You should read it. You should savor its grandiosity — it has references to the dawn of homo sapiens, the twilight of the Judeo-Christian order, Edmund Burke, James Madison — so that you can understand his current overreach, born of his certainty that he knows better than the rest of the body politic and is called to heal us.

You should note his remarks’ obsession with morality and you should try not to laugh, the same way you stifle chuckles when you’re reminded that Mike Pompeo is a putatively worshipful Christian and you try to square that with how he abetted the persecution of Marie Yovanovitch, leaves his State Department charges twisting in the wind and genuflects before a false prophet. In Trump he trusts.

You should dwell on the part of Barr’s jeremiad where he says that “men are subject to powerful passions and appetites and, if unrestrained, are capable of ruthlessly riding roughshod over their neighbors and the community.” Ruthless? Roughshod? That’s Trump in an alliterative nutshell, but Barr seemed to be perversely oblivious to that. He was making a case for Trump’s presidency.

The wonder of this wretched moment has never been the existence and stench of a bad egg in the Oval Office. That’s hardly strange, given how ably shamelessness serves ambition. The wonder is how many other bad eggs the current president has assembled or hatched. The wonder is this fluffy, funky omelet of unscrupulousness.

All these supposedly godly men — Barr, Pompeo, Mike Pence, Ben Carson, Rick Perry and more — cluster around such a demonstrably godless one. They rationalize that Trump’s indulgence of certain religious factions absolves him of his sins. Barr is the principal agent of that absolution.

He’s also a paragon of hypocrisy, telling Pete Williams of NBC News that the F.B.I. investigation of Trump’s campaign was an ominous abuse of government power for partisan aims. That description better suits the conduct for which Trump is about to be impeached. I don’t know how Barr kept a straight face.

Actually, I do. Since betrothing himself to Trump, he has had ample practice. In the Notre Dame speech, without any palpable sense of irony, he urged a “moral renaissance” and delivered this priceless line: “No society can exist without some means for restraining individual rapacity.” I agree.