Sessions’ firing exemplifies Trump’s odd view of loyalty
The day after the midterm elections, President Donald Trump fired Attorney General Jeff Sessions, replacing him at least temporarily with a more pliable loyalist. Sessions asked if he could finish the week. Nope.
Now, as a matter of law, Sessions wasn’t fired. The president asked him for his resignation, and Sessions agreed. That matters, because if Sessions had made Trump fire him, some restrictions would kick in that might make killing the Mueller investigation more difficult, if the president ends up going that way. In other words, Sessions’ last official act as attorney general was one more act of unrequited loyalty to the boss.
In Trump’s best-selling book “The Art of the Deal,” there’s a fascinating passage about his mentor, infamous lawyer/fixer Roy Cohn. “He was a truly loyal guy,” Trump wrote. “It was a manner of honor with him.”
He went on: “Just compare that with all the hundreds of ‘respectable’ guys who make careers out of boasting about their uncompromising integrity but have absolutely no loyalty . ... Roy was the sort of guy who’d be there at your hospital bed long after everyone else had bailed out, literally standing by you to the death.”
But it was a one-way street. When Cohn contracted AIDS, “Donald found out about it and just dropped him like a hot potato,” Susan Bell, Cohn’s longtime secretary, told Politico.
Sessions was the first senator to endorse Trump, at a time when doing so was still a considerable political risk. He campaigned for Trump. He defended Trump’s most controversial statements — about immigration, about Hillary Clinton, etc.
And, as attorney general, Sessions more than any other Cabinet secretary put policy meat on the bones of Trump’s rhetoric.
But none of that mattered, because Sessions, a former U.S. attorney and Alabama attorney general, believed he needed to recuse himself from the Mueller probe into allegations that Trump “colluded” with Russia. According to various reports, Sessions believed he not only had a legal and ethical obligation to do so, he also believed his recusal would be politically beneficial to the president because it would protect the integrity of the investigation.
Trump saw it differently. He believed that the first loyalty of the attorney general should be to Trump personally, not to the law or the Department of Justice.
This view was shared by Trump’s most reliable loyalists, many of whom claim to be passionately committed to the “Trump agenda.” But whenever that claim is put to the test, they reveal they are more committed to Trump himself. Jeanine Pirro of Fox News railed against Sessions, calling him a “shill” and hectoring him to “resign immediately” or “put on his big boy pants.” Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr., who tends to define both conservatism and Christianity as personal loyalty to Trump, said that Sessions was merely one of those conservatives who “pretend” to be a “friends of conservatives and the faith community.”
I disagree with Sessions on quite a few things, but the notion that he isn’t a conservative is silly. More importantly, the idea that he’s not a conservative — or a man of integrity — simply because he wouldn’t display blind loyalty to the president is grotesquely unconservative.
Sessions became attorney general because he thought he could accomplish important things. Trump had him fired because the only truly important thing in Trump world is Trump.