Romney is another friend of yours who hasn't spoken up, though, that much.

He has expressed his dismay but hasn't gone further than that.

What do you make of him?

Well, I think

Mitt is a great public servant and will do a lot of good things in the Senate.

Do you think his private sense of things is different from his public sense of things?

Oh, he'd be among those who I think would privately applaud what I'm doing.

Sure.

Has he?

You know, I haven't talked to him in a while, but

that would be my read on him based on past conversations, you know, even before the election of 2016.

Aaron Powell, and if you don't win the Republican primary, you are not going to be a Trump supporter, no matter what.

That is correct.

Would you support a Democrat running against him?

I don't know.

Have to wait and see who the Democrat is.

I would not support Mr.

Trump, however, for the reasons we have discussed earlier.

You have made your

dissatisfaction with Elizabeth Warren's policy proposals clear.

I think Bernie Sanders is obviously not someone that you are a fan of and his policies.

Another Democrat, could you see that happening?

You know,

I think there's not enough hours in a day for me to handicap the Democratic field, and I don't even know it that well.

It's a lot to keep up with.

It's a lot to keep up with, yeah.

I do have to say the mayor of South Bend is

a long, cool drink of water.

He's a nice, nice, fresh arrival on the scene.

So you're a Pete Buttigieg fan?

Yeah.

I wonder what he would make of that.

Maybe I'll have to ask him.

I'll see him campaigning out soon.

But Governor Bill Weld, thanks for being with us here on Radio Atlantic.

My pleasure.

Thanks so much.

That'll do it for this week of Radio Atlantic.

Thanks to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode.

And to Catherine Wells, the executive producer for Atlantic Podcasts.

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