Then-AG Bill Barr in 2020 told Trump that 'people are tired' of the 'drama,' new book says

• Attorney General Bill Barr tried to get President Trump to scale back his personal attacks on others, a new book says.
• "People are tired of the fucking drama," Barr told Trump in 2020, according to a Washington Post excerpt of "Confidence Man."

Former Attorney General Bill Barr was among those who tried to redirect former President Donald Trump as advisors worried accounts of his vindictive behavior would hurt his reelection chances, a new book reports.

"People are tired of the fucking drama," Barr told Trump in 2020, according to a Washington Post excerpt of the forthcoming book "Confidence Man," by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.

Barr, who would later testify about Trump to January 6 investigators, joined a number of aides who tried to get Trump to scale back his personal attacks on others, the book says, according to the Post.

The book details "frequent attempts from advisers to tell Trump to tone down his behavior," the Post says, and describes how Trump was often shown polling on how his news conferences about the COVID pandemic — which included bizarre moments like his promotion of unproven drugs or suggestion to inject disinfectants — were hurting him to get him to take his response more seriously.

Throughout 2020, on issues ranging from Iran, massive protests following the police murder of George Floyd, the COVID-19 pandemic to the presidential elections, Trump took a number of controversial steps and actions that even his advisers viewed as erratic.

He launched a drone strike in early 2020 that killed Iran's top general, and brought the US to the brink of a new war in the Middle East. Trump repeatedly downplayed the threat of COVID-19 while discrediting the guidance of top public health experts — at one point baselessly suggesting that injecting disinfectants into one's body could help eliminate the deadly virus.

He referred to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus," and was widely accused of exacerbating discrimination and violence against Asian Americans.

It wasn't long before the US was the epicenter of the pandemic, with deaths and hospitalizations skyrocketing on Trump's watch. The pandemic also did immense damage to the US economy, pushing it into a recession. Experts said if Trump had taken the virus more seriously, much of this could have been mitigated.

As he refused to acknowledge the severity of the pandemic, Trump simultaneously pushed baseless allegations of voter fraud throughout 2020, weeks and months before Election Day that undermined trust in the voting process among Republicans . After losing the election in November, Trump refused to concede and disrupted the longstanding US tradition of a peaceful transfer of power. Meanwhile, he routinely lashed out at critics on Twitter, while using it as a platform for spreading disinformation.