In “One Damn Thing After Another,” the former attorney general suggests that Republicans move past Donald Trump and his “madcap rhetoric,” but saves his harshest words for the former president’s critics.
ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER
Memoirs of an Attorney General
By William P. Barr
Illustrated. 595 pages. William Morrow/HarperCollins Publishers. $35.
“It was a lie,” the former attorney general William P. Barr writes early on in his new book — a “fabrication” that “was repeated and amplified in media coverage throughout the election and is still repeated.” Barr isn’t referring in this instance to Donald Trump’s insistent lie about “massive election fraud” in 2020, but to an event that happened nearly 30 years earlier, when Barr was doing his first tour as the attorney general, for President George H.W. Bush. The media misleadingly described Bush marveling at a supermarket scanner as if he had never encountered the technology before.
The suggestion that the first President Bush was some elitist patrician who didn’t know his way around a modern grocery store continues to rankle Barr three decades later. He parses the event in minute detail in “One Damn Thing After Another,” letting loose an extravagant pique that makes sense when you realize that being seen as out of touch is the kiss of death for establishment conservatives, especially now, when right-wing populism is ascendant.
Barr takes care in this book to present his childhood as more hardscrabble than a rarefied prep school education and an apartment on New York City’s Riverside Drive would have anyone believe. In Barr’s telling, it’s Democrats who are invariably the “smug elites,” while Republicans are the true defenders of “ordinary middle- and working-class Americans.”
“One Damn Thing After Another” is an intemperate culture-war treatise smuggled into a lawyer’s memoir: a seemingly sober recitation of events that’s periodically interrupted by seething tirades about “militant secularism” and a “Maoist” American left. He compares Trump’s opponents to “guerrillas engaged in a war to cripple a duly elected government” and calls the pandemic restrictions adopted by some states the most “onerous denial of civil liberties” in American history, second only to slavery.
Barr famously resigned as attorney general in December 2020, after he failed to find any evidence of substantial voter fraud, despite what he chronicles here as his assiduous efforts to “look into it.” (He calls allegations about voting machines “an idiotic theory that had no basis in reality.”) He ends his book by describing Trump’s postelection behavior as “puerile,” perhaps even “dangerous.” Still, as much as Barr was “disgusted” by the rampage on the Capitol, he’s “under no illusion about who is responsible for dividing the country, embittering our politics and weakening and demoralizing our nation,” he writes. “It is the progressive Left and their increasingly totalitarian ideals.”
Such eruptions go a long way toward explaining why he was willing to join the Trump administration in the first place, when the buttoned-up Barr, comfortably ensconced in retirement and the Republican old guard, didn’t quite fit the mold of those upstarts hoping to gain some capital (political or otherwise) by hitching themselves to the Trump train. (Barr had initially supported his former boss’s son, Jeb “please clap” Bush, in the primaries.) You might also wonder how Trump, an ostentatious, thrice-married reality television star who bragged about grabbing women’s genitals, could have been anything but repellent to Barr, a staunch Roman Catholic whose idea of a good time is playing the bagpipes.
But the two men happened to share one thing in common: a maximalist view of presidential power. “I agreed to join the besieged Trump administration as it careened toward a constitutional crisis,” Barr writes. He had already written an unsolicited memo voicing his skepticism about the Mueller investigation into the 2016 election, which Barr believed was consuming President Trump’s attention and distracting him from all the important work he would otherwise be eager to do.
Barr doesn’t make much of an effort in this book to counter assertions by his critics that even before reading the Mueller report he had mostly made up his mind. Barr says the investigation was “not so different from a witch hunt,” and the question of whether the Trump campaign sought to benefit from Russian interference in the election was “manufactured,” “phony,” “bogus”: “Russiagate specifically, and the resistance generally,” he writes, “were mendacious and fraudulent attempts to invalidate the legitimate election of an American President.”
A number of chapters are devoted to issues that Barr says are crucial to him, including “taking on big tech” and “securing religious liberty” (“the civil rights issue of our time”). A chapter titled “Bringing Justice to Violent Predators” offers Barr’s thoughts on the death penalty — he thinks it’s good, and his Justice Department rushed to execute 13 federal inmates in the seven months before Trump left office. As a point of comparison, the federal government had executed a total of four people in the preceding 60 years.
