Former Attorney General Bill Barr says Donald Trump should not attempt a Grover Cleveland and run for president again after losing his reelection campaign in 2020.
“I’m all for restoring America. That’s what I’m all about, is restoring the greatness of this country. And the principle threat is this progressive agenda. The only way to do that is not to speak about some other election and continue this trench warfare but instead a breakthrough election that will create and usher in an era just like Reagan did,” said Barr in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
“I don’t necessarily want to take a shot at Trump, but Trump is not that man,” he said, adding that the former president would be a 78-year-old lame duck the day he walked into office.
“He does not have the capacity to win the kind of transformative election. He may have been, historically, a necessary figure, and I give him all credit for bringing to a screeching halt the progressive march that occurred under the Obama administration and threatened the country going forward with Hillary Clinton,” said Barr.
Barr added that a lot of Trump’s traits allowed him to do that, “including his willingness to fight. Maybe his constant pugnacity and over-the-top approach was necessary to break through the media.”
“However, if you believe in the MAGA agenda, we’ve already punched the other guy in the nose. Now, how do we actually go about methodically restoring the United States?” Barr said. The first thing Republicans need to do, added Barr, is win a decisive, broad victory. “And you don’t do that by starting a civil war in the party and calling everyone who doesn’t believe that the election was stolen a RINO.”
The country’s former top lawyer is saying out loud what many other former Trump administration officials, Republican elected officials, and regular, die-hard Trump supporters are thinking but are reluctant to admit for a variety of reasons, which include suffering his wrath, electoral consequences, and the lack of will to deal with a sense of betrayal.
Yet Barr also firmly believes Trump could have handily won in 2020 had he just had “a minor adjustment in his behavior.” To this day, Barr says, “he wishes he had.”
Ask Trump supporters, and they will privately tell you the same, with most wishing he hadn’t tweeted so much or been so angry in that first debate in 2020.
Barr also discussed his recently released memoir, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of An Attorney General, a compelling read that takes the reader on a journey through an American success story. The book touches on the memories of the hardships of his immigrant grandparents, his parents’ first-generation successes in academia, and the sense of community he found bagpiping throughout his childhood.
IMG_2896.JPEGBarr’s account of the two years he spent in the Trump administration is a fascinating glimpse into the emotions of a very chaotic chapter in U.S. politics. He often finds himself both sympathetic to and maddened by the former president — sometimes all at the same time.
In our interview, Barr discusses his tenure in the Trump administration, what makes him a conservative, how his experience in piping developed his connection with the working class, and why his grandmother insisted his parents serve him a tall glass of Guinness on a daily basis beginning at the tender age of five.
Examiner: You’ve got to explain the daily Guinness.
Bill Barr: So I was a scrawny kid, picky eater, and I was walking to kindergarten one day, and I collapsed, I passed out. And so they took me up to St. Luke’s Hospital, which is in the Upper West Side of New York. And they’re doing all kinds of tests, and some doctors wanted to operate, do exploratory surgery because they thought I had something on my heart. And I actually remember being in the hospital and all that activity, and my grandmother showed up with this priest, Father Smith, from Hartford, who was also Irish-born. And they strongly opposed any kind of surgery, which was my mother’s disposition anyway, not to just do surgery, and my father, too, unless there was some real reason for it.
And they said that I should be built up by drinking Guinness every day. And that’s what they did. At every meal, I’d have my glass of Guinness. So the refrigerator was always filled with Guinness when I was growing up, and my brothers didn’t like that, they wanted some too.
Examiner: Do you still drink Guinness?
Bill Barr: Yeah (laughing).
Examiner: How did you come about playing the bagpipes, and those instances, or those traditions, how they also infused to this modern person?
Bill Barr: My parents both loved music, and they felt that a kid should have an opportunity to learn an instrument. They didn’t force us to, but they always encouraged us, they said it’s a good thing to do. And I wanted to play the bagpipes simply because my father had been playing this record in the house. And I just loved the sound of it. I found it stirring, which it is.
It’s a very evocative instrument. It can both be very, very sad and very, very uplifting. And so I just told my parents, “I’d love to play the bagpipes.” And my father, he liked the bagpipes too. And I think the idea appealed to him. And so we went through the process of finding a teacher, and we found this grand man who had been a young pipe major in the Scottish Army during World War I and had just a very interesting personal history. He would tell me the stories of fighting in the trenches and going over the top and all that kind of thing, and life in Scotland as a little boy.
It is still an important part of my life because it’s broadened my interest into more traditional music. My father and I actually looked for this article when I was writing the book, and I couldn’t find it, but there was this publication in Morningside Heights called the Morningsider. It was a newspaper. And he used to write regular articles for it. And he wrote one to say about his son Billy being a highlander. And the thrust of the article was that there’s no Scottish heritage in our family but that I have now gotten into this and identify with it and that everyone’s free to do that in the United States. It’s what’s great about our country. We’re not locked into any identity like that.
