In his soon-to-be-released book One Damn Thing After Another, Donald Trump’s former Attorney General William Barr seeks to set the record straight on his experience with and view of the former president. He also gives his advice to Republicans moving forward in 2024.

Barr firmly believes that Trump essentially beat himself in 2020, contending that if he had “just exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness,” he would have won the election. Furthermore, Barr encourages Republicans to support someone other than Trump in 2024. There is “an impressive array of younger candidates” who share Trump’s agenda, Barr says, but not his “erratic personal behavior.”

Speaking of Trump’s erratic personal behavior, Barr relays his personal experience of this in the Oval Office when, in December 2020, he told Trump that he found no evidence in support of widespread voter fraud claims the president was making. Barr says Trump responded: “This is killing me — killing me. This is pulling the rug right out from under me.” Barr adds, “He stopped for a moment and then said, ‘You must hate Trump. You would only do this if you hate Trump.’”

Barr writes that he immediately objected to Trump’s rationale, noting that he had “sacrificed a lot personally to come in to help you when I thought you were being wronged.” But Barr could not find enough evidence to support the president’s belief that the election was “stolen.” Trump countered by claiming that Barr did a number of things to undermine him, not the least of which was his decision not to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey.

When Barr finally offered to resign, he claims that Trump yelled “Accepted!” slamming his hand on the table and shouting: “Leave and don’t go back to your office. You are done right now. Go home!” But the White House team of lawyers convinced Trump to not follow through and it was not until several weeks later that Barr would finally turn in his resignation.

In a nutshell, Barr’s argument boils down to Trump simply not having the right temperament for the office. He writes, “He has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”

Seeming to prove Barr’s point, Trump spoke at CPAC over this past weekend and once again brought up his “stolen election” gripe — clearly an issue with which continues to use as a rallying point. Trump observed, “As everyone understands, this horrific disaster [in Ukraine] would never have happened if our election was not rigged and if I was the president.” He’s absolutely right, but as Mark Alexander has detailed, Trump continues to focus on the wrong fraud.

Notably, for the record, Barr’s accounts of some key figures in the deep-state conspiracy to take Trump down, are light handed. In a review of his book, analyst Lloyd Billingsley notes that Barr, who worked for the CIA’s Office of Legislative Counsel in his early years, fails to adequately take on corrupt former CIA director John Brennan.

[According to Billingsley(https://amgreatness.com/2022/03/12/the-william-barr-code/): “John Brennan shows up on page 190 claiming that the CIA knew what the Russians were doing in the 2016 election. In the 1976 election, John Brennan voted for the Stalinist Gus Hall, candidate of the Communist Party USA, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Soviet Union. Barr is not curious why the CIA would hire such a person. The Gus Hall voter was a signatory to the letter calling the Hunter Biden laptop story an example of ‘Russian disinformation’.” That was the cover up detailed by Mark Alexander.