Poor Donald Trump down there in Mar-a-Lago, seething because nobody really has his back because nobody with any power actually loves him in their heart.
His daughter Ivanka made very clear to the House January 6 Select Committee and to the newspaper that she never really went in for that whole “my father won the 2020 election” silliness. She also told the committee she agreed with Bill Barr that there was no significant fraud in the election. In response, Trump very lightly threw his daughter under the bus and lost his shit at Barr, saying among other things that “he sucked!”
“Ivanka Trump was not involved in looking at, or studying, Election results,” Trump wrote after she said she agreed with Barr’s assessment that there was no amount of fraud sufficient enough to overturn his loss.
“It affected my perspective,” Ivanka Trump told the committee about Barr’s assessment. “I respect Attorney General Barr, so I accepted what he was saying.”
Trump fired back Friday that Ivanka “had long since checked out, and was, in my opinion, only trying to be respectful to Bill Barr and his position as Attorney General (he sucked!).”
Well now, Barr’s full testimony to the January 6 committee is becoming public, and we’re really learning the extent of his (probably honest but ultimately self-serving) own under-bus-throwing of Trump.
So Trump got on his loser Truth Social platform and started screaming into the void:
“Former A.G. Bill Barr, a RINO if there ever was one, didn’t have the courage or stamina to go after voter fraud—Was afraid he was going to be impeached,” Trump wrote after Barr’s comments were aired. “NO GUTS, NO GLORY!!!”
Haha, oh bless his heart.
So what did Barr say to the committee that made Trump so mad? Well, what didn’t he say!
Let us first note that Barr made fun of Dinesh D’Souza’s piece of dogshit movie 2000 Mules, which Trump and D’Souza believe is some sort of smoking gun proving … something. He actually laughed at the 2000 Mules movie, and so did everybody else in the room. Barr said, “I was holding my fire to see what the photographic evidence was,” you know, just in case Dinesh D’Souza had made a movie that wasn’t absolute dogshit. But he hadn’t. Barr made fun of the entire premise of D’Souza’s “smoking gun,” his nutbag cell phone data conspiracy theory that underpins the entire point of the film.
“My opinion then and my opinion now is that the election was not stolen by fraud. And I haven’t seen anything since the election that changes my mind on that, including the 2000 Mules movie,” he said, followed by laughter.
In response, D’Souza raged and raged and said Bill Barr doesn’t even understand “geotracking” and also that he is very fat. No really.
Fabulous.
But this post is not about Dinesh D’Souza’s rage, it is about Donald Trump’s rage.
Barr seemed to suggest there was a time when Trump was more normal, when he could talk to him like a human being. “Before the election, it was possible to talk sense to the president … After the election, he didn’t seem to be listening.” We are skeptical, but this is all part of Bill Barr’s narrative that he had to quit when he quit because that was when things got crazy.
Barr made fun of Trump’s weird belief that there had been “big massive dumps” of votes in Detroit that were somehow fraudulent. He asked, “did all the people complaining about it point out to you, you actually did better in Detroit than you did last time?” If you’ve been curious why “Big Massive Dumps” was trending on Twitter at one point yesterday, this is why.
He told Trump all his conspiracy theory delusions about fraud in Philly were “absolute rubbish.” He said Trump was bellyaching about fraud before anybody had even had a chance to look and see if there was any fraud.
He said he thought Trump was “detached from reality.”
He said the conspiracy theories about Dominion voting machines were “idiotic.” 🙁
“I specifically raised the Dominion voting machines, which I found to be among the most disturbing allegations – disturbing in the sense that I saw absolutely zero basis for the allegations, but they were made in such a sensational way that they obviously were influencing a lot of people, members of the public,” Barr said.
Clearly Bill Barr is the devil and he is bad.
And that’s true, but not for the reasons Trump thinks.
But really, at the end of the day, again, it’s the laughing that’s hurting Trump the most. Brilliant hero writer Dahlia Lithwick wrote an entire column about what a good time Barr seemed to have in that deposition, laughing with those witch hunters. This man — who did so much in service of Trump; who did so much to undermine American democracy to prop up Trump’s white supremacist authoritarian presidency; who acted as little more than Trump’s personal lawyer when he was attorney general; but who then noped out at the last minute in a last ditch effort to save his own reputation (nice try, bud) — that guy, when he got behind closed doors, just laughed and laughed and laughed at that fucking loser.
Lithwick:
He used words like “rubbish” and “nonsense” and “bullshit” and “garbage” and “crazy” and “annoying” and “idiotic” and “stupid” to describe, frequently with a wide smile, how fundamentally silly Donald Trump’s claims about the 2020 election being stolen really were.
Of course Lithwick suggests that in a way, this was all a joke to Barr to begin with, reminding us that Barr was on board with Trump stealing the election before he abandoned ship, and that Barr said just recently that if it came down to it, he’d vote for Trump in 2024. YOLO, fuck it, etc.
So clearly we can look at Barr’s laughing on a number of levels.
But Trump can only see it on one level. Laugh at him.
[ABC News / Newsweek / CNN / Slate]
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