Barr wasn’t sure if the point of his story — that sometimes it’s smarter to wait to respond to an attack — registered with the president. Left unaddressed is whether Trump may have received another message: Don’t mess with Bill Barr.
Modern American politics is driven less by what people believe than who they hate, and one of the quickest paths to fame and relevancy is to be despised by the other side. In this, Barr excelled: Democrats argued that he was Trump’s hatchet man, twisting justice to spare the president’s friends and punish his critics.
Barr was easily Trump’s most effective and important Cabinet member, and showed far more competence and cunning than Trump’s prior attorneys general, Jeff Sessions and the mercifully brief acting AG Matt Whitaker.
The title of Barr’s book is not, as one might suspect, a reference to its…
