Barr Blasts Trump 2024 Run as ‘Dismaying’ in Blistering Book Excerpts
“Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”

Drew Angerer/Getty
Ex-Attorney General Bill Barr says in a forthcoming memoir that the prospect of Donald Trump making a second bid for the Oval Office is a “dismaying” one, lambasting the former president for having “neither the temperament nor persuasive powers” to lead the country. Barr urges Republicans to “look forward” to another candidate for their presidential nominee, casting Trump as “manic and unreasonable.” In the forthcoming book, One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, Barr searingly chronicles his time as Trump’s staunch ally, before the two heavyweights locked horns over the then-president’s baseless election fraud claims. “The election was not ‘stolen,’” Barr writes. “Trump lost it.” In perhaps his most withering attack, the former attorney general calls the plan that led to Trump’s first impeachment—his blackmailing of Ukraine in an attempt to wheedle out dirt on President Joe Biden’s son—a “harebrained gambit” that was “idiotic beyond belief.” The ordeal was “self-inflicted and the result of abject stupidity,” but Barr maintains, as he has since his time in Trump’s Cabinet, that it was not a “criminal offense.”
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