President Trump seems to have done the impossible: He’s made liberals feel bad for Jeff Sessions.
In a series of statements on Twitter, Trump attacked his own attorney general as “VERY weak” on investigating Hillary Clinton. And in claiming Ukraine tried to sabotage the election, Trump wondered, “where is the investigation A.G.”
Clearly, the president is feeling the heat of the investigation into whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election, and he resents the fact that Sessions, who recused himself from that investigation, can’t intervene on his behalf. He likely wants Sessions gone so he can appoint an even bigger sycophant who will help him evade questions he doesn’t want to answer and safeguard information he doesn’t want to come out.
But Trump can’t fire Sessions, at least not without creating a national scandal. Instead, he’s apparently decided to publicly berate and humiliate the attorney general until he resigns and Trump can appoint a replacement.
It is a depressing spectacle. But liberals shouldn’t be shedding any tears for Sessions. Sessions knew who Donald Trump was when he was running for president, and he liked it. He papered over Trump’s racism because it enabled his own; he shrugged off Trump’s authoritarian tendencies because he has a few himself.
Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest and most enthusiastic supporters. He gladly threw his hand in with an incompetent, unstable candidate who more or less promised to set fire to bedrock American institutions and fundamental norms of politics and democracy. Then Sessions got burned. Boo hoo.
Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump, at a moment in Trump’s campaign when he was pushing a border wall and refusing to disavow an endorsement from Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke. Sessions has a history from the 1980s of making racist comments, and in his role as attorney general has doubled down on law enforcement policies that harm African-Americans and that have been criticized by the left and right alike.
These include mandatory minimum sentences for non-violent drug offenders, a directive for prosecutors to pursue the most aggressive charges possible, and a turn back toward disastrous and exploitative private for-profit prisons. He’s also threatened the sanctuary cities that protect immigrants and defended President Trump’s travel ban.
We are at a moment of democratic crisis, with a president whose relationship to a hostile foreign power is under investigation, who is actively trying to stymie that investigation and who remains obsessed with both cable news and his long-since-vanquished opponent, Hillary Clinton.
This same president is now clearly trying push out his attorney general so that he can end an investigation that could end up indicting him or members of his team or his family, a nearly unprecedented abuse of power and breach of public trust. That he does it by insulting the guy on Twitter is a move so vulgar and juvenile it’s hard to believe it’s coming from a sitting American president.
Observers of this White House are rightly worried about what happens next. In a saner political environment, the Republican Party would refuse to confirm any appointee they weren’t confident would carry out a thorough and rigorous investigation into election interference. Unfortunately, we can’t trust them to do even that very basic duty — they confirmed Jeff Sessions, after all, who may have been a part of the potential collusion.
There is a very real fear that, when Sessions inevitably bows to his president’s commands and jumps down from his administrative perch like a good lapdog, he will be replaced by someone even less trustworthy and even more obsequious.
But none of that makes Sessions a victim — at least not of anyone but himself.