Barr plans to steal the election for Trump.

Donald Trump’s astonishing suggestion at a campaign rally last weekend that the US president will deploy government lawyers to try to hit the brakes on the counting of ballots on election night relies on the complicity of one federal official more than any other.

It’s Barr, the boss of all those lawyers who could stop the count.

Conveniently for Trump’s stated plan, Barr appears not only ready to acquiesce, he seems eager to bring the lawsuits, having laid groundwork for challenging the election with weeks of misleading statements about the integrity of mail-in voting.

It also looks as if he’ll be willing to sic the military on us.

In order for Trump to steal the election and then quell mass demonstrations – for that is the nature of the nightmare scenario now up for open discussion among current and former officials, academics, thinktankers and a lot of other people – Trump must be able to manipulate both the levers of the law and its physical enforcement.

Barr has been letting us know he’ll do it.

The erstwhile mild-mannered Washington lawyer has been spouting attacks on election integrity and hostility toward street protests while describing, in explicitly religious terms, an epochal showdown between the forces of “moral discipline and virtue” – which he believes he represents – and “individual rapacity” manifesting as social chaos, embodied by leftwing protesters among others.

It’s hard to get the head around seeing Trump as the head of Team Moral Discipline and Virtue and not of Team Individual Rapacity. He’s the most rapacious individual I’ve ever had the misfortune to be governed by.

In recent weeks, Barr has reportedly asked prosecutors to weigh charging protesters under sedition laws, meant to punish conspiracies to overthrow the government, and to weigh criminal charges against the Seattle mayor for allowing residents to establish a small “police-free” protest zone. He has designated New York City, Portland and Seattle as “anarchy” zones that he says “have refused to undertake reasonable measures to counteract criminal activities,” threatening federal funding.

…

Barr has competed with Trump to erode faith in the upcoming election, peddling baseless conspiracy theories about foreign nations printing counterfeit ballots, spreading tales about mass mail-in ballot fraud – in a lie that was later retracted by the justice department – and expressing frustration that the United States uses mail-in voting and multi-day voting, which are common measures to accommodate voters going back decades.

It’s a holy war kind of thing to him.

[Barr’s social and religious] commitments, in turn, are a matter of public record, including in a speech Barr delivered at Notre Dame University about one year ago. In the speech, Barr described a political philosophy driven by the need to counter an “individual rapacity” in humans that quickly produces “licentiousness” and the destruction of “healthy community life” if not restrained. The only possible restraint, in Barr’s view, are “moral values [that] must rest on authority independent of men’s will – they must flow from a transcendent Supreme Being.”

But, again, if it’s individual rapacity that he fears (and I would agree it’s a bad thing), then how can he see Trump as a shield against it? Trump has done more to promote and flatter and normalize rapacity than almost any public figure I can think of. He’s comparable to mob bosses in his rapacity rather than to presidents, even the crooked ones.

It’s a mystery to me.