I started playing in a band when I was 12, and almost everyone in the band, except one guy who was a college kid, was an adult. And we’d go to bars, the band would go into bars afterward. And most people in the band were working-class, or cops, or firemen, or people like that. Especially when I was younger, I did spend a lot of time in that circle.
And I’m not suggesting I had a hard scrap of life in what I’m saying, I just met a lot of different people who were firemen, police officers, and blue-collar workers and bonded with them over this.
Examiner: You appear to respect the natural formation of community. Is that what piping did for you, the sort of de Tocqueville observation of Americans, because they are constantly forming groups and associations, and that was the foundation of what made us exceptional?
Bill Barr: Yes. And the kind of egalitarianism that people are trying to force today is just posing and virtue signaling and phony. I think, within a church, you view yourself as no better than anybody else, and you’re all children of the same God, and you’re all sinners, and so forth and so on, and there’s nothing that exalts you in the eyes of God with respect to the person next to you. And the pew, that’s where real effortless and unselfconscious brotherhood exists, in my experience.
There is something that ties you together. So bagpiping’s an example where mutual love of a particular art form and appreciation for that ties you together. And you then subordinate other differences. And so when I was in the Trump administration, which is somewhat hard because a lot of the people who I was friends with were very upset by me doing that. But all in all, there’s something else that ties you together. That person I interviewed with in Scotland for a piping magazine, someone apparently wrote in a comment critical of me from a political standpoint. And the guy who did the article said, “Look, this is the piping world. We’re part of the piping fraternity. We don’t get into that kind of stuff. No, we don’t get into politics.”
But of course, we’re living in a world where politics intrudes into everything.
There’s currently this critique of classic liberalism, is that it elevates the atomized individual and that it’s all individualistic, and therefore, it depreciates community. And a lot of the stuff that’s being written by so-called conservatives that’s critical of the liberal tradition is that it elevates the individual over all else and so forth. And I think those critics actually are losing sight of the fact that it doesn’t, really, or strictly speaking, it isn’t all about the individual. It recognizes the individual, including his voluntary association.
And I always — sometimes, when I talk to people, I say, “Look, there’s basically two impulses. There’s force and there’s love, and love in a very broad sense, meaning affinity.”
And basically, liberals are all about using force and leave no room for the attachments and also the motivations for people taking action being voluntary.
Examiner: You don’t hold back in the book on your disappointment with the media and how as a whole they cover conservatives, even how they have covered the aftermath of the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol. Is the problem that national newsrooms are filled with people who don’t know anyone who is conservative, or is it something deeper in your observation?
Bill Barr: I think, by and large, many of them grow up in a bubble. And the New York culture is certainly part of that, the California one is certainly that. And I’ve experienced a lot of them saying, “We don’t understand you because, I mean, you have this background, and how could you go in for these kinds of Neanderthal ideas?”
And so I have encountered that, but I do think that something else has been at work over the past few decades. And I’m pretty hard on the media generally in my book, but I’ve always said, look, I recognize there are a lot of really good journalists who keep the faith and are very professional, and whatever their personal politics are, they’re able to still do good reporting and even analysis and so forth.
And when I was attorney general the first time, there were such people out there. There still are, I think. But they’re fewer and farther between. And from what I see, a lot of the younger journalists just view themselves more as political operatives. That is, that they have a higher calling than nearly reporting what some people might consider the objective facts. They’re fitting things into a narrative that will help propel change in the direction they want. And so they have a loud politics that corrupts what has previously been claimed to be the mission of the press. And so I think that these people don’t really know they’re being biased because they think of themselves as sitting on the 50-yard line, but actually, they’re sitting on the 10-yard line.
I think it is a great disservice to all Trump voters to get lumped in to the actions of a few. First, I think that the corruption of the press is the single most corrosive thing in our national life and is weakening our institutions and the people’s attachment to the country and is one of the major causes of polarization. And again, facts are presented to the American people in the form of a narrative, and it doesn’t conform to the truth — it doesn’t provide an accurate picture. It’s a lot of their lives basically, meant to achieve a political goal. And that’s what’s happening with the January 6 thing. I mean, most of the people on the Hill didn’t forcibly enter the Capitol and didn’t attack the police — there were people that did.
And when the riots were happening during the summer of 2020, the Left characterized the action as mostly peaceful, even when some people were committing acts of arson and attacking the police and so forth, and attacking a federal courthouse. It was not even covered. That was amazing. You could turn on the national news and not see what was going on. And they were projecting a false picture to the country, but they excused it by essentially saying, “Well, most people are peaceful, therefore, this is mostly peaceful.”
But on January 6, they characterized the whole thing by the acts of a significant segment of it.
I don’t personally downplay how outrageous I thought the behavior of that group was that obviously went up there looking for a fight and attacked the police and broke their way into the Capitol. But I don’t think that represents the majority of Trump supporters.
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