FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — Former Attorney General William Barr praised former President Donald Trump’s “very successful administration” — and offered scathing criticism of his former boss Tuesday during a South Florida appearance about his life and 22 tumultuous months in the Trump administration.
Barr, who is persona non grata with the former president, also used the occasion to praise Gov. Ron DeSantis. He said that he wasn’t making an endorsement of the Florida governor, who is widely expected to seek but hasn’t yet announced a candidacy for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination — which Trump also is seeking.
From the beginning until almost the end, Barr asserted that Trump’s policies were stellar. He lost re-election because of his own shortcomings, Barr said, including refusing to stop “acting like a jerk,” a label Barr repeatedly applied to his former boss.
Barr said Trump’s biggest problem was his reflexive reaction to “punch back immediately” and an inability to step back and think strategically.
“He is a petty man,” Barr said. “In a football game, he would rather lose the game if it allowed him to indulge some vengeance or some feeling or getting even with another person. He would put his own satisfaction ahead of winning the damn game.”
Barr contrasted that with what he said is his own ability to hold back and make a move later.
He spoke to a sold-out crowd of more than 700 people at the Forum Club of the Palm Beaches meeting at the Kravis Center for the Performing Arts, just a few miles from the Mar-a-Lago resort and club, home of the president he served, vilified and cheered. And he did some business: dozens of people lined up afterwards to buy copies of Barr’s book, which they’d just bought.
He said he didn’t know Trump well before he became attorney general, a job he accepted despite warnings. “Stay away. Stay away,” he said people told him.
Policies, personality
During Trump’s four years as president, he implemented “great policies,” Barr said.
“I was happy with the administration. He accomplished a lot of great things. And I also give him credit for a lot of qualities that we should have in a leader. And one of them is he had good policy instincts on many things, bread-and-butter issues like trade or crime or the border. He was blunt. He was willing to call and to stop all this eloquent circumlocution and get right to the point, tell it like it is,” Barr said.
Later, Barr offered a slightly different take, explaining that Trump “also had some very bad ideas occasionally. Many occasions. And it took inhuman strength and ungodly effort to keep things on track because he would never give up. You’d think you had it dead and buried …. You thought you had it under control and then — boom, he’d still come at you.”
Barr said he thought Trump was assured of re-election until the COVID pandemic. He said Trump was forced into unfamiliar territory and put his leadership on display for the American people. “It ended up showcasing his failings, not his strengths.”
Trump’s judgment is often “right on the money,” Barr said. “Other issues that are complicated, novel and so forth he hangs back when he’s not sure what to do (and) lets other people do things and then snipes at them. And that was COVID. He didn’t know what to do.”
In April of 2020, he said then-Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner tried and failed to persuade Trump to alter his style. “He had some repairing to do. And a lot of it was stylistic. A lot of it was just not acting like a jerk, insulting people.”
DeSantis
Barr said he was impressed with the way DeSantis led Florida during COVID. Though DeSantis initially operated in tandem with Trump policies, he later began to distance himself and has become much more skeptical of the medical establishment and vaccines than Trump.
“I have to say I’m not endorsing any opponent of Trump,” Barr said. “I’ve made clear I think we need a new face in 2024. But I’m not saying who. But I have to say that I was very impressed with the way Governor DeSantis handled it,” Barr said about the governor and COVID.
DeSantis immersed himself in “the substance and read everything and understood what was going on,” Barr said, adding that in his view the governor “made tough decisions, withstood the fire … and he wasn’t flip flopping around.”
He said he gets “irritated when I see Trump attacking DeSantis on DeSantis’ handling of it.”
2020 election
Barr split with Trump after the 2020 election, which Trump repeatedly and falsely claimed was stolen. “We investigated the stuff that was being thrown out and we found that it was just unfounded, and a lot of it was just silly,” he said.
“He was talking to all these nitwits on the outside who didn’t have responsibility, were otherwise clueless, and some of them will probably end up in jail,” he said. “I’m not gonna ride in the backseat of a car when you have some crazy people up front driving, you have no control over. I’m out of here.”
He said most of those at the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021 were peaceful, but hundreds “were clearly there for a fight,” “savagely” beat police, and should be in jail.
Perpetuating the notion that Vice President Mike Pence had the power to alter the results of the election on Jan. 6 was “very irresponsible.” But, he said, “I think they’re going to have a hard time showing any crime by the president on January 6th.”
Barr said on Trump’s possession of classified documents after he left office, some of which weren’t retrieved until the FBI executed a search warrant at Mar-a-Lago last week president on Jan. 6th, “they probably have him dead to rights.”
But a successful prosecution is unlikely, he said, because President Joe Biden had some classified documents at his home dating from his past government service. “Biden pulled that out from under him,” Barr said, declaring Trump “the luckiest man in the world.”
