AP Photo/Evan Vucci
- Barr cautioned Trump in April 2020 that he was risking his reelection chances, a new book says.
- He told Trump suburban GOP voters thought he was an “asshole” and didn’t care about his “fucking grievances.”
- “The main problem,” Barr reportedly added, “is you think you’re a fucking genius, politically.”
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Attorney General Bill Barr took a blunt approach with President Donald Trump in April 2020 while discussing his reelection chances.
The crux of the problem, Barr told Trump, was that most suburban Republican voters “just think you’re a fucking asshole.” That’s according to a new book by authors Bob Woodward and Robert Costa.
Insider obtained an early copy of “Peril,” which is set to be released next week.
“In my opinion,” Barr told Trump during a tense Oval Office meeting, according to the book, “this is not a base election. Your base is critical, and you’ll get it out. And there are a lot of people out there, independents and Republicans in the suburbs of the critical states that think you’re an asshole. They think you act like an asshole and you got to, you got to start taking that into account.”
The attorney general went on to tell the president that he had become a Beltway “captive” and needed to appeal to a broader group of voters than just his diehard base, the book said.
Barr is said to have debated how best to approach the conversation with Trump last year, while the US was grappling with a deadly and widespread pandemic and as the president refused to acknowledge the reality of the threat.
According to “Peril,” he decided the best option was to be direct and told Trump that with the way he was handling things, “you’re going to lose” the election.
The conversation came at a delicate time for Barr himself, who found himself in the doghouse last year because an internal Justice Department investigation into the origins of the Russia investigation was coming up empty and had found no evidence of wrongdoing by senior DOJ and FBI officials. The lack of bombshell developments infuriated the president, who had long insisted that the Russia probe was part of a so called “deep state” effort to sink his presidency.
Barr reportedly addressed those frustrations, telling Trump that suburban Republican voters “don’t give a shit” about Trump’s vendetta against his perceived foes.
“Your base cares about seeing [former FBI director James Comey] and the rest of those guys held accountable, but these other people don’t,” Barr said, according to the book. “They don’t care about your fucking grievances. And it just seems that every time you’re out there, you’re talking about your goddamn grievances.”
Barr advised Trump to focus more on the US’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic and its economic recovery, “not all this other shit, not every grievance you have,” the book said. But Trump refused to back down, saying, “I need to be a fighter. I’ve gotten where I am because I’m willing to fight.”
The attorney general was one of several top administration officials who worked to steer Trump in a different direction before the election and tried to stave off a political and national security crisis after Trump lost to Joe Biden.
According to the book, Barr grew so frustrated with Trump’s nonsense conspiracy theories about voter fraud that he confronted the president on November 23 and told him his claims were “bullshit.”
Trump’s anger with Barr reached a boiling point when, a week later, the attorney general told reporters that the DOJ had not found evidence of voter fraud on a scale that would tip the election results in Trump’s favor. Shortly after, Barr resigned from office.
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