Former AG Bill Barr Warns ‘Trump Will Burn Down the GOP,’ Calls ‘for New Leadership’
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Former Attorney General Bill Barr warned that his former boss, former President Donald Trump, “will burn down the GOP” and called “for new leadership.”
In a Monday piece for former New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss’ Substack publication Common Sense, headlined “Bill Barr: Trump Will Burn Down the GOP. Time for New Leadership,” Barr recalled Trump having attributes such as “stak[ing] out a position and his willingness to state unpleasant truths that many were afraid to say” having “accurately diagnosed, and given voice to, the deep frustration of many middle-class and working-class Americans who were fed up with the excesses of progressive Democrats; the shameless partisanship of the mainstream media; and the smug condescension of elites who had mismanaged the country, sold them out, and appeared content to preside over the decline of America.”
However, wrote Barr, Trump clearly “lacks the qualities essential to achieving the kind of unity and broad election victory in 2024 so necessary if we are to right our listing republic. It is time for new leadership.”
Barr criticized Trump for bringing “his wrecking-ball style to the task of governing the nation” that included “his disruptiveness and penchant for chaos.” Barr cited Trump’s response to the Covid-19 pandemic as an example given the then-president’s “tonal response,” which “reinforced what many people found repellant about his personality. He yielded to his impulse for pettiness and pointless nastiness; got drawn into infantile name-calling spats; and, in his press conferences, made everything about himself.”
Barr remarked that Trump did not reach out to voters outside his base and that it was not “fraud” that caused Trump to lose re-election in 2020.
Barr wrote that “the defining feature of our political landscape continues to be the sharp leftward lurch of the Democratic [P]arty” and that threat “opens up a historic opportunity for the GOP—the opportunity to revive something like the old Reagan coalition: a combination of Republican-leaning, college-educated suburbanites; culturally conservative working-class voters; and even some classical liberals who are repulsed by the left’s authoritarianism.”
Barr wrote that Trump is not up to the task of forming a broad, Reaganesque coalition. He cited Trump costing the GOP the 2021 Georgia Senate runoffs that handed control of the Senate to the Democrats. Additionally, said Barr, “the GOP’s poor performance in the recent midterms was due largely to Trump’s mischief.”
Moreover, Barr warned that while Trump’s base “ is probably no larger than a quarter of the GOP,” Trump “[uses] it s leverage to extort and bully the rest of the party into submission. The threat is simple: unless the rest of the party goes along with him, he will burn the whole house down by leading “his people” out of the GOP.”
Barr concluded:
Trump’s willingness to destroy the party if he does not get his way is not based on principle, but on his own supreme narcissism. His egoism makes him unable to think of a political party as anything but an extension of himself—a cult of personality.
Trump is due credit for stopping progressives’ momentum and achieving important policy successes during his administration. But he does not have the qualities required to win the kind of broad, durable victory I see as necessary to restore America. It is time for the 45th president to step aside.
