On Monday, Bill Weld, the Republican former governor of Massachusetts, confirmed that he is challenging Donald Trump in the 2020 G.O.P. primary, thereby insuring that Trump will be the first Oval Office occupant since 1992 to face a primary challenge. With recent opinion polls indicating that more than eight in ten Republican voters approve of Trump’s performance, Weld’s candidacy is obviously a long shot, as his campaign manager, Stuart Stevens, readily conceded to the Washington Post. But Weld’s bid shouldn’t be dismissed out of hand. Even if it does fail, it will serve a number of useful purposes.

The very sight of an articulate Republican who hasn’t been terrorized into submission going out and making a case against Trump will highlight the woefully supine state of the rest of the Party. By insuring that there will be a contested G.O.P. primary—something the White House was surely keen to avoid—Weld’s entry will also preserve the option for more widely known Republican critics of Trump, such as John Kasich or Ben Sasse, to jump in later if they get up the courage. Finally, it insures that there will be fireworks. Despite his languid, upper-class demeanor, Weld is no pushover, and he’s already going for the jugular. So far, Trump has ignored his fledgling candidacy. But that won’t last.

A commercial on the home page of Weld’s campaign Web site features a mashup of some of Trump’s verbal outrages. They included his criticism of the late Senator John McCain for getting captured in Vietnam; his mockery of a disabled reporter; his declaration that there were “fine people on both sides” in Charlottesville; and a clip from the “Access Hollywood” tape in which he said to the host Billy Bush, “I moved on her like a bitch.” The video also unveiled Weld’s campaign slogan: “Because America deserves better.”

In a series of television and radio interviews heralding his official campaign launch, Weld pressed the case against Trump. “I really think if we have six more years of the same stuff we’ve had out of the White House for the past two years, that would be a political tragedy, and I would fear for the Republic,” he told CNN’s Jake Tapper, on Monday. On Tuesday, after Trump vetoed a congressional resolution to end U.S. involvement in the civil war in Yemen—another sop to the absolutist Saudi regime— Weld highlighted the danger to the international order that a Trump reëlection would present. In an interview with MSNBC’s Lawrence O’Donnell, he said, “Insulting our allies, eroding our military alliances abroad, cozying up to dictators—there’s no limit to the damage that can be done.”

In private, quite a few elected Republicans would accede to many, if not all, of the arguments that Weld has expressed. In public, even those G.O.P. senators who have distanced themselves from Trump at times are keeping quiet. When CNN reached out to Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Mitt Romney, and Ben Sasse, none of them would comment on Weld’s campaign. This was unsurprising, as was the fact that two senators who are facing tough reëlection races in 2020—Corey Gardner, of Colorado, and Joni Ernst, of Iowa—both indicated that they are supporting Trump. Since the 2016 election, the Republican National Committee has been installing Trump loyalists at the helm of state parties across the country, and incumbents are understandably averse to crossing them, or Trump voters generally.

Weld, however, is a free agent. His goal is to attract traditional Republicans who are as disillusioned with Trump’s feckless tax and spending policies as they are with his personality. “I think most Republicans believe that we deserve an economic conservative in the White House,” Weld said to O’Donnell. In states like New Hampshire, which have open or semi-open Republican primaries, he will also be going after Independents, and even Democrats. “It will be a national campaign,” he told Tapper. “Twenty states do permit . . . crossover voting, which is more than a beachhead. I’m looking forward to the campaign.”

In today’s G.O.P., Weld is something of a maverick, but he isn’t a political outsider. His Massachusetts governorship extended from 1991 to 1997. In 2005, he considered entering the New York gubernatorial race but didn’t. In the 2016 Presidential election, he occupied the Vice-President’s slot on the Libertarian Party ticket, which got about 4.5 million votes. At seventy-four years of age and six-four, Weld is a year older than Trump and several inches taller. (Trump claims to be six-three.) He doesn’t seem to be the type to be intimidated, and one can only admire his willingness to subject himself to the personal attacks from Trump and his allies that are already beginning.

At this early stage, there is little basis on which to compare Weld to Eugene McCarthy in 1968 or Pat Buchanan in 1992. (Both of them scored strong second-place finishes in New Hampshire, upended their respective elections, and helped bring about the demise of sitting Presidents.) But Weld does have the look about him of a happy warrior. When the Boston Globe’s James Pindell caught up with him at a diner in New Hampshire, he was busy talking to the patrons about fisher cats—carnivorous weasels that prey upon mice, birds, and even porcupines in the forests and woodlands of the Granite State. “People are usually, like, ‘What is a fisher cat?’ ” Weld said. “But [they] don’t realize how ferocious they can be, sort of like me and this campaign.” To perform an invaluable public service, Weld doesn’t have to be ferocious. He just has to keep telling the truth about Trump and force other Republicans to confront it.