Blog No. 248. Donald Trump and William Barr: A Perfect Storm

President Donald Trump and his Attorney General, William Barr, have generated a Perfect Storm for American democracy. Each would be dangerous on his own, but the synergy of their relationship creates a threat that is a matter of serious concern. Trump appears to have relatively little in the way of a coherent ideology; rather he is driven by desires for political power and ego gratification. Barr does have a set of ideological views and they serve to enhance Trump’s considerable appetites.

Donald Trump’s personal instincts are unmistakably authoritarian. He often pays little heed to counsel, let alone dissent, from his advisers. He has even less regard for those outside his circle of White House staff and fawning Cabinet officers. Competing sources of power—Congress, the judiciary, and the media—are viewed with attitudes ranging from distrust to hostility and bitter disdain. Although Trump likes to portray himself as a deal maker, his record as president shows very few accomplishments in the way of deals, either domestically or in foreign affairs. The typical Trump approach is not to negotiate and seek compromise, but to threaten and manipulate and, if those tactics fail, to launch verbal attacks. (On the other side of the coin, Jeffrey Toobin explained in the February 19 New Yorker why Trump’s rash of clemencies and pardons this week was an exercise in authoritarianism: ” [T]he pardons were entirely personal in origin, and so the granting of them was exclusively an exercise of Trump’s own power. That was their point. A benevolent leader dispensed favors. “)

Trump’s ability to indulge his authoritarian instincts derives from the unswerving support of his base. On January 23, 2016, addressing a rally in Iowa, Trump made the notorious observation that “I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.” In the ensuing four years, Trump has given us frequent occasions to recall that claim, and we have no reason to conclude that he no longer believes it.

For his part, Bill Barr had an expansive view of executive authority that long preceded the arrival of Donald Trump on the political stage. But Trump was warmly receptive to that view and even expanded on it, opining last year that “I have an Article 2, where I have the right to do whatever I want as president.” It may be recalled that Barr appeared to have applied for the position of Attorney General when he sent an unsolicited memorandum to then Deputy Attorney General, Rod Rosenstein, criticizing the Mueller investigation and arguing that the president could not have been guilty of an obstruction of justice. When Barr became the Attorney General, he lost little time in converting his views into action.

In a compelling article last week in the Atlantic, “Bill Barr Must Resign,” Donald Ayer, Deputy Attorney General under President George H. W. Bush, presented a searing indictment of Barr’s conduct as Attorney General and his radical notions of presidential power. Ayer cited several examples of questionable actions by Barr beginning with his handling of the Mueller investigation and leading up to his recent interference in the sentencing of Roger Stone.

Ayer summed it up in this way:

Barr’s Federalist Society speech suggests that he is ready to say nearly anything in pursuit of his lifelong goal of a presidency with unchecked powers. As Napoleon is reputed to have said, the man who will say anything will do anything. That Barr has also repeatedly used his authority as attorney general to tailor the position of the United States, in court and in legal opinions, to empower such an unworthy incumbent as Donald Trump to do whatever he wants suggests that this is correct.

The benefit of the doubt that many were ready to extend to Barr a year ago—as among the best of a bad lot of nominees who had previously served in high office without disgrace—has now run out. He has told us in great detail who he is, what he believes, and where he would like to take us. For whatever twisted reasons, he believes that the president should be above the law, and he has as his foil in pursuit of that goal a president who, uniquely in our history, actually aspires to that status. And Barr has acted repeatedly on those beliefs in ways that are more damaging at every turn. Presently he is moving forward with active misuse of the criminal sanction, as one more tool of the president’s personal interests.

Ayer’s article is somewhat lengthy, but reading it will be a worthwhile investment of time for any reader who is seriously interested in understanding Barr’s perspective and the dangers it poses.

Ayer, I am sure, did not expect that Barr would take his urging to heart and resign, or that Trump’s captive Republicans on Capitol Hill would put any pressure on him to do so. Neither did the more than 2,000 former officials of the Justice Department who, in an extraordinary action, signed an eloquent letter to Barr calling for his resignation. They did, however, seek to stiffen the spines of those who still work in the Department of Justice and elsewhere in the government. After saluting the four prosecutors who withdrew from the Roger Stone case after Barr’s intervention the letter continued:

[W]e call on every DOJ employee to follow their heroic example and be prepared to report future abuses to the Inspector General, the Office of Professional Responsibility, and Congress; to refuse to carry out directives that are inconsistent with their oaths of office; to withdraw from cases that involve such directives or other misconduct; and, if necessary, to resign and report publicly — in a manner consistent with professional ethics — to the American people the reasons for their resignation. We likewise call on the other branches of government to protect from retaliation those employees who uphold their oaths in the face of unlawful directives. The rule of law and the survival of our Republic demand nothing less.

