Former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld announced on Friday he would be launching a presidential exploratory committee to run in 2020 as a Republican and challenge President Donald Trump, CNN reports.

"I hope to see the Republican Party assume once again the mantle of being the party of Lincoln. It upsets me that our energies as a society are being sapped by the President's culture of divisiveness in Washington," he said in New Hampshire, adding, "Because of the many concerns I've talked about today, I've established an exploratory committee ... as a Republican in the 2020 election."

Speaking at the "Politics & Eggs" breakfast in Bedford, New Hampshire, Weld blasted Trump as a "schoolyard bully," "unstable" and "a president whose priorities are skewed to the promotion of himself rather than toward the good of the country."

Weld is the first potential primary challenger to the President on the Republican side. A number of Democratic candidates have already joined a crowded 2020 race in hopes of facing off against Trump in the general election.

Weld will face an uphill battle in his efforts to take down Trump, noted CNN. History shows that presidents generally only face serious primary challenges when their approval rating within their own party is at 75% or below. Trump is currently far above this threshold.

Trump recently scored an 89% approval rating among Republicans nationally in a Gallup poll. Even in New Hampshire, where Weld is expected to base much of his campaign effort, Trump showed a similarly strongly 83% approval rating with Republicans in a University of New Hampshire poll in late October.

"The truth is that we've wasted an enormous amount of time by humoring this President, indulging him in his narcissism and his compulsive irrational behaviors," Weld said Friday, accusing Republicans in Washington of showing "the symptoms of Stockholm syndrome."

He added, "The situation is not yet hopeless, but we do need a mid-course correction."

Weld served as a two-term Massachusetts governor during the early 1990s and later lost the 1996 US Senate race in Massachusetts to John Kerry.

He later moved to New York and unsuccessfully sought the Republican nomination for governor in 2005.

Weld was Mitt Romney's co-chair in New York when Romney ran for president in 2008. After Romney dropped out, Weld ended up endorsing then-Democratic nominee Barack Obama for president over the GOP nominee, Sen. John McCain.

Weld was the 2016 vice presidential nominee on the Libertarian Party ticket with former New Mexico Gov. Gary Johnson.

(Arutz Sheva’s North American desk is keeping you updated until the start of Shabbat in New York. The time posted automatically on all Arutz Sheva articles, however, is Israeli time.)