In 2016, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld received the Libertarian Party’s vice-presidential nomination. This year, having returned to the Republican Party, Weld is challenging President Donald Trump for the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
Many people would assume that Weld would be criticizing Trump for ordering this week’s killing in Iraq of Iranian General Qassim Suleimani. This assumption would make sense given the libertarian position favoring nonintervention overseas.
Tag: Bill Weld
Ron Paul, who had been the 1988 presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party, spent much time in his 2008 and 2012 Republican primary presidential runs criticizing US intervention overseas and promoting following a noninterventionist foreign policy. Some people might expect Bill Weld would do the same thing in his current Republican primary challenge to President Donald Trump. Weld was, after all, the 2016 Libertarian nominee for vice president. However, as Weld made crystal-clear in his October 8 editorial at Foreign Affairs, Weld aspires to oversee as president a foreign policy that is solidly interventionist.
Many states have for decades imposed difficult to virtually impossible hurdles that third parties must jump over for their candidates to appear on general election ballots. But, it is not only Libertarian, Green, and other third-party candidates who can be denied their places on election ballots. Alex Isenstadt reported Friday at Politico that the state Republican parties of Arizona, Kansas, Nevada, and South Carolina were “poised to cancel their 2020 GOP presidential primaries and caucuses, a move that would cut off oxygen to Donald Trump’s long-shot primary challengers.”