‘ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER: MEMOIRS OF AN ATTORNEY GENERAL’
By William P. Barr
William Morrow ($35)
“One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General” begins with a meeting at the White House on December 1, 2020, hours after Bill Barr told a reporter the Justice Department had found no evidence of fraud on a scale that would have affected the outcome of the presidential election. Raked over the coals by President Trump, Mr. Barr offered to resign. “Accepted,” Trump yelled, as he banged the table. “You are done right now. Go home.”
Barr’s memoir, which covers his two tours of duty as Attorney General (under Bush 41 and Trump), ends with his recommendation that Republicans nominate someone other than Trump in 2024.
Between these pages, Barr provides a hyper-partisan, combative, conspiracy-laden analysis of American society and politics that explains why he was eager to join the Trump Administration.
The Democratic Party, according to Barr, has been taken over by “woke” radicals who espouse Marxist, racial, gender, and transgender ideologies. Supported by mainstream media, “who force facts into preferred narratives,” Big Tech and other corporate and professional elites, they seek control “over every aspect of life,” including removal of religion from schools and other public institutions and demand that students “publicly confess their white privilege and identify themselves as oppressors.”
“I am under no illusion,” Barr writes, “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.”
Viewing themselves as “guerrillas engaged in a war to cripple a duly elected government,” the radicals use every “tactic, no matter how abusive,” including incitement of political violence, to destroy the Trump Administration.
Like Trump, Barr expresses no reservations, no second thoughts, considers no alternatives to the advice he gave the president and the policies he supported during his tenure as Attorney General. Barr launches a gratuitous attack on Dr. Anthony Fauci, for example, mocks the phrase “follow the science,” and gives Trump high marks for his pandemic policies, without addressing criticism of these claims. He does not adequately explain why he intervened to cancel the guilty plea of Michael Flynn and reduce the sentence of Roger Stone. Or why he decided to raise concerns about the likelihood of fraud posed by mail-in ballots at the very moment Trump was predicting the 2020 presidential election would be rigged.
In December 2020, Barr tells us, he concluded that “Trump’s reckless claims of fraud” and orchestration “of a mob to pressure Congress” to overturn the results of a free and fair election was a “disservice to the nation” and the people “who had labored and sacrificed to make his administration a success.” He was “infuriated” as well by Trump’s insulting remarks about the recently deceased John McCain and Colin Powell, and to women based on their physical appearance.
More important, perhaps, given his full-throated endorsement of Trump’s policies, Barr is angry that Trump wrecked Republicans’ chances of maintaining their majority in the U.S. Senate by sabotaging the party’s candidates in the run-off election in Georgia. “In the final months of his Administration,” he writes, “Trump cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.”
And so, Barr hopes “one of an impressive array” of younger candidates “less interested in petty quarrels and erratic personal behavior” and fully capable of advancing MAGA’s agenda will get the Republican Party’s presidential nomination.
It’s worth noting, however, that Barr has recently indicated he will support his former boss if he gets the nod. Clearly, he doesn’t believe that by putting himself before country and principle and subverting the peaceful transfer of power, Trump has disqualified himself to serve as president.
Glenn C. Altschuler is the Thomas and Dorothy Litwin Professor of American Studies at Cornell University.
First Published: April 3, 2022, 10:30 a.m.