Barr offers an extended apologia that tries to square his position on putting people to death with his religious faith. Pope Francis’s revision of the Catholic Church’s Catechism, denouncing the death penalty as “inadmissible because it is an attack on the inviolability and dignity of the person,” sends Barr into a paroxysm of hairsplitting: “The term inadmissible has no established meaning in moral theology, and is certainly too vague and indirect to be read as an attempt to extinguish this vast body of established teaching, even assuming it could be.”
This is a pattern in Barr’s book: He nitpicks his way to desired conclusions by carefully navigating a lawyerly path around finely drawn distinctions, all the while lobbing bomblets at anyone he defines as an enemy. “For all his urbane affect, Obama was still the left-wing agitator who had patiently steered the Democratic Party toward an illiberal, identity-obsessed progressivism,” Barr writes; no doubt actual “left-wing agitators,” who have regularly denounced Obama for centrism, would like to have a word.
Barr’s version of Trump, meanwhile, contains multitudes: The former president may have “an imprecise and discursive speaking style,” even a tendency for “madcap rhetoric,” but Barr also believes Trump has “a deep intuitive appreciation of the importance of religion to the health of our nation.” Barr muses that “the country would have benefited and likely seen more of the constructive, problem-solving style of government that President Trump previewed on election night,” if only he “had been met by a modicum of good faith on the other side.”
By “good faith” Barr is perhaps imagining something like his own generous interpretations of Trump’s behavior, which he goes to great and often tortuous lengths to rationalize in his book. When Barr learned about the consequential phone call between Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, who was then Ukraine’s President-elect, Barr said he argued for the swift release of the transcript — largely because it showed that Trump, according to Barr, had ultimately done nothing wrong on the call.
Yes, Barr allows, telling Zelensky that American military aid was conditional on a Ukrainian investigation of the Bidens was “foolish,” but “a quid pro quo is inherent in almost all diplomacy.” Besides, even if such an investigation into the president’s opponent would have yielded “political benefits” for Trump, it “would also arguably advance America’s anticorruption agenda,” Barr says. Making room for such intricate rhetorical contortions is partly why this book is nearly 600 pages long.
There are also numerous places where Barr offers what looks at first to be a blizzard of detail but nevertheless makes some strange omissions. He devotes page upon page to the question of voter fraud, which he repeatedly declares to be a real threat, with nary a word about voter suppression. He characterizes the inspector general’s report on the Mueller investigation as “damning” while neglecting to discuss that the same inspector general’s report declared that the F.B.I. had adequate reason to investigate ties between the Trump campaign and Russia. Barr also stays mum on the fact that a bipartisan report from the Republican-led Senate Intelligence Committee concluded the same thing.
By the end of “One Damn Thing After Another,” it’s clear that Barr has something else in common with Trump — a shrewd ability to recognize when certain people are no longer useful for his purposes, and a willingness to dispense with them accordingly. Barr slips in a description of Robert Mueller’s “trembling” hands and “tremulous” voice, wondering if Mueller “might have an illness” — a striking (and expedient) bit of gossip for Barr to float about an old friend. The last chapter has Barr throwing Trump under the bus, albeit gently and with the utmost decorum. Barr laments Trump’s stubborn problems of “tone,” faulting him for “needlessly” alienating “a large group of white-collar suburbanites,” and declares that it’s time to move on from the loser of the 2020 election by recovering “something like the old Reagan coalition.”
But Barr faces a quandary, which is to explain how Republicans can ditch Trump while keeping his fervent base. The result is like the deus ex machina moment in an ancient Greek play, when a hopeless situation is resolved by the sudden appearance of a god on a crane. “The Republicans have an impressive array of younger candidates fully capable of driving forward with MAGA’s positive agenda and cultivating greater national unity,” a wistful Barr insists. “MAGA’s positive agenda” combined with “national unity”? Until I got to that point in his book, I wouldn’t have pegged Barr as someone so thirsty for a fairy-tale ending.
