Bill Barr’s support for Trump proves he has 'no long-term imagination at all': column

Former Attorney General Bill Barr confirmed in a Friday interview that he plans to back ex-President Donald Trump over President Joe Biden, after months of speaking out against the MAGA hopeful.

The former Trump official fears that Biden may overregulate kitchen stoves, and Trump, on the other hand, will not.

Atlantic staff writer David Frum, in a Sunday, April 28 op-ed, insists that Barr may want to consider backing Biden.

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He writes:

In 2011, future Speaker of the House Paul Ryan delivered a speech warning that the United States was fast approaching a 'tipping point' that would 'curtail free enterprise, transform our government, and weaken our national identity in ways that may not be reversible.That way of thinking can justify extreme actions. If the choice really is between constitutional democracy on the one hand, and free enterprise and national identity on the other, that’s indeed agonizing.'

Frum asserts, "Barr feels how he feels. But as a rational matter, he’s not thinking clearly. Even for a conservative Republican such as Barr, who wants to maximize power for conservative Republicanism, Trump is a choice that makes sense only if you have no long-term imagination at all."

He continued, "Alongside a President Clinton, voters in 2016 elected a 241–194 Republican House and a 52–48 Republican Senate. A President Clinton would probably not have signed as big a tax cut as President Trump did in 2017. Her regulators would not have been as friendly to the oil and gas industry as Trump’s were. But facing such strong Republican majorities in Congress, and with a popular-vote mandate of only 48 percent, she would have been limited in her ability to advance her own agenda.

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"Alternatively, imagine if Joe Biden wins in November," Frum writes. "A Biden reelection might well mean more regulation of stoves, as Bill Barr worried. Biden might do other things Barr would not like either, but even those things would be an improvement over the outlook of chaos from Trump’s attempt to overturn American law to save himself from prison."

Frum's full report is here (subscription required).