Former Attorney General Bill Barr is urging new leadership for the Republican Party, which he said faces a historic opportunity in the 2024 elections to take advantage of the leftward lurch of Democrats.
In an opinion piece for media website Common Sense, Barr said the GOP in 2024 can revive the coalition that was so popular under Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, a combination of Republican-leaning, college-educated suburbanites, culturally conservative working-class voters and even some liberals who are turned off by the left’s authoritarianism.
But Barr wrote the person standing in the way of that happening is his former boss, Donald Trump.
“It is painfully clear from his track record in both the 2020 election and the 2022 midterms that Donald Trump is neither capable of forging this winning coalition or delivering the decisive and durable victory required,” Barr wrote. “Indeed, among the current crop of potential nominees, Trump is the person least able to unite the party and the one most likely to lose the general election.”
Barr, who came under fire from Trump after he wouldn’t back the former president’s claims about fraud in the 2020 election, credited Trump’s presidency for “stopping progressives’ momentum and achieving important policy successes during his administration.”
But he wrote the party needs a leader who can provide more than “bombastic rhetoric.” It needs a “substantive, strategic, and disciplined president capable of executing a plan to achieve the durable reforms needed to set the country back on a sane course.”
He said Trump’s divisive actions since the 2020 election are not those of someone capable of leading the party. He wrote Trump is willing to destroy the party if he doesn’t get his way.
“The threat is simple: Unless the rest of the party goes along with him, he will burn the whole house down by leading ‘his people’ out of the GOP,” Barr wrote.
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