I am honored to know at least two of the signatories of the letter to Barr and I extend my own thanks to them for taking the initiative to speak out.

Donald Ayer did not address another very troubling facet of Barr’s role as Attorney General. If Barr’s speech to the Federalist Society laid bare his view of presidential power, a speech at Notre Dame he made in October exposed his zeal as a defender of the faith. In the speech, Barr inveighed against “militant secularism” and the abandonment of Judeo-Christian values resulting in “licentiousness – the unbridled pursuit of personal appetites at the expense of the common good. This is just another form of tyranny – where the individual is enslaved by his appetites, and the possibility of any healthy community life crumbles.” According to Barr, secularism is responsible for all manner of dire social pathologies including illegitimacy, depression, mental illness, senseless violence and a drug epidemic; in short, “immense suffering, wreckage, and misery.”

A refreshing rebuttal to Barr’s dire assessment was provided by a February 19 column by Max Boot in the Washington Post, “William Barr’s America vs. reality in 2020.” Boot presented a wide range of metrics showing that, contrary to Barr, social conditions have gotten better in America and are continuing to improve. Boot also provided data indicating that, as a global matter, lives were generally better in less religious countries.

Moreover, to the extent that any of the social ills complained of can be attributed to a rise in secularism, churches and temples must bear a major responsibility for having failed to meet the spiritual needs of their parishioners. Barr’s own Catholic Church is not alone in that respect, but the spectacular failure of his Church to acknowledge and eradicate sexual abuse has surely driven countless numbers into a secular life.

In any case, Barr’s speech would be unremarkable if delivered from a pulpit, or even by a layman speaking at a religious institution. Coming from an Attorney General, however, the speech raised disturbing questions of the separation of church and state. Does the government have a role in fighting secularism and in attempting to restore Judeo-Christian values? Barr clearly seemed to think so, but the boundaries of the role he envisions are unclear.

Perhaps the most important problem with Barr’s speech is the clear overlap between its message and Trumpian politics. Despite Trump’s notorious personal history, and his current practice of spending his Sundays on the golf course, Trump has proclaimed himself a champion of religion, and evangelists are unquestionably a key element of his base. Attracted by his aggressive position against abortion, and to some extent his support of Israel, they accept Trump as a “flawed vessel for God’s will.” A writer in the Guardian found an “unholy alliance between the religious right and Trumpism. As Carlo Invernizzi-Accetti pointed out:

[B]y establishing an equivalence between morality and religion, and between religion and Christianity (or, as he sometimes also put it, “Judaeo-Christian values”), Barr excluded two key social groups from the remit of those he deemed capable of “free government”: non-believers and non-Christians. For anyone keyed into the mainstays of Trump’s discourse, it should be clear who is here being stigmatized as a “threat”, not just for religion but for American freedom in general: urban elites and recent immigrants. Take these two groups out and you have a pretty good cross-section of Trump’s electorate.

The writer continued that Barr’s approach reflected a fundamental distortion of Christian (and Catholic) values:

Christianity was never intended to function as an exclusive identity, marking out the boundaries between those deemed fit for “free government” and those that aren’t. On the contrary, the core of the Christian message is one of universal inclusion.

Put another way, religion in Barr’s hands became another opportunity to harness the toxic synergy he shares with Trump.

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One of the challenges of writing a blog of political commentary in the Trump era is keeping up with breaking news. As this blog was being drafted, there came this report in the Washington Post:

Attorney General William P. Barr has told people close to President Trump — both inside and outside the White House — that he is considering quitting over Trump’s tweets about Justice Department investigations, three administration officials said, foreshadowing a possible confrontation between the president and his attorney general over the independence of the Justice Department.

The article went on to quote an associate of Barr’s who said, “He has his limits.” Does he now? We’ll have to see. And if he should resign, what then? As a noted constitutional scholar wrote the other day concerning the demand for a Barr resignation, “The only thing I’ve seen that comes close to a real counterargument is that the replacement would be just as bad or worse.”