Two-time former Attorney General Bill Barr assessed former President Donald Trump as “the weakest of the Republican candidates,” predicting Trump will win the Republican primary and then lose to President Joe Biden in the 2024 general election, Fox News reported.
“I think ultimately the savvy Democratic strategists know [the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office probe] is going to help Trump, and they want him to be the nominee because he is the weakest of the Republican candidates, the most likely to lose again to Biden,” Barr reportedly said on ABC’s “This Week” Sunday.
Trump was indicted March 30 following Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s years-long investigation into the former president. Trump now faces 34 charges to which he pleaded not guilty April 4.
“I don’t think anything’s going to happen before a nomination is made and even perhaps until the election, the 2024 election,” Barr said when asked about the likelihood of Trump being convicted and sent to prison. “This stuff is going to drag out through ’24 and it’s going to stymie and disrupt the whole Republican primary process.”
“I also think, though, as far as the general election is concerned, it will gravely weaken Trump,” Barr said. “He’s already, I think, a weak candidate that would lose, but I think this sort of assures it.”
While critical of Trump, Barr has maintained that the legal case against Trump is politically motivated and utterly without legal merit. Barr stood by that assessment, describing it as “transparently an abuse of prosecutorial power to accomplish a political end … an unjust case.”
Barr also reiterated that he would be most concerned about the Mar-a-Lago document case, saying Trump has “dug himself into a hole” given his “reckless and self-destructive behavior.”
“In many respects, he’s his own worst enemy,” Barr said.
Barr’s appraisal of the Democrats’ strategizing has antecedents in recent history, when the Democratic Party spent more than $53 million in support of the 2022 Republican primary campaigns of Trump-backed candidates that they considered weak in a general election and vulnerable to portrayal as extreme.
Once those suddenly cash-flush candidates won, Democrats then shone a spotlight on them, highlighting them in their nationalized message that our very democracy is under assault and would not survive a Republican mid-term victory.
President Joe Biden spoke of the threat in his November 2 speech that was his closing argument before voters headed to the polls. “In our bones,” he declared, “we know democracy is at risk.
“We can’t take democracy for granted any longer.”
Biden emphasized, as Politico reported, that the threat to democracy came from those “Trump acolytes” who were, as he said, “running for every level of office in America.”
The Democratic Party’s spending efforts were successful, having lifted their selected candidates to victories over their more moderate Republican primary opponents and onto November ballots.
“We’re often not faced with questions of whether the vote we cast will preserve democracy,” he said. “But this year we are.”
“Make no mistake: Democracy is on the ballot for all of us,” Biden said.
Whether or not the same pattern will unfold in 2024 remains to be seen.
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