William Barr to GOP: Time to Let Trump Go

The latest book on the presidency of Donald Trump comes from an inside source, and it surely won't please Trump. Former Attorney General William Barr's soon-to-be-released memoir is called One Damn Thing After Another, and various outlets are highlighting passages in which Barr lays into his former boss repeatedly. Examples:

• Trump "has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed,” writes Barr, per the Wall Street Journal. He urges Republicans to look instead toward "an impressive array of younger candidates" who embrace the Trump agenda without the "erratic personal behavior."
• "The election was not ‘stolen,'" Barr writes. "Trump lost it." He adds that Trump could have won had he "exercised a modicum of self-restraint, moderating even a little of his pettiness."
• "Trump cared only about one thing: himself," writes Barr, per the Washington Post. "Country and principle took second place."

• Barr asserts that Trump "lost his grip" after the election, per the New York Times. "He stopped listening to his advisers, became manic and unreasonable, and was off the rails,” Barr writes. "He surrounded himself with sycophants, including many whack jobs from outside the government, who fed him a steady diet of comforting but unsupported conspiracy theories."
• Some things Trump will like: Barr slams the media for its "active support for progressive ideology" and says the political left is guilty of “the same kind of revolutionary and totalitarian ideas that propelled the French Revolution, the Communists of the Russian Revolution and the fascists of 20th-century Europe."
• While Barr criticized Trump's post-election behavior, he does not think it rose to the level of a criminal offense. "I did not think, from what I heard, that Trump ‘incited’ violence in the legal sense," Barr writes. "Incitement has a legal definition, and Trump’s statements would not fit that definition in any American court."
• Trump has not yet responded, though he previously called his former attorney general "weak" and a "disappointment in every way."

(More William Barr stories.)