Bill Barr’s willingness to vote for Trump in 2024 shows he has entered a ‘dark place’ mentally: conservative

After avoiding interviews in 2021, former U.S. Attorney General William Barr has resurfaced in recent weeks. His new book, “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General” was released on March 8, and he has been highly critical of former President Donald Trump in interviews with NBC News reporters Lester Holt and Savannah Guthrie. Never Trump conservative Peter Wehner agrees with much of that criticism, but in a biting op-ed published by The Atlantic on March 9, Wehner slams Barr for not ruling out the possibility of voting for Trump in 2024’s presidential election if he is the Republican nominee.

Barr, in his book, blames Trump for the January 6, 2021 attack on the U.S. Capitol Building — where a violent mob of Trump supporters tried to prevent Congress from certifying now-President Joe Biden’s Electoral College victory in the 2020 election. And Barr has pushed back against the Big Lie, describing Trump’s claim that the election was stolen from him because of widespread voter fraud as “bullshit.”

Barr told Holt, “I do think he was responsible in the broad sense of that word, in that it appears that part of the plan was to send this group up to the Hill. I think the whole idea was to intimidate Congress. And I think that that was wrong.”

The former U.S. attorney general also told Holt, “The absurd lengths to which he took his ‘stolen election’ claim led to the rioting on Capitol Hill…. I told him that all this stuff was bullshit about election fraud.”

Barr was also highly critical of Trump during his interview with Guthrie, saying that he doesn’t think the GOP should nominate Trump in the 2024 presidential election and that he is “gonna support somebody else for the nomination.” Guthrie, however, asked him, “But if he is the nominee and your choice is Donald Trump or whoever’s running on the Democratic side, would you vote for him?” — to which Barr responded, “Because I believe the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee.”

That response, Wehner laments, speaks volumes about Barr’s “mindset” — and what it says isn’t good.

“He believes that Donald Trump perpetrated a massive conspiracy in order to overturn a presidential election,” Wehner writes. “He believes that the former president is responsible for sending a violent mob — including one person wearing a black hoodie emblazoned with Camp Auschwitz, some erecting a gallows with a rope, others chanting ‘Hang Mike Pence’ — to storm and desecrate the Capitol in hopes of intimidating lawmakers…. And yet, Bill Barr would still vote for Donald Trump for president. It raises the question: Just what would Trump need to do in order for Barr not to vote for him?”

Wehner continues, “One need not be a progressive to be troubled by Barr’s stance. Indeed, one can believe, as Barr does and as I do, that the left poses threats to our country. If Barr can’t vote for a Democrat in good conscience, the obvious alternative would be to write in some other name on his ballot. But for Barr, that’s not enough. He has come to view the Democratic Party as so depraved, so malicious, so malevolent, and so close to a total victory that would shatter America that he would vote for a man he clearly considers psychologically unhinged, reckless, dangerous, and living in a delusional world.”

Barr, Wehner writes, has “wandered into” a “dark place” mentally in which “the normal rules don’t apply.”

“Barr’s error isn’t so much that his critique of the left is completely without merit; it is that he’s so consumed by the threat from the left that he has become blind to the larger and more imminent threat,” Wehner warns. “For all his searing criticisms of Trump, and despite his frightening portrayal of the former president’s mental and emotional states, Barr has made clear that if Trump is the nominee of the Republican Party, he can count on Barr’s vote. Without a moment’s hesitation, he would hand the nuclear launch codes back to a man he describes as manic, unreasonable, and off the rails.”

Wehner adds, “During the 2016 campaign Trump said, ‘I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.’ Trump must have had Barr in mind.”