Donald Trump may be the presumptive G.O.P. candidate for the 2020 election cycle, but that doesn’t mean the party’s voters are enamored of the concept. A recent Marist poll found that 44 percent of Republican voters would like to see a primary challenger. Four in 10 Republican voters feel the same way in New Hampshire, as do more than 60 percent in Iowa. But with the exception of casual Libertarian Bill Weld, who announced his intention to take on Trump in 2020, there have been few Republicans willing to speak up for the silent minority—until now.

Emerging from obscurity to undermine Trump is none other than former Florida governor Jeb Bush, the onetime presumptive candidate for the G.O.P. presidential nomination who was mercilessly and unexpectedly crushed under the heel of Trumpism in 2016. “I think someone should run. Just because Republicans ought to be given a choice,” he tells former Obama strategist David Axelrod in an episode of The Axe Files airing Saturday. It would be hard to overcome Trump’s “loyal base,” Bush admits, much less unseat a sitting president in a primary. “But to have a conversation about what it is to be a conservative I think is important.”

Of course, Republican primary voters had such a choice in 2016, when they soundly rejected Jeb Bush’s pro-immigration, pro-free-trade version of conservatism in favor of strident nationalism, border walls, adultery, and various other manifestations of American Greatness. As a result, Bush never broke above fourth place in any primary, despite having $130 million in his campaign coffers. He ultimately dropped out after pulling in just 8 percent of the vote in South Carolina. (Trump took the state with 32.5 percent.)

Then again, much has changed in the three years since Bush famously begged voters to “please clap” for his platform. Trump’s tax cuts have benefited the wealthy and his trade wars have hurt farmers; the stock market is trending sideways; America’s foreign policy is in disarray; and the Mueller report looms. Trump retains the support of almost 90 percent of Republican voters, for now. But the next several months could force centrist conservatives to make some hard choices. Bush, for one, still believes in the possibility of a Republican white knight to reunite the party around a truly conservative vision to address issues like income inequality, immigration, and global warming. “Our country needs to have competing ideologies that people—that are dynamic, that focus on the world we’re in and the world we’re moving towards rather than revert back to a nostalgic time,” he told Axelrod.

So far, none of the candidates openly mulling primary runs against Trump are really offering that vision, and few Republican voters are buying whatever they’re selling. Last month, an Emerson College poll found that John Kasich, the former Ohio governor with a platform closest to Bush’s, would be crushed by Trump in the Iowa caucuses by 90 points. Weld, who announced a kamikaze-style mission to challenge Trump in the primaries, is so unpopular that political insiders in New Hampshire—the state where the former Massachusetts governor hopes to establish his name—called his quixotic run “a weapon” Trump could use “to beat up future challengers, to dismiss them all as ‘just another Bill Weld.’”

Bush isn’t giving up hope. On The Axe Files, he mentions Larry Hogan, the moderate Republican governor of blue-state Maryland, as “at the top of a list of leaders that I admire today.” Bush notes that when he spoke at Hogan’s second inauguration as governor of Maryland in January—during which Hogan quietly denounced Trump—he got an inkling that Hogan might be mulling a run. “I didn’t realize I was part of his pre-campaign,” he jokes. Hopefully he’s not giving Hogan campaign advice, too.

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