Bill Barr’s sudden conversion shows how Trump will keep haunting the GOP

Bill Barr’s sudden conversion shows how Trump will keep haunting the GOP

Paul Waldman — Read time: 4 minutes

William P. Barr has traveled the road to Damascus and arrived with a book he’d like you to buy.

The former attorney general, whose tireless labors in President Donald Trump’s service made him one of the most sinister villains in an administration brimming with moral depravity, is here to tell you that he was shocked, shocked by what he saw.

“Trump cared only about one thing: himself,” Barr writes in a new book that is full of criticism of the former president. “Country and principle took second place.”

Barr’s conversion from Trump lackey to Trump critic is particularly vivid, but he might not be the last person to have such a change of heart. It all depends on how long Trump’s hold on the Republican Party lasts, and how that shapes the ambitions of other Republicans.

Barr is in his 70s now, and he may not be eager for another government job, so a rehabilitation tour is in order. As a shrewd operator, Barr surely knows that history will not be kind to Trump, so he wants to make sure everyone knows how repulsed he was by what he saw.

But does he think we’re going to just forget the way he enabled Trump’s assault on the integrity of the Justice Department and the entire government? The way he misled the public about what was in the special counsel’s report on Russian electoral interference to make Trump seem utterly innocent, when Barr had read the report but it had not yet been released?

The way he forced out U.S. attorneys who might investigate Trump? The way he spread preposterous lies about voter fraud in advance of the 2020 election? The way he took extraordinary steps to help Trump cronies escape accountability for their criminal conduct? Barr’s name will forever be tied to Trump’s, as it should be.

For other Republicans, this is a tricky moment, made deeply uncomfortable by the presence of a pro-Vladimir Putin wing within the GOP. Even if it consists primarily of Trump and the repellent Fox News host Tucker Carlson — who has gone from spreading covid disinformation to running segments so friendly toward Putin that they’re replayed on Russian state TV — it was merely an embarrassment before now, rather than a political problem.

But with nearly the entire world united against Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, Republicans find themselves caught between joining that popular cause and repudiating Trump, which no one who wants to have an electoral future in the GOP thinks they can do.

So on ABC’s “This Week,” host George Stephanopoulos tried to get Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) to condemn Trump’s effusive praise of Putin’s invasion, leaving Cotton to awkwardly dodge the question. Sensing blood, Stephanopoulos asked the question four times, and Cotton kept dodging.

As a Republican with presidential ambitions of his own, Cotton would almost certainly prefer that Trump fade away, or at least not run for the White House. Unfortunately, Trump seems to be doing just the opposite: Speaking at the Conservative Political Action Conference over the weekend, he again vowed another bid. “We did it twice, and we’ll do it again,” he said to the cheering crowd. “We’re going to be doing it again a third time.”

This is the ongoing dilemma for Republicans: When Trump gets attention these days, it’s usually because he’s facing more legal jeopardy for his ethically challenged business practices, or because he said something shocking or despicable. If Trump says, “Tax cuts are good and abortion is bad,” it doesn’t make news; if he offers tributes to murderous dictators, it does.

That means Republicans will keep getting asked to defend the worst of Trump’s words and deeds. They might try to say it’s not their business or they’re concerned about more meaningful issues, but that just opens them up to more questions, given that there are few things reporters are more drawn to than intraparty tension.

Even if Trump doesn’t run again in 2024, he will continue to hang over everything Republicans do. They’ll have to answer for their own roles in enabling him. They’ll have to say whether they agree with what he says. And they have to detail the limits of their future support for him.

There will be no resolution to this problem as long as Trump and Trumpism exist. Nor will Republicans escape their own recent pasts. No amount of tell-all books and pleas to move on will make Trump’s aides and supporters emerge from this period looking unsullied.

But perhaps they knew this when Trump asked them to set fire to whatever integrity they had, to hitch their own ambitions to his debased crusade for self-aggrandizement, and they agreed. Barr was one of the most enthusiastic volunteers, and like the others, he will not be able to rewrite history. They made their bargain, and they cannot hide who they are and what they did.