Former Attorney General Bill Barr doesn’t want you to worry about a revelation from a White House communications director under then-President Donald Trump that Trump once suggested executing a staffer. “Right before I resigned,” Alyssa Farah Griffin said on “The View” in December, “I was in an Oval Office meeting with a dozen other staffers, and somebody had, he thinks, leaked a story about him going to the bunker during the George Floyd protests. And he said, ‘Whoever did that should be executed.’”
Don’t be so concerned, Barr told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. “The president would lose his temper and say things like that,” he admitted, but “I doubt he would have actually carried it out.” As the word “things” suggests, such wishes were a remarkably unremarkable occurrence in Trump’s White House, but “at the end of the day, it wouldn’t be carried out, and you could talk sense into him.”
Are you not reassured?
More Republicans will likely offer the excuse that Trump’s threats are temporary eruptions of his temper and not an indication of how he’d lead (or rule).
In many ways, Barr’s hope that Trump won’t act as he says is emblematic of the old Republican Party establishment’s relationship with the former president. Well before Election Day 2016, most of the party’s elected officials and unelected powerbrokers insisted Trump could be taken “seriously, but not literally.” As his term unfolded, they clung to this fiction like shipwrecked sailors to a battered raft.
Jan. 6 should have shattered that delusion. Yet, as Barr’s comments show, the passage of time has resurrected this belief, and as Election Day nears, more Republicans will likely offer the excuse that Trump’s threats are temporary eruptions of his temper and not an indication of how he’d lead (or rule). But the Trump of 2024 is not the Trump of 2016. The restraints that at times shielded the country from his worst impulses last term won’t be there this time.
Since the night he announced his 2024 campaign, Trump’s third run for the White House has taken a different tone — and not just because he seems to garble his words with increasing frequency. The threats have become more sweeping and more serious. Rallies lionizing the (supposedly) “silent majority” have become dark recitals of grievances.
As The New York Times’ Charles Homans wrote over the weekend, Trump’s “speeches, and the events that surround them, are about them — what they have done to Trump, and what Trump intends to do in return.” Now he labels his political enemies “vermin.” He warns that immigrants are “poisoning the blood” of the country. He pledges to be a dictator, but only on “day one.” He promises that “2024 is our final battle. … We will drive out the globalists, we will cast out the Communists, Marxists and Fascists, we will throw off the sick political class that hates our Country.”
In Trump's term, chiefs of staff like John Kelly and H.R. McMaster and Cabinet secretaries like Jim Mattis and, yes, Barr himself occasionally staved off Trump’s worst ideas. But, over four years, those who dared to have second thoughts departed, voluntarily or involuntarily. By the end of Trump’s term, loyal lackeys encouraged his every impulse leading to Jan. 6.
In fact, not even Barr expects that there will be any guardrails in a new Trump White House.
Should Trump be elected again, the country will start from that depth, and only descend from there. Already, campaign staff at the Republican National Committee face loyalty tests that require them to say that Trump’s lies about the 2020 election are true. MAGA diehards lead the external planning for the new administration: the sweepingly vengeful Project 2025. A new interview with Time magazine’s Eric Cortellessa finds Trump planning what Cortellessa calls “an imperial presidency.” Trump and his allies float sending troops into liberal cities, using the Justice Department to pursue his political enemies and sweeping away checks on presidential power. And there’s no reason to believe anyone will “talk sense into him.”
In fact, not even Barr expects that there will be any guardrails in a new Trump White House. It’s just “my feeling,” he told Collins, “having worked for him and seen him in action. I don’t think he would actually go and kill political rivals and things like that.”
Again, are you not reassured?
Barr isn’t alone in this wishful thinking. Earlier this month, New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu insisted that his support for Trump was “not about him as much as it is having a Republican administration — Republican secretaries, Republican rules.” And then there’s the slightly more subtle excuses of Republicans such Sen. Mitch McConnell, who told CBS’ “Face the Nation” that “I’m focusing on turning the Senate Republicans into the majority.” As for restraining the wannabe dictator, apparently someone else will handle that.
As conservative Never Trumper and former Ted Cruz staffer Amanda Carpenter points out, the unspoken incentive for Barr and those like him is the desire to preserve power and influence. “Barr is a Washington operator,” she told the New Republic’s Greg Sargent, pointing to his new role leading a conservative alternative to the Chamber of Commerce. “For Trump’s second term, Bill Barr is looking for opportunities again.” The same can be said of McConnell, Sununu and other Republicans who flirted with speaking the truth about the presumptive nominee but are now falling in line.
The irony is that, if Trump wins, these late shows of loyalty may not be enough. Before Barr’s endorsement, Trump called his former attorney general “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy.” After Barr’s endorsement, Trump posted, “I am removing the word 'Lethargic' from my statement.” For now, though, bowing down may help men like Barr sleep at night, believing that their influence is secure.
If only they were as concerned for the country.
