Bill Weld has announced his intention to challenge Donald Trump for the Republican nomination for the 2020 presidency.  Weld’s most recent run for political office was as the nominee of the Libertarian Party for vice president in 2016.  While the VP candidate must be officially nominated by the Libertarian Party delegates at the convention, Weld was the choice of the presidential nominee, Gary Johnson.

I wrote quite a bit on Weld and his establishment credentials at the time.  On May 29, 2016, when comparing the Johnson/ Weld ticket to Trump, I stated the following:

“At least with Trump, there is a chance for a less interventionist foreign policy.  If Johnson gets in, then Weld gets in.  If Weld gets in, then the Republican establishment gets in.”

Is there any contesting now that Bill Weld is part of the establishment that seeks to maintain the general status quo of U.S. empire and statism?

You could rightfully argue that the Republican establishment got in with Trump anyway.  After all, you can’t get much worse that John Bolton and Mike Pompeo.  But at least with Trump, he sometimes takes some reasonable stances with regards to foreign policy.  He hasn’t started any new major wars yet, although you never know what tomorrow may bring.

But just imagine if Gary Johnson were president, with Bill Weld as vice president.  Does anyone honestly think that Johnson would have carried through on anything in regards to a less interventionist foreign policy?  Would he have withdrawn troops from the Middle East?

Gary Johnson, if he was even being honest with some of his non-interventionist rhetoric, is weak. If you are weak going into a position like that, you will not survive, or at least your agenda will not survive. Even if he did have a somewhat honest agenda of reducing the U.S. empire, he wouldn’t have been able to carry through on any of it.  Weld would have had his guys running the show from day one.

Donald Trump has been too weak to even get troops out of Syria.  He went further than almost anyone else would have been capable in that he announced a withdrawal from Syria.  But then Bolton and the rest of the establishment put him in his place and delayed the withdrawal.  Trump is weak, but he is not as weak as Johnson.  If Trump can’t pull a few thousand troops out of Syria, there would have been no hope for Johnson.

I even said similar things about Rand Paul when he was running for president.  He has been better on foreign policy issues since his run for the presidency ended.  But if he was not willing to stand up to the establishment while he was running for office, there would have been little hope had he actually been elected. Maybe there was a tiny bit of hope with him because it is possible that his father (Ron Paul) would have scolded him in private and told him to do the right thing and start bringing the troops home.

Weld – An Establishment Plant?

Sometimes conspiracy theories run too far and too deep for me.  Sometimes you don’t need a conspiracy to just believe that people acted in their own self-interest.

Bill Weld obviously got a little notoriety by being the vice-presidential candidate on the LP ticket.  But the more I look at the situation, I can’t help but wonder whether he was a plant, who was put there by and for the establishment.

Most people knew that the Johnson/ Weld ticket was never going to win the general election, barring something extraordinary.  Even if Trump and Hillary had both been recorded on video doing explicitly criminal acts, and the videos had been released a week before the election, it probably wouldn’t have led to anywhere near a Johnson/ Weld victory.

I think Weld’s main purpose was to stop Donald Trump from getting in the White House.  In other words, his main purpose was to help elect Hillary Clinton, which obviously didn’t work.  In the run up to Election Day, Weld was out there essentially campaigning for Clinton.  I still wonder whether Johnson felt betrayed by this, or if he was part of the plan.

Now Weld is set to run against Donald Trump in the Republican primaries.  I can’t imagine that Weld would be delusional enough to think that he could defeat Trump.  It’s possible that he could get really lucky at the last minute and something bad could happen to Trump.  But even here, the Republican electorate would likely find someone else to replace Trump instead of Weld, even at the last minute.

Weld is being put out there to challenge Trump not because anyone expects him to win.  It is simply a strategy to weaken Trump. Weld will hammer away at Trump and do the establishment’s bidding.  While the Democratic candidates (and there are many) hammer away at each other, at least there will be someone else outside of this crop of politicians who is also attacking Trump.  The main focus of the Democratic primary debates will be who can give away more “free” stuff, and who can attack Trump more.

We will have all of the Democratic candidates going after Trump.  The establishment media will obviously continue with their attacks.  And we’ll now have Weld from the Republican establishment side going after Trump.  The more, the merrier.

Lessons Learned for the LP?

The biggest takeaway will be whether the “Libertarians” who supported Johnson/ Weld will learn anything from this.  Unfortunately, I doubt it.  But I have to imagine that there will at least be a few people who scratch their heads and rethink the strategy of putting up “respectable” people as the Libertarian Party nominees.

I had a few debates with Libertarians over this in 2016.  I was told that the LP just wanted two respected former governors who have name recognition and credibility.  If Weld is what you want to call credible, then the word has lost all meaning to me.

He is only credible in the sense that he is a reliable shill for the establishment and statism. He is highly dependable to take the position that most favors the state.

The Johnson/ Weld ticket did get the most number of votes ever for the LP in a presidential election.  But so what?  It is meaningless.  Some of those votes were just protest votes against Donald/ Hillary.  They were not necessarily votes in favor of liberty.

The duo of Johnson and Weld did little to educate people on the benefits and morality of liberty. If anything, they did a great disservice by clouding the libertarian message.  Now there may be some people who think that Johnson and Weld are what it means to be a libertarian.

They didn’t grow the party with actual libertarians.  They didn’t help spread the message of liberty.  They didn’t set any foundations for future growth in the liberty movement.  They didn’t even do much to help us on any of the individual issues.  It didn’t take great courage to come out for the legalization of marijuana in a time when it is already happening by popular opinion.

The LP needs to find another Harry Browne (although nobody could match what Harry Browne did). There are a few promising prospective candidates out there now, such as Jacob Hornberger of The Future of Freedom Foundation.

It would be interesting to see what an actual libertarian could do in the general election. At the very least, maybe the next LP nominee could actually help educate others on what it means to be a libertarian.  It is almost the opposite of the things that are advocated by Bill Weld.