Barr rebukes Trump as ‘off the rails’ in new memoir
Categories: FOREIGN COUNTRIES
Former Attorney General William Barr writes in a new memoir that former President Donald Trump’s “self-indulgence and lack of self control” cost him the 2020 election and says “the absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill.”“Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” Barr writes. The memoir — an account of Barr’s time as attorney general under President George H.W. Bush and under Trump — defends his own actions in the Trump administration that led to sharp criticism of a Justice Department setting aside its independence to bend to White House pressure.Barr was long considered a close ally of Trump's. But the two fell out toward the end of the Trump administration, when Barr refused to go along with Trump’s baseless claims that the 2020 election had been stolen. “He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Barr writes. “He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories.He compares its support for social justice issues to “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution and the fascists of 20th-century Europe.”