One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General

"Yes, Barr was Attorney General for George H. W. Bush in the early 1990s, then after being off the scene for 20 years he was hired by Donald Trump . That was the main reason I was interested in this book: the Trump years. I didn’t care a whole lot about his personal history or the first administration—not that there was anything improper in him including that. But he was at the epicenter of some of the most incredible controversies and challenges of the Trump presidency, behind the scenes when the cameras were off. This book is subject to all the same concerns we’ve talked about—of being self-serving, trying to correct the record. That’s part of this book. But it is also really interesting, because the Trump presidency was like no other. Very different from George H. W. Bush’s, from all of them. So it was good to get a perspective from a serious knowledgeable person who was right there. Yes, I think that’s a big factor. Barr talks in the book about how he was reluctant to join the administration. Just being associated with Trump can be a death knell for your political career. You don’t see many from the first Trump presidency involved in the prospective second Trump presidency, including his own family and the others in his administration. Barr claims—and I think there’s a lot of truth in his claims—that he did it despite those concerns. He said: Look, I’ve been around a long time. I’m in my late sixties. Who cares if, in the last phase of my life, my reputation is not what I want it to be. The thing I find fascinating about individuals like Barr is that, when the Trump administration was careering off the rails all the time, they wanted to step in and help. I’m a very big Trump critic; I’m not a fan of his at all. But I think a lot of his opposition went too far; they didn’t respect the office of the presidency in the way they should have, to optimise our system of government. Barr wanted the administration to succeed, even though he had doubts about Trump, and there’s a contradiction there, because he’s now blacklisted as a Trumper. Actually, I think it’s more honorable to step in and help, if you have the opportunity to do so. Thank you. Yes: here we are in the aftermath of the Trump administration, a four-year stress test of our system of government. What compelled me to write the book was that I was hopeful that we, the American polity—after his horrible behaviour surrounding the election where he tried to reverse the results—would have a reversion to the mean, a return to normality or the approach we have had as a country in the last several decades. That didn’t happen. Trump remained Republican champion despite all his misbehaviour. The new President, Joe Biden, clearly no longer had the capacities to have the most important, demanding job in the country. I was like, okay, there’s a root cause here, something more long-term, more fundamental than just Trump in the presidency. And the effort of the book is to try to diagnose it. Why do we continue to be so dysfunctional. Exactly."