Former attorney general William P. Barr’s consideration of Donald Trump’s presidential candidacy is not terribly complicated. It seemed for a bit as though it might be. After serving as one of Trump’s most aggressively loyal officials, Barr broke with Trump in December 2020 by refusing to elevate false claims about voter fraud. He later told the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, riot that Trump never offered “an indication of interest in what the actual facts were” about the election results, preferring to live in his fantasy world. In July, Barr compared having to pick between Trump and President Biden in the 2024 election to jumping off a bridge. And now he has jumped and landed precisely where every other aspect of his service under Trump would have indicated: on Trump’s side. Barr walked through his reasoning in an interview with CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday. He specifically addressed the issue on which he’d most obviously broken with Trump: the former president’s effort to retain power despite losing in 2020. His argument? Biden was the more worrisome actor. “I think Trump would do less damage than Biden,” Barr told Collins. “I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy, I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.” He explained his thinking by claiming that “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left. It’s the collectivist socialist agenda.” He outlined how he saw these threats manifesting at the moment: “Parents are losing the freedom to control their children’s education. And people can’t speak their mind without losing their jobs, and things like that. This is worse than the McCarthy era.” “We’re not enforcing our borders, we have open borders,” he continued a bit later. “We have lawlessness in our cities. We have regulations coming fast and furious. So, telling people what kind of stoves they can use, and what kinds of cars they have to drive, and eliminating cars and so forth. Yes, those are the threats to democracy.” This is patter straight out of the right-wing media bubble.

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