Donald Trump told William Barr, his attorney general, that the secret to a “good tweet” was “just the right amount of crazy”.

The detail from Barr’s forthcoming memoir leaked out on Monday, via Josh Dawsey of the Washington Post.

The Post, the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have reported on the contents of One Damn Thing After Another: Memoirs of an Attorney General, which will be published on 8 March.

Barr’s title is taken from a description of the job by Ed Levi, appointed by Gerald Ford after the Watergate scandal.

Some critics responded to the news that Barr says Trump is unqualified to be president and defends his own handling of the Russia investigation by wondering if the world really needs one book after another by former Trump aides bent on self-justification.

Barr, for example, describes a tumultuous Oval Office meeting on 1 December 2020, at which he refused to back Trump’s lie about electoral fraud in his defeat by Joe Biden. On the page, the former attorney general says he tried to resign.

But the resignation offer is not described in books by Bob Woodward and Robert Costa (Peril) and Jonathan Karl (Betrayal), which otherwise closely mirror Barr’s description of the meeting.

Barr did quit nearly two weeks later, on 14 December.

Maggie Haberman of the New York Times, a reporter who had a direct line to Trump during his time in power, has her own Trump book coming out in October.

She said the revelations so far from Barr showed that “the cabinet member/person of stature most loved by Maga has become the latest person in a long string who worked for Trump to say he’s unfit”.

Dawsey tweeted the tidbit about Trump’s tweets, tweeting: “One bit from Barr book: Trump told his former attorney general the ‘secret of a really good tweet’ was ‘just the right amount of crazy’.”

Trump used Twitter as his primary means of communication but he has been suspended from it since the deadly Capitol riot, which happened after he told supporters to “fight like hell” in service of his lie about voter fraud in his election defeat by Biden.

The Post reported that Barr and White House lawyers developed a system for dealing with Trump’s more extreme – or “legally problematic” – ideas, such as using an executive order to end citizenship for people born in the US to undocumented parents.

The lawyers, Barr writes, “operated like a tag team, so that neither of us would provoke too much of the president’s ire at one time”.

“We referred to this as choosing who would ‘eat the grenade’,” Barr says.