Once an unapologetic Trump lapdog, Bill Barr transformed into a howling Rottweiler in his testimony to the Jan. 6 committee, which on Monday made the former attorney general the star of its second public presentation in a historic series of hearings that will stretch through next week.
Though Barr’s frothing performance dominated the news cycle for its blistering assessments of Trump’s claims regarding an ostensibly stolen election — “idiotic,” “disturbing,” “nonsense,” “absolute rubbish,” “crazy” — the money quote arose from Barr’s judgment on Trump’s frame of mind in the months after Election Day in 2020.
“I was somewhat demoralized because I thought, ‘boy if he really believes this stuff, he has, you know, lost contact with, with — he’s become detached from reality,’” Barr said.
Though it escaped serious analysis on any of the post-game shows, the most astounding word in all of that was “become.”
He’s “become” detached from reality?
As we are this summer presented a series of Watergate parallels, even with narratives a half century apart, here’s the somehow necessary reminder that while the 37th president, Richard M. Nixon, went crazy in his final months in the White House, the 45th president, Donald J. Trump, brought crazy through the front door on his first day. In van loads of designer luggage.
He’d just completed a presidential campaign launched on a series of insane notions (“We’re building a wall and Mexico is paying for it.”) that should have scuttled it before it began. But for most of the next four years, people like Bill Barr and Mick Mulvaney and Kellyanne Conway and Mark Meadows and Mike Pompeo and Rudy Giuliani and every other subspecies of power-mad Washington hack who could penetrate his atmosphere did not find him even a bit odd.
Funny how that happens.
Did somebody say, “Team Normal,” the other day? Stop it. You were all on Team Nuts.
Did no one ever even marvel at Trump, a person who believes things are true simply because he says them, and believes other things are false because he doesn’t like them?
Smells like insanity.
But look, you’re right, I’m not a trained clinical psychologist.
Mary Trump is a trained clinical psychologist who spent much of her childhood in the big house in Queens where her Uncle Donald and his four siblings grew up. You may have heard that she’s penned some observations.
“There is a through line from (that) house to the Trump Tower tri-plex (in Manhattan) to the West Wing, just as there is from Trump Management to the Trump Organization to the Oval Office,” is the way Mary Trump began the final chapter of her book “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.” “The first are essentially controlled environments in which Donald’s material needs have always been taken care of, the second, a series of sinecures in which the work was done by others and Donald never needed to acquire expertise in order to attain or retain power (which partly explains his disdain for the expertise of others). All of this has protected Donald from his own failures while allowing him to believe himself a success.”
It’s evident the election of 2020 was an attack on Trump’s very belief system, such as it is. Losing was outside of this belief system. From the time he was about 12, losing’s been that thing he’s just not capable of.
When Joe Biden beat him by an electoral vote score of 306-232, the exact same margin Trump declared a landslide as he defeated Hillary Clinton, Trump’s brain had no muscle memory on how to lose, graciously or otherwise. His only impulse was to savage the expertise of people who were still trying to tether him to reality.
It didn’t matter to Trump that his own campaign manager, Bill Stepien, told him his chances of winning were “very, very, very bleak.”
It didn’t matter to Trump that no less a Republican stalwart than elections lawyer Ben Ginsberg said the 2020 election was “not close.”
It didn’t even matter to Trump that Fox News political editor Chris Stirewalt decided to call Arizona for Biden on election night, nor will it matter to him what Stirewalt told the Jan. 6 committee on Monday.
“Normally, you’re talking about hundreds of votes, maybe 300 votes that are going to change,” Stirewalt explained to the committee about recounts after saying Trump had no chance to win. “So the idea that through any normal process in any of these states — remember, he had to do it thrice, right? He needed three of these states to change. And in order to do that, you’re at an infini(tessimal) — you’re better off to play the Powerball than to have that come in.”
The really sickening part is, Trump has played the Powerball and Trump won. He’s got a golden ticket. He and his grifting family have slid comfortably to a place above the law for the past half century. And it still doesn’t look like anyone’s coming for him.
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