And now he’s jumped and landed precisely where every other aspect of his service under Trump would have indicated: on Trump’s side.
Barr explained his reasoning in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. He specifically addressed the issue on which he most clearly broke with Trump: the former president’s efforts to retain power despite his defeat in 2020. His argument? Biden was the most worrying actor.
“I think Trump would do less damage than Biden,” Barr told Collins. “I think this is all 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 saying that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the side of the left. This is the collectivist socialist agenda.” He explained how he sees these threats playing out today: “Parents are losing the freedom to control their children’s education. And people can’t express what they think without losing their jobs and things like that. This is worse than the McCarthy era. »
“We do not respect our borders, we have opened them,” he continued a little later. “We live in anarchy 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 should drive, and eliminating cars and so on. Yes, these are the threats to democracy.”
This is a message straight out of the right-wing media bubble. The story of the stove, the story of crime, the story of the frontier. Then there is the accusation of McCarthyism, the “cancel culture” anecdote. Collins challenged Barr by highlighting right-wing pressure to ban books; Barr shrugged and responded by asking, “Don’t you think there should be limits to what people are able to read at a very young age?”
That’s it, right there. Barr likes and agrees with Trump’s efforts to undermine democracy — and, in fact, he stood by him during most of those efforts. He doesn’t like what Biden is doing, partly because he’s gobbled up absurd claims about what Biden is doing and partly because he just thinks that’s what the left does. The left “has always” been a threat to democracy, he said; so it’s Currently the threat to democracy.
Before Barr was the one to correctly note that Trump’s claims about the 2020 election were false, he was the one to defend and extend Trump’s line-crossing approach to the presidency. (Even though Barr said the lawsuits Trump faces may have been political, in his familiar way of just asking questions, he also pointed out to Collins that Trump “basically has the kind of personality where he’s always testing the limit ”, which is “what gets him in trouble”).
Barr got the job in part by sending an unsolicited letter to the Justice Department in 2018, saying special counsel Robert S. Mueller III could not reasonably charge a president with obstruction of justice. After Barr took office as attorney general less than a year later, the Mueller investigation into Russia’s efforts to influence the 2016 election quickly ended. Barr’s phrasing of the report’s findings was incredibly helpful to Trump in allaying concerns about his actions.
And then Barr went further, appointing a U.S. attorney to investigate the origins of the Russia probe. Barr was an active participant in this effort to raise questions about the work of federal law enforcement, an effort that ultimately attempted to directly implicate Hillary Clinton in triggering questions about Trump’s ties to Russia. (It did not work.)
Before Barr was the one admitting that Trump couldn’t handle election fraud, he was the attorney general who gave Trump oxygen by allowing the Justice Department to break with tradition by digging into allegations of fraud. Before that, he was the one who came to ask the police who were dealing with the demonstrators in Lafayette Square if the demonstrators would still be there when the president left the White House, followed by the violent cleaning of the square a few minutes later. late. and Trump’s photo op in a church a few minutes later.
Before thathe was the one who set up a system by which the flood of Rudy Giuliani allegations about Biden from sources in Ukraine (including some linked to Russian intelligence) found their way into the channels of proper law enforcement – a system that ultimately generated a discredited corruption case against the current president.
All of these actions were taken in service of a president who viewed his power as extensive and allowed him to target his opponents in direct and indirect ways. As he made clear in his first letter to the Justice Department, Barr shares this view of presidential power, at least when deployed by a Republican president.
When an official in a Democratic administration floats the idea of phasing out gas stoves only to quickly backtrack on the idea, it’s a sign of how Biden is implementing a “collectivist socialist agenda.” .
Barr has framed his worldview in decidedly religious terms, as he did in an infamous 2019 speech at the University of Notre Dame.
“Today, secular activists do not have the spirit of live and let live,” he said in that speech, identifying these secularists as followers of the extremist ideology QAnon. could, as part of the media and entertainment industries and as university professors. “They are not content to let religious people practice their faith alone. Instead, they seem to delight in coercing people into violating their consciences.
At another point in his speech, Barr said: “I don’t mean to say that there is no hope for moral renewal in our country, but we cannot sit back and just hope that the pendulum swings back towards reason. »
Barr also addressed the issue of morality with Collins.
“Biden is not a great moral example, okay? he said. “And does he respect the laws? Here he is, offering another round of student loan forgiveness, after losing it in the Supreme Court. On Barr’s morality scale, Trump’s actions are on par with Biden’s forgiven student loans.
Partly because he is so willing to excuse what Trump did. Collins asked Barr about a claim that Trump called for the execution of someone who leaked an unflattering story about him.
“I remember him being very angry about it. In fact, I don’t remember him saying, executing. But I wouldn’t dispute it, you know? Barr responded. “I mean, it doesn’t seem — I mean, the president would lose his temper and say things like that. I doubt he would have actually done it.
When pressed by Collins, he said he was confident Trump could be dissuaded from such action. “What worries me about President Trump is not that he becomes an autocrat and does these kinds of things,” Barr insisted. This came a minute or two before his assertion that the Biden administration’s efforts to combat internal combustion engine emissions were a mark of democratic collapse.
Barr also doesn’t seem to acknowledge that his break with Trump was specifically rooted in his inability to dissuade Trump from coming off the ledge. He tried to get Trump to walk away from election fraud, without success. But he seems to want those watching to assume that Trump won’t have someone killed.
Collins challenged Barr on this.
“Name one thing Biden has done that is worse” than trying to overturn the election, she said.
“I think his whole administration is a disaster for the country,” Barr responded.
Collins asked if it was “worse than overturning the peaceful transfer of power.”
“Did he succeed?” Barr responded.
The answer is yes, of course: power was transferred, but the process was not peaceful. But hey, at least no one suggested that reducing the use of natural gas stoves would have potential health and environmental benefits.
washingtonpost
