Donald Trump couldn’t resist throwing an insult at the latest high-profile Republican to endorse him: his former attorney general, Bill Barr.
In a late-night Truth Social post on Wednesday, Trump gleefully posted news of Barr’s endorsement, with a jab thrown in:
“Wow! Former A.G. Bill Barr, who let a lot of great people down by not investigating Voter Fraud in our Country, has just Endorsed me for President despite the fact that I called him “Weak, Slow Moving, Lethargic, Gutless, and Lazy” (New York Post!),” Trump wrote. “Based on the fact that I greatly appreciate his wholehearted Endorsement, I am removing the word ‘Lethargic’ from my statement. Thank you Bill. MAGA2024!”
During Trump’s presidency, Barr did everything he could to protect Trump, from delaying Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election, to intervening in the criminal cases against Trump advisers Michael Flynn and Roger Stone, and defending Trump in the lawsuit filed by E. Jean Carroll, among many other examples. But Barr failed to overturn Trump’s loss in the 2020 election, earning Trump’s ire, and thus resigned in the last few months of Trump’s presidency.
Since then, Barr has freely criticized Trump, lambasting the former president after he was indicted for mishandling classified documents last year and noting that special prosecutor Jack Smith probably had a lot of evidence.
“Should we be putting someone like this forward as the leader of the country, leader of the free world?” Barr said in June. “He will always put his own interests, and gratifying his own ego, ahead of everything else, including the country’s interest, there’s no question about it.”
But Barr’s own political views, specifically his belief that Christian hegemony is essential to American democracy, probably led him back to endorse Trump. As Michael Tomasky wrote last week for The New Republic, “Barr hates disorder and all the rest of it. But he hates something else more: liberalism.”