Former Attorney General Bill Barr revealed in his new book, “One Damned Thing After Another,” the lengths he would have gone to in order to vote for then-GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump in 2016.
Specifically, Barr wrote that he would have “crawled over broken glass” to cast a ballot for the eventual winner and 45th president, especially because he was sure Trump would be naming a successor to conservative Supreme Court icon Justice Antonin Scalia, who passed away suddenly earlier in the year.
Business Insider reported:
Barr, a highly influential figure in the conservative legal world who served two stints as attorney general under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Trump, detailed his thinking around the 2016 election in his new book “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” released on Tuesday.
Barr wrote that he initially supported Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and son of George H.W. Bush, in the 2016 Republican primaries, calling Jeb “down-to-earth, thoughtful, and soundly conservative.”
But after Bush flamed out of the primaries and Trump emerged as the frontrunner, Barr “had no hesitancy backing him over Hillary Clinton” and wrote the Trump campaign a check the day after Trump secured the nomination.
Barr noted that he did not view Trump as his “idea of a president,” noting that he found his “frequently crass, bombastic, and petulant style” to be very “grating.” But he added that eventually, he came to accept Trump’s style and believed in his policy agenda.
The former AG also “makes no secret of his distaste for President Barack Obama and the Clintons in his book, writing that in 2016, ‘the country was in no mood for four more years of Obama-era progressivism and Clintonian mendacity,’” Business Insider added.
At the time of Scalia’s death, Republicans controlled the upper chamber and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, then-Judge Merrick Garland.
The future Trump AG wrote that he was encouraged by Trump’s pledge to nominate judges and justices in Scalia’s mold.
“Still, Trump was not one to discuss judicial philosophy with any precision, and I wondered if he knew why Sca-lee-ah was so important to conservatives. But in May 2016 he released a list of eleven potential Supreme Court picks, and in September he added ten more names. Those lists presented an impressive array of committed constitutionalists,” Barr noted in his book.
He said that it all came down to a simple question.
“Who did I want determining the direction of the Supreme Court for years to come: Trump or Hillary Clinton? The question was not close,” Barr said. “On this basis alone, I would crawl over broken glass to the polls to vote for Trump.”
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