ONE DAMN THING AFTER ANOTHER

Another casualty of the Trump administration tells his story.

It was all the Democrats’ fault: They refused to cooperate with Trump when he was elected in 2016, and thus they “dictated the tenor of the next four years.” Talk about bad timing: Venturing that Vladimir Putin is not such a bad guy and that Russia’s leaders “no longer promote a revolutionary ideology that foreordains general antagonism with the West” could stand hard rethinking. But so writes Trump’s notably compliant attorney general in this brittle, defensive memoir. Granted, Barr admits, Trump “became manic and unreasonable, and went off the rails” after losing the 2020 election, whereupon a less compliant Barr resigned largely because he would not support Trump’s claim that the election was rigged. For all that—and for all that Trump regularly berated him—the author remains a true believer not in the man but in the policies. The man, he allows, would raise “Groundhog Day issues,” fixations that ranged from firing “ ‘Comey’s people’ and those responsible for ginning up the phony Russiagate scandal” to the contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop. Barr airs any number of Groundhog Day issues himself in this overlong, tedious harangue. He is especially worked up at the “new antiliberal progressivism…embraced by an increasing number of prominent Democrats, aided by relentless media propagandizing, and reinforced by a co-opted education system”; favors a militarized and vigorously active police force; believes that nonreligious public schools “effectively indoctrinate students in a secular progressive ideology antithetical to the values and perspectives of a religious viewpoint”; scorns “the media and cultural elites” and the “curricula of a race-fixated anti-Americanism”; and seeks an executive branch with largely unlimited powers, albeit perhaps with more sense than to urge a mob to storm the Capitol.

Anyone who follows the news will already have Barr’s talking points, freeing readers to buy another book.