Have you heard of Bill Weld? The campaign manager for the Republican lightweight and potential 2020 challenger to Donald Trump may have resigned.
The Daily Caller reports that Jennifer Greenhorn, a GOP strategist, quietly stepped down from Weld’s campaign on June 14. Weld, a Never Trump Republican who is being championed by the president’s haters, is the only Republican currently planning to primary Trump.
A loss for the Weld campaign
For those who care — which is a fairly limited group of liberals and Never Trump stalwarts like Bill Kristol — Weld is a libertarian running the only high-profile (if you can call it that) primary challenge to Trump. But Weld’s campaign, as one might expect, seems to be having some trouble.
Weld is running a quiet campaign out of the spotlight, so it may not come as a surprise that his campaign manager resigned — and hardly anyone noticed. Greenhorn reportedly served in the role from April to June, but it didn’t become clear until after the fact when Greenhorn published an op-ed attacking President Trump in USA Today.
“The president is engaging in the worst kind of racism. That is, he is using racist language in an attempt to enrage the masses and convince one American that another American is their enemy because they are different, and he is doing so to advance a political agenda and personal power,” she wrote.
In the piece, titled, “Trump stole my party and my heart is breaking,” Greenhorn was at first listed as an “opinion contributor” and “Republican activist.” USA Today was criticized for failing to note that Greenhorn was Weld’s campaign manager. But when the paper issued a correction, it seemed that it did not make a mistake:
Jennifer Horn is a communications consultant and the former chairman of the Republican party of New Hampshire, where she has lived for 18 years. She managed William Weld’s primary challenge to Donald Trump from April 15 to June 14.
Greenhorn does not list herself as Weld’s campaign manager on her Twitter page. She was mentioned as Weld’s campaign manager as recently as June 17 by The Washington Post, the Daily Caller noted.
Never-Trump Republican’s campaign struggling
Weld has struggled from the start to gain traction in a party that has been transformed by, and is dominated by, President Trump. Trump enjoys high approval ratings, at about 80%, with Republican voters. Primary polls have Trump leading Weld by a huge margin of more than 80 points.
It may not be hard to surmise why. Like his campaign manager, Weld is a political dinosaur. The former Massachusetts governor, like another former Massachusetts governor who flirted with challenging Trump, has been met with a cool reception from Republican voters who are tired of the libertarian RINO establishment whose failure led to Donald Trump’s rise.
Like Mitt Romney and Bill Kristol, Weld is the kind of Republican who thinks Trump is a bigger problem for the country than the leftists that Trump, unlike Weld, actually fights. The beliefs of Republicans like Weld have become virtually indistinguishable from those of liberals.
Weld, who is apparently so much a contrarian that he endorsed Barack Obama over John McCain in 2008, has described Trump as “appalling,” and, amid the “go back” furor, as a “raging racist.”
The problem for Weld is that his target voters are going to be mostly Democrats. To say the least, there isn’t a huge constituency for a Republican candidate there.