26 The New York Review
Enabler in Chief
Fintan O’Toole
On September 23, less than two weeks
before he tested positive for Covid,
Donald Trump made explicit what has
long been implicit: he will not accept de-
feat in the presidential election. Asked
whether he would “commit here today
for a peaceful transferal of power after
the November election,” Trump replied,
“Get rid of the [mail- in] ballots and
you’ll have a very peaceful—there won’t
be a transfer, frankly. There will be a
continuation.” Earlier that day Trump
explained why he wants to appoint a
successor to Ruth Bader Ginsburg on
the Supreme Court before the election:
“This scam that the Democrats are pull-
ing—it’s a scam—the scam will be be-
fore the United States Supreme Court.”
The plan could hardly have been laid
out more clearly. If he loses, he will rely
on a Supreme Court, three of whose
members he will (he hopes) have ap-
pointed, to overturn the result.
In reporting on Trump’s remarks,
The New York Times claimed they
were “a jarring contrast” to a state-
ment made the previous day by his at-
torney general, William Barr: “What
this country has going for it more than
anything else is the peaceful transfer
of power, and that is accomplished
through elections that people have con-
fi dence in.” This was presumably meant
to offer some comfort to Times readers,
to imply that Barr would not tolerate
Trump’s threat to suspend American
democracy. But the comfort is false. In
reality, the contrast between Trump’s
statement and Barr’s is one of tone,
not of substance. Barr was answering
a question about the election at a press
conference in Milwaukee. His reply
began, “Obviously I’ve been outspoken
and concerned about a last- minute shift
to universal mail- in ballots.” In his qui-
eter, more restrained way, Barr was
actually supporting Trump’s case—the
peaceful transfer of power depends on
the validity of the election, but such
legitimacy is undermined if there is a
large number of mail- in ballots.
Barr has been echoing Trump’s base-
less accusations that voting by mail is
inherently fraudulent for many months.
In an interview with Steve Ins keep on
NPR on June 25, Barr raised the pos-
sibility of widespread counterfeiting of
ballots. Inskeep asked, “Did you have
evidence to raise that specifi c con-
cern?” Barr replied, “No, it’s obvious.”
There is only one reason to point to
threats for which there is no evidence—
to lay the ground for a challenge to the
election’s results. In this light Barr’s
statement in Milwaukee, far from con-
tradicting Trump’s strategy, could in
fact be imagined as the opening prem-
ise of a brief from the attorney general
to the Supreme Court arguing why huge
numbers of votes should be discounted.
Barr is the single most important fi g-
ure on Trump’s transition team, but the
transition in question is not the demo-
cratic transfer of power. It is the tran-
sition from republican democracy to
authoritarianism. Because of his suave,
courteous, even jovial demeanor and
intellectual acumen, and his long record
as a member of the pre- Trump Republi-
can establishment, it seems superfi cially
plausible to look to Barr as the one who
might ultimately seek to restrain Trump
and protect the basic institutional and
constitutional order. All evidence—in-
cluding ProPublica’s report on October
7 that the Department of Justice has
now weakened its long-standing prohi-
bition against interfering in elections by
allowing federal investigators “to take
public investigative steps before the
polls close, even if those actions risk af-
fecting the outcome of the election”—
points in the opposite direction.
The desire to believe in Barr as a po-
tential savior of democracy goes deep.
Andrew Weissmann, one of Robert
Mueller’s main aides in the special
counsel’s investigation into Russian in-
terference in the 2016 election, admits,
in his new book, Where Law Ends, to
sharing this faith:When I had learned... that Barr
had been nominated to replace the
much- beleaguered Jeff Sessions
as attorney general, the news had
brought a sense of relief. All my
colleagues in the Special Counsel’s
Offi ce believed, as I did, that Barr
would likely be an institutional-
ist.... Barr, I thought, would be
like Sessions, who understood the
attorney general’s unique place in
the fi rmament of cabinet members:
a political appointee on whom it
was incumbent to keep his arm
of the government independent of
politics....
