Bill Weld is the early frontrunner for most annoying trend of the year

This guy is supposed to beat Trump in a Republican primary?

Former Vice Presidential candidate and Massachusetts Gov. Bill Weld.
(Image credit: MOLLY RILEY/AFP/Getty Images)

With the new year still very much ahead of us, it's far too early to say what will turn out to be the most annoying trend of 2019 — the decluttering mania and the Alliance of American Football both look very promising so far — but I have my own early candidate — in the literal sense of someone not named Donald J. Trump who says he's running as a Republican for the presidency of the United States of America in 2020.

If you don't know who Bill Weld is, it's probably because you were neither a resident of Massachusetts in the early to mid '90s or one of the four million or so pot smokers and disgruntled Hillary voters who pulled the lever for Gary "What is Aleppo?" Johnson in 2016. The running mate of the self-described "entrepreneur in the cannabis space" was Weld, a former Republican governor of the Bay State, who has not held political office since 1997. Weld was held in such esteem by the rest of his party that the Republican-controlled Senate Foreign Relations Committee would not even hold a hearing for him when he was nominated to be ambassador to Mexico.

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Matthew Walther

Matthew Walther is a national correspondent at The Week. His work has also appeared in First Things, The Spectator of London, The Catholic Herald, National Review, and other publications. He is currently writing a biography of the Rev. Montague Summers. He is also a Robert Novak Journalism Fellow.