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In “One Damn Thing After Another,” the former attorney general suggests that Republicans are going beyond Donald Trump and his “crazy rhetoric,” reserving his harshest words for the former president’s critics.
By Jennifer Szalai
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ONE DAMN CHING AFTER ANOTHERMemory of an Attorney GeneralBy William P. BarrIllustrated. 595 pages. Editors William Morrow/HarperCollins. $35.
“It was a lie,” writes former Attorney General William P. Barr at the beginning of his new e-book, a “fabrication” that “was repeated and amplified in media politics during the election and is still repeated. “Barr is not referring in this case to Donald Trump’s insistent lie about “massive voter fraud” in 2020, but to an occasion that occurred some 30 years earlier, when Barr was on his first excursion as attorney general, for President George HWBush. The media deceptively portrayed Bush marveling at a supermarket scanner as if he had never met a generation before.
The suggestion that the first President Bush was an elitist patrician who couldn’t pass in a fashionable grocery store still unsettles Barr 3 decades later. Analyze the occasion down to the smallest detail in “One Damn Thing After Another,” letting out an extravagant even though it makes sense when you realize that being seen as disconnected is the kiss of death for status quo conservatives, especially now, when the right wing of populism is on the rise.
Barr is careful in this e-book to provide his formative years as more complicated than a rarefied high school education and an apartment on Riverside Drive in New York would have him believe. According to Barr, it is the Democrats who are invariably the “sufficient elites, while the Republicans are the true defenders of “ordinary middle- and working-class Americans. “
“One Damn Thing After Another” is a premature treatise on culture war smuggled into a lawyer’s memoir: a sober recitation of occasions that is periodically interrupted by bubbling diatribes about “militant secularism” and a “Maoist” American left. He compares Trump’s warring parties to “guerrillas engaged in a war to paralyze a duly elected government” and calls the pandemic restrictions followed in some states “the ultimate denial of civil liberties” in U. S. history, just after slavery.
Barr resigned as attorney general in December 2020, after failing to locate any evidence of truly extensive voter fraud, despite what he describes here as his diligent efforts to “examine” it. (He calls the claims about voting machines “a silly theory that had no basis in reality. “)He ends his e-book by describing Trump’s post-election habit as “childish,” perhaps even “dangerous. “there are no illusions about who is to blame for the department of the country, the bitterness of our politics, and the weakening and demoralization of our nation,” he wrote. “This is the progressive left and its totalitarian ideals. “
Such eruptions largely explain why he was in a position to sign for Trump’s management in the first place, when the buttoned-up Barr, comfortably seated in his retreat and the old Republican Guard, were not entirely compatible with the mold of those they had. he only hoped to gain capital (political or otherwise) by clinging to Trump’s train. (Barr first subsidized his former boss’s son, Jeb, “please applaud” Bush in the primaries. )repulsive for Barr, a convinced Catholic whose concept of a smart moment is to play the bagpipes.
But it turns out that the two men have one thing in common: a maximalist view of presidential power. an unsolicited memo expressing skepticism about Mueller’s investigation into the 2016 election, which Barr said was grabbing President Trump’s attention and distracting him from all the important jobs he would otherwise think of doing.
Barr goes to great lengths in this e-book to counter his critics’ claims that, even before reading the Mueller report, he had largely made up his mind. Barr says the investigation is “not that different from a witch hunt” and that the question of whether Trump’s crusade to profit from Russian election interference was “fabricated,” “bogus,” “bogus”: ” Russiagate specifically, and the resistance in general,” he writes, “were false and fraudulent attempts to invalidate valid law. ” election of a president of the United States.
Several bankruptcies are true to the problems Barr says are for him, adding “addressing big tech” and “ensuring devout freedom” (“the civil rights factor of our time”). A bankruptcy titled “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” presents Barr’s Opinion on the Death Penalty: He Believes It’s Good, and his Justice Department rushed to execute thirteen federal inmates in the seven months before Trump’s departure. By comparison, the federal government executed a total of four other people in the past 60 years. .
Barr gives an extensive excuse that tries to reconcile his position of killing other people with his devout faith. Pope Francis’ revision of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, denouncing the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” sends Barr to a climax of pinches: “The term inadmissible has no established meaning in ethical theology, and is too vague and oblique to be read as an attempt to extinguish this vast framework of established teachings, even assuming it can only be
This is a style in Barr’s book: he makes his way to desired conclusions by conscientiously navigating a legal path around finely drawn distinctions, while dropping bombs on anyone he defines as an enemy. left-wing agitator who patiently led the Democratic Party into illiberal, identity-obsessed progressivism,” Barr writes; no doubt the real “left-wing agitators,” who have denounced Obama for his centrism, will want to weigh in.
Meanwhile, Barr’s edition of Trump, crowds: The former president would possibly have “a vague and discursive taste for speech,” even a tendency to “crazy rhetoric,” but Barr also believes Trump has “a deep intuitive appreciation of the importance of faith. “to the suitability of our nation. Barr believes that “the country would have benefited and probably would have noticed more of the taste of constructive government and problem-solving that President Trump premiered on Election Night,” if only “he had been greeted with a modicum of intelligent faith on the other side. “
In “good faith,” Barr would possibly be imagining something akin to his own beneficial interpretations of Trump’s behavior, which he strives to rationalize in his book. When Barr learned of the back-to-back phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, who was then Ukraine’s president-elect, Barr said he had advocated for the quick release of the transcript, largely because it showed that Trump, according to Barr, ultimately did nothing wrong.
Yes, Barr admits, telling Zelensky that U. S. military aid conditional on a Ukrainian investigation of the Bidens is “foolish,” but “a quid pro quo is inherent in almost any diplomacy. “”political benefits” for Trump, also “probably more so the U. S. anti-corruption agenda,” Barr said. Accommodating such complex rhetorical contortions is part of the explanation for why this book is only about six hundred pages long.
There are also many places where Barr gives what at first glance appears to be a snowfall of main points but nevertheless commits omissions. He devotes page after page to the factor of electoral fraud, which continually declares that it is a genuine threat, without hesitation. he says the inspector general’s report on Mueller’s investigation is “damning” and refuses to talk about the fact that the same inspector general’s report said the FBI had enough explanation for why to investigate links between Trump’s crusade and Russia. Barr is also silent on the fact that a bipartisan report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the same.
By the end of “One Damn Thing After Another,” it’s clear that Barr has something else that isn’t unusual with Trump: a savvy ability to recognize when other people are no longer useful to his purposes, and a willingness to do without them. in consecuense. Barr slips in a description of Robert Mueller’s “shaky” hands and “shaky” voice, wondering if Mueller “might have a disease,” a surprising (and timely) step for Barr over an old Frinish. In the final chapter, Barr throws Trump under the bus, albeit gently and with the utmost decorum. Barr laments Trump’s damned “tone” issues, blaming him for “unnecessarily” alienating “a giant organization of white-collar workers,” and says it’s time to move on from the 2020 election loser by taking back ” anything like the old Reagan Coalition. “
But Barr faces a dilemma, which is how Republicans can abandon Trump while maintaining his fervent base. The result is like the moment deus ex machina in an ancient Greek play, when a desperate scenario is resolved with the sudden appearance of a god on a crane. “Republicans have an impressive array of young candidates perfectly capable of advancing MAGA’s positive timeline and cultivating greater national unity,” Barr insists, melancholy. “Maga’s positive timeline” combined with “national unity”? Until I got that point in his book, I wouldn’t have Barr as someone so thirsty for a fairytale ending.
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