Bill Barr’s ‘One Damn Thing After Another’

Writing memoirs about President Trump’s White House is the cottage industry that won’t cool down, and hot off the presses — on March 8, to be precise — is William Barr’s “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” both a book and a preemptive strike against Mr. Trump’s potential reentry to the misty realm of presidential politics. The former attorney general’s memoir promises to be a little different than many that have preceded it, if for no other reason than that Mr. Barr, now 71, served under not one but two presidents — George H. W. Bush, 1991-93, and Trump, 2019-20 — and they were quite different. The publisher, an imprint of HarperCollins, notes that Mr. Barr “takes readers behind the scenes during seminal moments of the Bush administration in the 1990s, from the LA riots to Pan Am 103 and Iran Contra,” while during the Trump administration he “faced an unrelenting barrage of issues, such as Russiagate, the opioid epidemic, Chinese espionage, big tech, the COVID outbreak, civil unrest, the first impeachment, and the 2020 election fallout.”It’s worth recalling how Messrs. Barr and Trump clashed spectacularly in the Oval Office a month after the 2020 election, following Mr. Barr’s assertion that the Department of Justice found no evidence of widespread voter fraud — in contradiction to Mr. Trump’s widely shared complaints that fraud cost him the race against President Biden. Also, after the January 6, 2021, tumult at the Capitol, Mr. Barr accused his by then former boss of “orchestrating a mob to pressure Congress.” Mr. Trump has not kept quiet on this front, recently calling Mr. Barr a “swamp creature” and a “Republican in name only” who he’s branded as “afraid, weak, and frankly pathetic.”All publishers know that pointed barbs make for rapid page-turning in any memoir, but how much of the probably epic mudslinging at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue makes it into the 600 pages of Mr. Barr’s book — with a title inspired by a description of the job of attorney general made famous by Edward Levi, the man Gerald Ford appointed to the position in the wake of Watergate — is yet to be seen. For some newspapers, like London’s Guardian, the takeaway is that what Mr. Barr has really done, either despite or because of his experience serving two commanders-in-chief, is to use his memoir as a case against another Trump White house run. For the New York Times, “One Damn Thing After Another” is “part lawyerly defense, part culture-war diatribe.” Well, that’s not all: The Gray Lady, apart from the book review, also accords the timely oeuvre some political coverage, dipping into said cultural battles with the headline, “Barr Rebukes Trump as ‘Off the Rails’ in New Memoir.” For the Daily Mail, it is “a scathing book” and it Internet-certifies Mr. Barr as “among the ex-president’s most damning critics.” MarketWatch treads a somewhat more serene track: “Barr rips Trump, says election not stolen, urges GOP to move on.” It notes that Mr. Barr writes that Mr. Trump has “shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”A man who has long plied the counselor’s trade, Mr. Barr knows the importance of weighing his words, and his is not the stuff of sensationalism — fans of Stormy Daniels’s 2018 memoir “Full Disclosure” should move along, please, for this one’s squarely on “The Room Where It Happened” side of the chaos. The Guardian also notes that despite Mr. Barr’s writing that “the absurd lengths to which [Trump] took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill,” he adds that the Donald’s reckless behavior in the waning days of his administration falls short of the legal standard for incitement. There is also the firsthand account of Mr. Barr’s take on the Mueller investigation into alleged Russian interference in American elections; in the book he refutes accusations that he ran interference for his boss, calling them, according to the Times, “drivel” and claiming that it was “a simple fact that the president never did anything to interfere with the special counsel’s investigation.”Could it be that the more overt political tenor of Barr’s book will make it less of an engaging read than John Bolton’s own 2020 “White House Memoir”? Certainly including the words “attorney general” in a book’s title is no guarantee copies will fly off shelves. Not that there’s a deficit of drama. You’ll read how Barr’s interview to the Associated Press denying electoral fraud triggered a Trumpian tirade in which POTUS 45 thundered (according to Barr), “This is killing me, killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me.” Judging by the coverage Barr’s memoir is generating thus far, no one will be lending Mr. Trump a magic carpet ride back to Washington anytime soon. If ever.

Bill Barr’s ‘One Damn Thing After Another’

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