In recent days, ardent Trump defender and Attorney General Bill Barr made headlines when he made a rare break from the president. In an ABC News interview, he complained about Trump’s constant deluge of tweets, which he claimed make it feel “impossible” for him to actually do his job. Although the White House has maintained a public about-face, behind the scenes, Trump is — surprise surprise — apparently freaking out. The New York Times reports that the ABC interview was one strike among at least a couple against Barr that have set the president off.
Reportedly, he’s also angry at his own administration officials for dropping an investigation into former FBI official Andrew McCabe, who Trump has often criticized. Despite the closure of that investigation without any charges, Trump seems convinced that there’s something in the former official’s behavior that’s worth going after further. In other words, he seems disconnected to the point of trying to push the obviously outlandishly dangerous idea that the law is what he says it is.
The Times says that Trump’s “immediate response was anger” after hearing the news of the dropped McCabe probe, adding that he was “shocked” by Barr’s public complaints about his tweeting.
The publication explains:
‘[I]nsiders insist the tension is real, with potentially profound consequences for an administration that has redrawn the lines at the intersection of politics and law enforcement. Barely a week after being acquitted in a Senate impeachment trial, Mr. Trump is demanding that some of the people whose actions he believes led to his troubles be charged, convicted and sent to prison, and it is not clear that even Mr. Barr is willing or able to go as far as the president wants.’
But that doesn’t mean that he’s going to drop his grossly totalitarian demands to take complete control of the law enforcement apparatus and turn it against his political enemies. He’s trying to complete on his own the scheme that got him impeached in the first place, which involved trying to bribe Ukraine into investigating the Bidens and other political opponents.
The last attorney general, Jeff Sessions, faced repeated public criticism from Trump, who flipped out over his decision to step back from the Russia investigation rather than take some kind of corrupt control. One anonymous Barr team member called the possibility of similar presidential reactions to Barr a chance for “death by a thousand cuts.” For now, Fox News hosts seem to be helping drive a narrative for the president to stick with Barr, but who knows how quickly Trump could change his mind and turn his apparent anger into a firing?
To be clear, Barr is himself leading plenty of work for the president’s agenda even now. His team has started a review of the case against Michael Flynn, and they intervened to lower a D.C. U.S. attorney’s office’s sentencing recommendation of seven to nine years for fellow Trump ally Roger Stone. Barr has claimed that he decided to lower that recommendation before Trump tweeted about it publicly, but it’s not like he can credibly say that he did so at any point without an understanding of the president’s long public perspective on the proceedings, which he’s called a sham.
