In what may be the strongest indication yet that it does, indeed, take one to know one, Bill Barr reportedly warned Donald Trump that he had a very real chance of losing the election because many voters think he’s an “assh*le.”
The new report of an expletive-filled warning from the former attorney general to the former president came from a new book that detailed the final months of the Trump presidency. The book, “Peril,” from Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, detailed a conversation that the twice-impeached president had with Barr where the attorney general who would later resign made it clear that many suburban Republican voters “just think you’re a fucking asshole.
As Business Insider detailed, the warning came in April 2020, amid a pandemic and just before the final months of the campaign that saw Joe Biden beat the incumbent president.
“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.”
Barr was explicit in his advice to Trump: the voters that carried him to victory in 2016 aren’t his hardcore supporters, but those in the suburbs that don’t care about his “grievances” that he would ramble about during his bewildering speeches and public appearances.
“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 was right about Trump’s chances of losing, of course, because he did in November. But there was clearly no getting through to the now-former president who still thinks he had the election stolen from him. Still, we now know there was at least one person on his staff willing to tell him he’s completely full of sh*t.
[via Business Insider]