From One World Trade Center in Manhattan, this is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of the New Yorker and WNYC Studios.

Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick.

Running in a primary election against a sitting president is generally speaking of futile effort.

To come up with a plausible primary challenge, you've got to think back

pretty far, maybe to 1980, when Edward Kennedy challenged President Jimmy Carter for the Democratic

nomination, and even then Kennedy failed. But just about everything in the presidency of Donald

Trump has been unprecedented. So we shouldn't be very surprised to see something

unusual in the 2020 campaign. And it looks like Bill Weld is going to run against Donald Trump

to become the Republican nominee. Weld is a lawyer and a former Justice Department official,

and he served as governor of Massachusetts for much of the

1990s. In 2016, he ran as vice president on the Libertarian Party ticket. In national politics these

days, we don't often see Republicans like Bill Weld anymore. He's a New England moderate,

that is, fiscally conservative and socially liberal. But Weld is not at all

moderate in his views on Donald Trump. They say the president has captured the Republican Party

in Washington, as he himself might tweet, sad. It's even sadder that Republicans in Washington, many of them, exhibit all the symptoms of

Stockholm syndrome, identifying with their captor. The truth is that we've wasted an enormous

amount of time by humoring this president, indulging him in his narcissism and his compulsive irrational behaviors.

I reached Bill Weld at his office in Boston last week.

Governor, I don't mean to be flip, but what are you thinking?

You've decided to run for president for the Republican Party against a sitting president, President Trump,

and that presents all kinds of, let's just say, challenges

and body blows to you inevitably.

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