Playing pundit again on Monday morning, President Donald Trump delivered a bleak assessment of Attorney General Jeff Sessions’ standing in his administration.
Calling up the old reporter’s cliché, he diagnosed Sessions as “beleaguered,” an odd fit of meta-messaging to the country and the “A.G.,” who also happened to be the first US senator to back Trump’s candidacy.
There is no clear science, or art, to measuring this President’s relationships with subordinates outside his innermost circle of familial relations. The pursuit is more of a hybrid, like polling — you take the available information, weigh it according to a certain set of studied assumptions, then hope reality lands within the margin of error.
It is clear now that Sessions’ value to Trump, who remains preoccupied with an assortment of Russia investigations, diminished significantly with the announcement in March of his blanket recusal from any probe into the 2016 campaign. That decision and its implications, combined with the erratic and conditional nature of Trump’s loyalties, suggests this super-charged political marriage could be headed for a headline-grabbing divorce.
But for all the drama, It’s hardly surprising.
The Bannon connection
As unlikely as their alliance might appear on its face, the New York real estate mogul and prosecutor-turned-senator from Dixie have one thing very much in common: Steve Bannon.
Before coming aboard Trump’s campaign as its CEO last summer, Bannon ran Breitbart News and there he developed a rapport with Sessions, a recurring guest on his radio show. Two days before Sessions formally endorsed Trump, he was on the air with Bannon, talking up a “movement” that sounded a whole lot like how Bannon viewed Trump’s candidacy.
Then, on Feb. 28, 2016, Sessions took the plunge.
“I told Donald Trump this isn’t a campaign, this is a movement,” he said at a Madison, Alabama, rally ahead of the Super Tuesday primaries. “Look at what’s happening. The American people are not happy with their government.”
It wasn’t the first time Sessions donned Trump’s “Make America Great Again” campaign hat in an Alabama football stadium. About six months earlier, he appeared onstage at another Trump event, in Mobile, making him — for a time — the highest-profile American politician willing to — if not yet endorse Trump — then sign on with his message.
“Thank you for the work you’ve put into the immigration issue,” Sessions said at the time. “I’m really impressed with your plan. And I know it will make a difference, and this crowd shows a lot of people agree with that.”
On the trail and into the White House
A month before Sessions himself joined the ride, an aide in his Senate office, Stephen Miller, left the Hill to become a senior policy adviser to the Trump campaign. Miller would go on to write Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican convention in Cleveland, along with a number of other highly touted — and often controversial — speeches. He works now as a White House adviser and speechwriter.
His boss wasn’t far behind, and days after the endorsement and Super Tuesday romp, on March 3, 2016, Trump announced Sessions would lead his campaign’s national security advisory committee.
“Mr. Trump and the American people know our country needs a clear-eyed foreign policy rooted in the national interest,” Sessions said in statement posted by Trump on Facebook. “We need to understand the limits of our ability to intervene successfully in other nations. It is time for a healthy dose of foreign policy realism.”
That meant “forming partnerships based on shared interests” in the Middle East, he added, advocating for the “safe return of migrants to their home countries” as part of a broader strategy to “protect our own national security.”
Trump ran roughshod over the GOP primary field and on July 19, 2016, Sessions was given the ceremonial honor of formally entering his name into nomination at the RNC.
“He loves his country and he is determined to see it be a winner again,” he said. “Donald Trump is the singular leader that can get this country back on track. He has the strength, the courage, the will to get it done.”
Exactly one year later, The New York Times would publish a long interview from Trump’s White House in which the President lamented nominating Sessions to his post at the Justice Department. Trump was — and remains — angry over Sessions’ recusal, which came about in part because of the controversy surrounding his contacts with Sergey Kislyak, the recently departed Russian ambassador to the US.
The first of those meetings came on the sidelines in Cleveland, and another at Sessions’ Senate office. Neither were disclosed at his confirmation hearings, leading Sessions to take the steps now believed to have poisoned his relationship with Trump.
The bitter end?
Back in October 2016, when the Access Hollywood tape first became public, throwing Trump’s candidacy into doubt, as Republican officials either went missing or called on him to leave the race, Sessions never flinched.
“This thing is overblown,” he told Fox News, as video of Trump making lewd and sexually aggressive remarks in private flooded the airwaves before the second presidential debate. “Everybody knows that Trump likes women.” Sessions then pivoted, indignantly, to what he suggested was the “overlooked … power of the WikiLeaks on Hillary Clinton.”
But for all his loyalty, personally and politically, Sessions still now finds himself in the hot seat. Trump draws a direct line — with no apparent detour to account for his firing of FBI director James Comey — from the recusal to the appointment, by Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, of special counsel Robert Mueller.
“Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job, and I would have picked somebody else,” Trump told The New York Times during a bombshell interview published last week.
He continued: “So Jeff Sessions takes the job, gets into the job, recuses himself. I then have — which, frankly, I think is very unfair to the President. How do you take a job and then recuse yourself? If he would have recused himself before the job, I would have said, ‘Thanks, Jeff, but I can’t, you know, I’m not going to take you.'”
By the weekend, Trump’s simmering frustrations with the Russia investigations and fellow Republicans popped up to a boil. On Saturday, he launched a tweetstorm musing on his “complete power to pardon” and jabbing at “the A.G. or Special Council” (that’s Sessions and Mueller) for not “looking at the many Hillary Clinton or Comey crimes.”
Fast forward to another angsty Monday, this one with son-in-law and adviser Jared Kushner’s meeting with Senate intelligence committee staffers leading many morning newscasts. From the White House, Trump reprised his rant — this time with a little extra mustard.
“So why aren’t the Committees and investigators, and of course our beleaguered A.G., looking into Crooked Hillarys crimes & Russia relations?” he tweeted, a question that never asked for an answer. Before noon, Axios would cite “West Wing confidants” in a report floating former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani — who subsequently backed Sessions’ recusal decision and denied the story — as a possible replacement for Sessions.
And so, the pressure is on. If Sessions stays, there are roadblocks up ahead. And If he goes, the ending will feel as inevitable as his union with Trump once seemed improbable.