WOULD A TIMELY BILL BARR DENUNCIATION OF TRUMP HAVE MADE A DIFFERENCE? NO.

William Barr's memoir is about to be published. He's denouncing Donald Trump as unfit.

Former attorney general William P. Barr says in a new book that the prospect of Donald Trump running for president again is “dismaying” and urges the Republican Party to “look forward” to other candidates, concluding after a searing, behind-the-scenes account of his time in the president’s Cabinet that Trump is not the right man to lead the country.

... “We need leaders not only capable of fighting and ‘punching,’ but also persuading and attracting — leaders who can frame, and advocate for, an uplifting vision of what it means to share in American citizenship,” Barr writes. “Donald Trump has shown he has neither the temperament nor persuasive powers to provide the kind of positive leadership that is needed.”

The reaction to this has been what you'd expect.

How on character that Barr waited until he could make money off of it with a book to say Trump was totally unsuited for the presidency, instead of doing something about it when he had the power to. https://t.co/v9nm4ZenF5

— Joyce Alene (@JoyceWhiteVance) February 27, 2022

Bill Barr 2022 = John Bolton 2019.

Both had visibility into actions by Donald Trump that caused them great alarm and would have been useful to impeachment investigators.

Both withheld that knowledge and saved it for tell-all books.https://t.co/Nwmo3H8XyS

— Kyle Cheney (@kyledcheney) February 27, 2022

In the abstract, I'm sympathetic to this argument. Journalists (Bob Woodward, Maggie Haberman) who have damaging news about public officials shouldn't hold it until their books come out. Prominent officials shouldn't maintain discreet silences.

But in reality, it wouldn't have made the slightest difference. We didn't know that Trump had grasped the dangers of the coronavirus when Bob Woodward knew, but Woodward told us well before the election -- and Trump still got 74 million votes and nearly won the Electoral College. We know what happens when someone gets the goods on Trump: Republican officeholders and rank-and-file GOP voters rally around him, denouncing his critics as Deep State saboteurs and, if they're Republicans, RINO traitors. Barr could have said all this in time for Trump's second impeachment -- but he'd have immediately become a pariah like Liz Cheney, and he wouldn't have swayed a single vote in the House or Senate.

But don't take my word for this. Look at the reaction to Barr's book now. Not long after the first stories about it ran, Trump spoke at CPAC -- and brought down the house.

For all the chatter that Trump’s influence over the Republican Party is growing weaker, that others in the GOP tent are feeling more emboldened to break with him, there were few signs of it here. Inside the confines of CPAC ... there was little sense that the former president was anything other than the center of attention. The cavernous ballroom was, for the first time all weekend, completely full when Trump took the stage to roaring cheers on Saturday night.

“We did it twice, and we’ll do it again. We’re going to be doing it again a third time,” Trump said to cheers. Partway through his speech, the crowd erupted into cheers of “Four more years!”

In CPAC's straw poll, Trump beat Ron DeSantis 59%-28%. No one else won more than 2% of the vote.

Barr's book is having no impact, just as his denunciation in real time would have had no impact.

It doesn't matter what anyone says now. No minds will be changed about Donald Trump ever again, and very few have been changed since 2016. No one will say or write anything that will magically make the scales fall from his backers' eyes, and that wasn't possible even during his presidency. If we aren't spared a third Trump run by death or legal entanglement, we just have to beat him with the forces we have. We won't make any new converts.