We were counting on Barr, with
his prior experience and intel-lectual heft, to hold that line and
maintain the separation of power
that is so vital to a democracy.Weissmann believed that Barr would
use the independence of his offi ce “to
prevent us turning into a banana re-
public.” But no one who has thought
about Barr’s ideological formation, and
in particular his views on the nature of
authority, should be so naive.Accounts of Barr’s career tend, for
obvious reasons, to focus on his legal
and constitutional opinions. But those
opinions are not abstract. They are
the surface expressions of a mentality
formed in the years of Richard Nixon’s
presidency, not just by the turbulent pol-
itics of that period but by events much
closer to home. In 1974 there were two
resonant resignations. One was Nixon’s
from the presidency. The other was
the unexpected departure of Donald
Barr, William’s father and role model,
from the headmastership of Dalton, an
elite private school on New York City’s
Upper East Side. Nixon had fought to
assert his complete independence from
congressional oversight. Donald Barr
resigned from Dalton because he felt
his authority was being undermined by
its board of trustees. As The New York
Times reported at the time, the con-
fl ict seemed “to center on the question
of where the board’s authority should
yield to the headmaster’s judgment.”It may be a coincidence that Don-
ald Barr’s son became the doughtiest
upholder of the principle that con-
gressional authority should yield to
the president’s judgment—but if so, it
is one even a bad novelist would balk
at. When William Barr was beginning
his legal career, he chose to clerk for
Malcolm R. Wilkey, who, on the fed-
eral Court of Appeals for the District
of Columbia Circuit, had strongly
dissented from the majority ruling
that Nixon should turn over his secret
White House tape recordings because,
he argued, a president has an “abso-
lute” privilege to refuse demands from
the other two branches of government.
It is striking too that, although these
were not the issues that led to Donald
Barr’s resignation, he had previously
fought off a revolt from Dalton parents
who accused him, the Times reported,
“of turning a ‘humanistic, progressive’
school into one in which ‘discipline and
authoritarian rule’ were the hallmarks.”
William Barr is very much part of that
nexus of American conservatives who
date what he calls “the steady erosion
of our traditional Judeo- Christian
moral system” to the loss of discipline
in the 1960s under the pressure of all
the challenges to authority that culmi-
nated so dramatically (and, for them,
so traumatically) in Nixon’s departure.
What his father had done to Dalton—
rescuing it from the decadence of pro-
gressivism and restoring authoritarian
rule—is what Barr has always wanted
to do to the United States.
Barr’s path into the apparatus of the
state is one on which he followed his
father’s footsteps. Donald had worked
at the Offi ce of Strategic Services, the
precursor of the Central Intelligence
Agency. While William was still a stu-
dent at Columbia, where his father had
also enjoyed a distinguished career as
a teacher and administrator, he worked
as a summer intern at the CIA and in
1973, took up his fi rst full- time job
there as an analyst.
That same year Donald Barr pub-
lished an atrocious science fi ction novel
called Space Relations and dedicated it
to his wife as a token of “thirty years’
love.” It is a probe launched from con-
servative, white, male America into the
strange inner worlds of its own psyche
in the Nixon years. As literature, it is
excruciating. But it deals in a usefully
unguarded way with themes that bear
heavily on William Barr’s present po-
sition as Trump’s most formidable en-
abler: the legacy of slavery, Catholic
sexual dogma, the proper response to
revolt from below.
The protagonist of Space Relations,
the “galactic diplomat” John Craig, is
American and white (we learn of his
“pallid skin” in the fi rst paragraph). He
is, as the book opens, being subjected
to “anal and urethral” examinations as
part of his preparation for a journey to
the planet Kossar. This is, in fact, a re-
turn voyage: Craig, we soon learn, had
previously been kidnapped by space
pirates and sold to a powerful aristo-
crat on Kossar, a society of slaves and
slaveowners. Most of the novel’s action
retails his life and adventures during
those two years as a slave. Thus, Space
Relations is really a thinly disguisedWilliam Barr; illustration by John Cuneo