Former attorney general William P. Barr’s consideration of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is not terribly complicated.
It seemed for a bit as though it might be. After serving as one of Trump’s most aggressively loyal officials, Barr broke with Trump in December 2020 by refusing to elevate false claims about voter fraud. He later told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that Trump never offered “an indication of interest in what the actual facts were” about the election results, preferring to live in his fantasy world. In July, Barr compared having to choose between Trump and President Biden in the 2024 election to jumping off a bridge.
And now he has jumped and landed precisely where every other aspect of his service under Trump would have indicated: on Trump’s side.
Barr walked through his reasoning in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. He specifically addressed the issue on which he’d most obviously broken with Trump: the former president’s effort to retain power despite losing in 2020. His argument? Biden was the more worrisome actor.
“I think Trump would do less damage than Biden,” Barr told Collins. “I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy, I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”
He explained his thinking by claiming that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left. It’s the collectivist socialist agenda.” He outlined how he saw these threats manifesting at the moment: “Parents are losing the freedom to control their children’s education. And people can’t speak their mind without losing their jobs, and things like that. This is worse than the McCarthy era.”
“We’re not enforcing our borders, we have open borders,” he continued a bit later. “We have lawlessness in our cities. We have regulations coming fast and furious. So, telling people what kind of stoves they can use, and what kinds of cars they have to drive, and eliminating cars and so forth. Yes, those are the threats to democracy.”
This is patter straight out of the right-wing media bubble. The stove thing, the crime thing, the border thing. Then there’s the McCarthyism charge, “cancel culture” anecdotalism. Collins challenged Barr by noting the right’s push to ban books; Barr shrugged and countered by asking, “Don’t you think there should be some limits on what people are able to read at very young ages?”
That’s it, right there. Barr likes and agrees with Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy — and, in fact, was standing alongside him for most of those efforts. He dislikes what Biden is doing in part because he has gobbled up nonsensical claims about what Biden is doing and in part because he just thinks it’s what the left does. The left “has always” been the threat to democracy, he said; therefore, it is currently the threat to democracy.
Before Barr was the guy noting correctly that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were false, he was the guy defending and extending Trump’s line-crossing approach to the presidency. (Even as Barr claimed that the prosecutions Trump faces were perhaps political, in his familiar just-asking-questions way, he also pointed out to Collins that Trump “basically has the kind of personality that he’s always testing the limit,” which is ” what gets him in trouble.”)
Barr got the gig in part by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department in 2018 arguing that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could not feasibly charge a president with obstructing justice. After Barr took over as attorney general less than a year later, the Mueller investigation into Russia’s effort to influence the 2016 election quickly concluded. Barr’s framing of the report’s findings was incredibly useful to Trump in batting away concerns about his actions.
And then Barr went further, appointing a US attorney to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. Barr had an active hand in this effort to raise questions about the work of federal law enforcement, an effort that ultimately tried to implicate Hillary Clinton directly in triggering questions about ties between Trump and Russia. (It didn’t work.)
Before Barr was the guy admitting that Trump didn’t have the goods on election fraud, he was the attorney general giving Trump oxygen by allowing the Justice Department to break tradition by digging into alleged claims of fraud. Before that, he was the guy who came out to ask law enforcement dealing with protesters in Lafayette Square whether the protesters would still be there when the president came out of the White House, with the violent clearing of the square following a few minutes later — and Trump’s photo op at a church a few minutes after that.
Before thathe was the guy who set up a system under which Rudy Giuliani’s flood of allegations about Biden from sources in Ukraine (including some linked to Russian intelligence) worked their way into proper law enforcement channels — a system that ultimately generated the discredited bribery claim against the current president.
All of these actions were taken in the service of a president who viewed his power as expansive and allowed for targeting opponents in direct and indirect ways. As he made clear in that initial letter to the Justice Department, Barr shares this view of presidential power, at least when deployed by a Republican president.
When an official within a Democratic administration floats the idea of phasing out gas stoves before quickly backing off the idea, though, that’s a sign of how Biden is implementing a “collectivist socialist agenda.”
Barr has framed his worldview in strongly religious terms, as he did in an infamous 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame.
“Today militant secularists do not have a live-and-let-live spirit,” he said in that speech, identifying these secularists in the way an adherent of the extremist QAnon ideology might, as elements of the media and entertainment industries and as college professors. “They are not content to leave religious people alone to practice their faith. Instead, they seem to take delight in compelling people to violate their conscience.”
At another point in that speech, Barr said, “I do not mean to suggest that there is no hope for moral renewal in our country, but we cannot sit back and just hope that the pendulum is going to swing back towards sanity.”
Barr broached the issue of morality to Collins, too.
“Biden is not a great moral exemplar, okay?” he said. “And is he following the law? Here he is, giving away another round of forgiving student loans, after he lost it in the Supreme Court.” On Barr’s scales of morality, Trump’s actions sit evenly with Biden’s forgiving student loans.
In part because he’s so willing to excuse what Trump did. Collins asked Barr about a claim that Trump had called for the execution of someone who had leaked an unflattering story about him.
“I remember him being very mad about that. I actually don’t remember him saying, executing. But I wouldn’t dispute it, you know?” Barr responded. “I mean, it doesn’t sound — I mean, the president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually carried it out.”
Pressed by Collins, he claimed he was confident that Trump could be talked out of such an action. “The thing that I worry about President Trump is not that he’s going to become an autocrat and do those kinds of things,” Barr insisted. This came a minute or two before his claim about how the Biden administration’s effort to address emissions from internal combustion engines was a mark of democratic collapse.
Barr also doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his break with Trump was rooted specifically in him inability to talk Trump off the ledge. He tried to get Trump to step away from the election-fraud stuff, without luck. But he seemingly wants those watching to assume that Trump won’t have someone killed.
Collins challenged Barr on this.
“Name one thing that Biden has done that’s worse” than trying to subvert the election, she said.
“I think his whole administration is a disaster for the country,” Barr replied.
Collins asked whether it was “worse than subverting the peaceful transfer of power.”
“Did he succeed?” Barr replied.
The answer is “yes,” of course: Power was transferred, but the process was not peaceful. But, hey, at least no one suggested that cutting back on natural gas stoves would have potential health and environmental benefits.
