OPINION: This article may contain commentary which reflects the author's opinion.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr may have had a bad falling out with then-President Donald Trump following the 2020 election, but four years earlier, he would have done whatever it took to cast a ballot for him.
In particular, Barr said in his newly released book that he would have “crawled over broken glass” to vote for Trump in 2016 because he was certain the 45th president would be choosing a successor to the late Associate Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, Business Insider reported.
The outlet adds:
Barr, a highly influential figure in the conservative legal world who served two stints as attorney general under Presidents George H.W. Bush and Trump, detailed his thinking around the 2016 election in his new book “One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General,” released on Tuesday.
Barr wrote that he initially supported Jeb Bush, the former Florida governor and son of George H.W. Bush, in the 2016 Republican primaries, calling Jeb “down-to-earth, thoughtful, and soundly conservative.”
But after Bush flamed out of the primaries and Trump emerged as the frontrunner, Barr “had no hesitancy backing him over Hillary Clinton” and wrote the Trump campaign a check the day after Trump secured the nomination.
Barr noted that he did not view Trump as his “idea of a president,” noting that he found his “frequently crass, bombastic, and petulant style” to be very “grating.” But he added that eventually, he came to accept Trump’s style and believed in his policy agenda.
The former AG also “makes no secret of his distaste for President Barack Obama and the Clintons in his book, writing that in 2016, ‘the country was in no mood for four more years of Obama-era progressivism and Clintonian mendacity,'” Business Insider noted.
But another major reason why Barr supported Trump other than on policy was his potential to shape the Supreme Court.
After Scalia, a constitutionalist scholar who was a conservative stalwart on the bench, died unexpectedly in February 2016. At the time, Republicans controlled the upper chamber and Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) refused to hold hearings for Obama’s nominee, then-Judge Merrick Garland.
Barr said he was encouraged by Trump’s pledge to nominate judges and justices in Scalia’s mold.
“Still, Trump was not one to discuss judicial philosophy with any precision, and I wondered if he knew why Sca-lee-ah was so important to conservatives. But in May 2016 he released a list of eleven potential Supreme Court picks, and in September he added ten more names. Those lists presented an impressive array of committed constitutionalists,” Barr wrote.
The former attorney general noted that it all came down to just one question.
“Who did I want determining the direction of the Supreme Court for years to come: Trump or Hillary Clinton? The question was not close,” Barr said. “On this basis alone, I would crawl over broken glass to the polls to vote for Trump.”
Business Insider noted further:
Trump did, in fact, end up nominating three conservative justices to the Court: Justice Neil Gorsuch to succeed Scalia in 2017, Justice Brett Kavanaugh to replace Anthony Kennedy in 2018, and Justice Amy Coney Barrett to take the place of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg, who died less than two months before the election.
Barr has been critical of Trump since the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol Building, essentially blaming him for stoking the violence with his claims about the 2020 election. That said, Barr also admitted in an interview promoting his book earlier this week that if Trump winds up becoming the 2024 GOP nominee again, he would likely vote for him.
“Because I believe that the greatest threat to the country is the progressive agenda being pushed by the Democratic Party, it’s inconceivable to me that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr told NBC “Today” host Savannah Guthrie.
“It’s hard to project what the facts are going to turn out to be three years hence, but as of now, it’s hard for me to conceive that I wouldn’t vote for the Republican nominee,” Barr noted further.
