There's been a lot of bad blood between former Attorney General William Barr and Donald Trump. Barr was adamantly opposed to Trump's efforts to investigate alleged voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, and has since been vocally opposed to Trump being president again. There's been nothing ambiguous about his rhetoric. For three years now, he's been warning the country that Trump shouldn't be the GOP nominee, and that electing him would be a disaster.
“I don’t think he should be our nominee, the Republican Party nominee, and I think the Republicans have a big opportunity. It would be a big mistake to put him forward,” Barr said back in 2022.
In May of last year, Barr predicted that a Trump victory would deliver "chaos" and a "horror show."
“It is a horror show when he’s left to his own devices,” Barr said. “And so, you may want his policies, but Trump will not deliver Trump policies.”
“He will deliver chaos and, if anything, lead to a backlash that will set his policies much further back than they otherwise would be,” he added.
But now, with a Trump/Biden rematch looking all but certain, Barr is singing a slightly different tune. At a Forum Club of Southwest Florida lunch in Naples, Florida, the former attorney general put the 2024 choice thusly: “Voting for Trump is playing Russian roulette with the country. Voting for Biden is outright national suicide.”
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Based on the polls, which largely show Trump winning in both nationwide surveys and battleground surveys, it's clear that Barr's position on the issue of voting Trump is very much a reflection of voter attitudes. Even a year ago, polls were giving Biden the edge, but Trump has been consistently leading in the RealClearPolitics average since September. Yes, Trump's style is not what most Americans are used to, and he often creates his own problems by saying things he shouldn't. But people acknowledge that they were much better off under Trump than they have been under Joe Biden.
They also see that Trump didn't start any new wars and was far more successful at negotiating peace treaties than any other recent president. In fact, they've seen the world plunge into chaos under Biden. So, it's not a hard calculation here. A few mean tweets in exchange for peace and prosperity is a no-brainer of a deal. In other words, the public is clearly tired of what the Biden administration has delivered and Trump's personal faults are no longer a good enough excuse not to vote for him. This is essentially what we learned from the New York Times independent voter focus group this week.
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On top of that, all the chaos, despair, and economic malaise that Democrats predicted would happen under Trump instead happened under Joe Biden. Biden, you may recall, was not only pitched as a centrist who would listen to both sides and be president for all — what a bad joke that was — but he was also touted as someone who would bring competence and stability back to the White House.
Again, what a joke that turned out to be.
