During his tenure as Donald Trump’s attorney general, William Barr was a loyal partisan, celebrated by the then-president’s followers. Now, Trump sees Barr as a “spineless RINO” and a “disappointment in every sense of the word.”
It’s part of a larger pattern that casts the former president in a deeply unflattering light.
As we discussed yesterday, the former attorney general has written a new book filled with criticisms of his former boss in the Oval Office, taking aim at Trump’s temperament, pettiness, and brazen lies about his 2020 election defeat. Barr now believes the former president “cared only about one thing: himself. Country and principle took second place.”
Barr also sees the former president as an “incorrigible” narcissist whose post-election lies did “a disservice to the nation.” He now wants his party to look to new leaders who lack Trump’s “erratic personal behavior.” The idea of Trump running a third national campaign is, as the former attorney general put it, is “dismaying.”
For a great many reasons, Barr is a deeply flawed messenger, and his efforts to rehabilitate his image and wash the Trump-era stain from his record deserve skepticism.
But as important as this, it’s also worth appreciating just how many people who worked closely with Trump now believe he’s unfit for office.
John Kelly, for example, served as Trump’s White House chief of staff for 17 months, working side-by-side with the then-president every day in the West Wing. Now, Kelly can barely contain his apparent contempt for Trump.
Circling back to our earlier coverage, Barr and Kelly have plenty of company. In June 2020, former Defense Secretary James Mattis, wrote a rather extraordinary rebuke of Trump, condemning the president for being divisive, immature, and cavalier about abusing his powers. Two weeks later, former White House National Security Advisor John Bolton, who also worked closely with Trump for a year and a half, concluded that the then-president was not “fit for office.”
Former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson shared some uncomplimentary thoughts of his own about Trump. According to the nation’s former chief diplomat, the then-president is “pretty undisciplined,” “doesn’t like to read,” and “often” urged Tillerson to pursue policies that were inconsistent with American laws.
And these are just the top-level officials who served at the cabinet level. The list grows much longer if we include other federal officials who worked with Trump just below the cabinet level. Every president has faced criticisms from partisan rivals and critics in the press, but it’s qualitatively different to hear from officials who were part of Trump’s own team. Many of these former officials had a front-row seat, watching how the Republican tried to lead, how he processed information, how he evaluated evidence, and how he made decisions. And now that these men and women have left the administration and had an opportunity to reflect on their time on Team Trump, they’re eager to let the public know that Trump is unsuited for national leadership. History offers plenty of examples of presidents who’ve clashed with one aide or another, but we’ve never seen anything like this.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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