The Bill Barr Public Image Rehabilitation Tour of 2022 is underway. Prepare for a tidal wave of self-serving, revisionist bullshit.
Barr’s book is out this week, and the attention-grabbing headline is that he has (quite belatedly) turned against his former benefactor and hero, Donald Trump. Despite having spent his tenure as attorney general lying for Trump, propping up Trump, protecting Trump from criminal investigation, and abetting Trump’s effort to steal the 2020 election, Barr now reportedly has turned on his master.
Barr, sounding like a spurned lover, writes that Trump “cared only about one thing: himself.” He describes Trump as an “incorrigible” narcissist who exhibits “self-indulgence and lack of self-control.” Barr concludes that Trump “has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers” needed to lead the country, and that the prospect of Trump running for re-election in 2024 is “dismaying.” Not to go overly highbrow here but, to paraphrase Adam Sandler in The Wedding Singer: these are things that could’ve been brought to our attention yesterday. How bold and principled of Barr to come clean now, in March 2022, after he spent years as Trump’s eager, slobbering lapdog.
And let’s be clear: this is no honest, self-reflective, lookback. True to form, even Barr’s fleeting moments of clarity are compromised by half-baked, self-pitying deflection. Despite his newfound courage to speak up against Trump, Barr declares in the book that he’s “under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralizing our nation. It is the progressive Left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals.” (Didn’t see that twist coming, did you?) Yes, that’s correct: according to Barr, the former President was an unhinged, antidemocratic maniac who spurred a coup attempt and should never be president again – yet the primary fault for the nation’s ills sits with “the progressive Left.” Barr also reportedly saves much personal grievance for “the media,” though his critiques of the press have traditionally been conclusory and self-pitying more than specific and substantive.
I haven’t seen the book yet – for some reason, they didn’t send me an advance reader copy – but, beyond the belated turnabout on Trump, it appears to reflect Barr’s characteristically dishonest, arrogant worldview. A blistering New York Times review brands the book “an intemperate culture-war treatise smuggled into a lawyer’s memoir.” Sounds about right; one of the chapters of my book, Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department, is titled “Culture Warrior.” In that section, I argue that Barr’s extremist political and religious beliefs drove his ends-justifies-the-means conduct as attorney general.
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