Having apparently learned that former attorney general William Barr has endorsed his candidacy, after having previously described him as childlike and unfit for office, Donald Trump accepted Barr’s submission with characteristic grace. For Trump, this meant a social-media post ridiculing Barr:
If the insult is too wry for you, allow me to translate: Trump is calling Barr fat. And, of course, Barr is rather hefty. So, too, is Trump. But one of the rules of bullying is that the bully does not need to follow the same standards as his targets.
It may seem bizarre that Trump feels compelled to gratuitously insult a man who has just endorsed him. But it is fully consistent with the method Trump uses to dominate his subordinates. Barr wished to escape his relationship with Trump with at least some tiny scrap of dignity. For Trump, it is important not to allow this to occur.
It’s often said that Trump has a transactional approach to people, and this is mostly true. The small degree to which it isn’t true is that Trump insists upon a hierarchical relationship. His counterparties cannot be seen as equal partners. The transaction is that Trump is hiring them for his own purposes, and while they can expect compensation for services rendered, they cannot expect social parity.
Barr’s place in the Trump firmament is peculiar and unique in a way that challenges the expectations of both men. The universe of Trump officials is broadly sorted by its levels of complicity. At the high end of the scale are those officials who went to work for Trump to limit the damage he could do to the country (James Mattis, John Kelly) and who became despised deep-state traitors. At the bottom end are those who enlisted willingly in his most criminal and authoritarian schemes (Rudy Giuliani, Steve Bannon) and who left as MAGA heroes.
Barr defies the scale. He enthusiastically supported Trump’s efforts to pervert the Justice Department into a tool of personal abuse (which Barr justified on the basis of his constitutional theory that presidents should properly exert direct control over the operations of the entire bureaucracy, including law enforcement). Barr bought Trump’s idea that he was the victim of a vast deep-state plot and threw himself into the task of rewriting the department into a machine to protect the president and investigate his enemies. His sole request was that Trump allow him to maintain the appearance of propriety by abstaining from public demands that Barr prosecute certain targets and let go certain allies.
Trump, characteristically, refused to grant Barr this fig leaf. Barr, characteristically, gave Trump what he wanted anyway.
But Barr also ultimately tried to jump off the train at the very end when Trump’s legal-coup attempt was going off the rails. And because Barr had been given the impossible task of producing legal evidence that Trump had won the election, he became a central scapegoat in Trump’s narrative of betrayal.
And so Barr left the administration paradoxically occupying both ends of the moral scale, one of Trump’s most loyal enablers and his most detested apostate.
Barr’s whole strategy since leaving the administration has been to reframe his service as a strategic effort to advance conservative-movement principles. Barr called Trump unfit and incompetent and pushed Republicans to choose a more effective nominee. His grounds for opposing Trump always pointed toward an eventual reconciliation, though. He opposed his former boss not on the grounds of being an authoritarian but on the grounds of being too ineffective.
It was awkward, of course, to formally endorse a man whom he had described as operating not unlike a small child given terrifying powers. Barr’s way of squaring the circle intellectually was to insist that the Democrats were worse. (He has insisted another Biden term would amount to “national suicide.”) Barr was a principled constitutional conservative, manipulating Trump for the right-wing cause as best as he could manage.
Barr’s way of handling the optics and tone of his surrender was to endorse Trump without using his name. “I’ve said all along given two bad choices, I think it’s my duty to pick the person I think would do the least harm to the country, and in my mind, that’s — I will vote the Republican ticket,” Barr explained. “I’ll support the Republican ticket.”
I suspect it was that tiny act of independence — endorsing his former boss without uttering his name — that made Trump determined to punish Barr. Trump is ignorant in most ways, but he has a keen sense of submission and defiance, and he could detect that Barr was withholding the full measure of prostration he demands.
Barr was attempting to cast his endorsement as a deal between equals. Trump could accept only one place for Barr, and that was at his feet.
