The Senate confirms Trump Cabinet picks Ben Carson and Rick Perry.
How unlikely partnership took hold and helped shape president’s administration
WASHINGTON — Shortly after Jeff Sessions swore his oath as attorney general, former staffers gathered in the Oval Office alongside him and President Donald Trump for a photo. Missing, one noticed, was Stephen Miller, who had left Sessions’ Senate office for Trump’s campaign and is now the president’s chief policy adviser.
Trump summoned Miller to join, saying that without this Sessions aide, he wouldn’t have been elected president.
That a former aide is now in a West Wing position demonstrates the degree to which Sessions has so stocked Trump’s administration with allies that his influence is unlikely to be diminished, even as he finds himself under fire for failing to be upfront about meetings with a Russian official.
Sessions said he would recuse himself from the investigation of Russian interference in the presidential election.
Sessions’ swearing-in marked the culmination of an unlikely partnership between Trump and Sessions that brought each from the fringes of the Republican Party to the center of national power.
And though Sessions “doesn’t approach you as someone who’s going to deliver a knockout punch,” he and Trump share a commitment to advancing their agenda of economic populism and tough immigration enforcement, said David Horowitz, head of the Los Angeles-based Freedom Center and a conservative author who is close to Miller and Sessions.
Early in the campaign, Sessions saw in Trump a willingness to unapologetically express hard-line views on immigration, as Sessions himself had for years, and the potential for Trump’s charisma and message to win him the presidency. He endorsed Trump before anyone else in the Senate, amid the heat of the primary season in early 2016, giving Trump the credibility that came from a senator’s backing.
Sessions also brought to the relationship knowledge of the inner workings of Washington and the halls of Congress, as well as a roster of staff who understood the machinery of the Justice Department and immigration agencies well enough to bend the bureaucracy to their will.
In addition to Miller, whom Trump hired in January 2016, Sessions’ former chief of staff Rick Dearborn is running the White House’s legislative outreach to Capitol Hill.
The Sessions orbit also extends into federal agencies; former staffer Gene Hamilton is crafting the plans for implementing Trump’s immigration orders at the Department of Homeland Security.
Though the two men joined forces only a year ago, Sessions and Trump first met more than a decade earlier, in 2005. Then, it was the Alabama senator who needed Trump’s expertise.
The price tag for a planned renovation of the U.N. headquarters, estimated at $1.2 billion, seemed well beyond what U.S. taxpayers should be asked to guarantee, in Sessions’ view. And in researching the issue, he discovered that the city’s most prominent real estate developer had himself cast doubt on the sky-high figure. Sessions invited Trump to join him in testifying before a Senate subcommittee investigating the issue.
“Mr. Trump built the brand-new, top-of-the-line, state-of-the-art, 90-story Trump World Tower almost across the street for $350 million,” Sessions said, injecting a bit of Trumpesque hyperbole into the proceeding. “… How could this renovation cost $1.2 billion?”
But it would be 2013 that marked a turning point for both men.
After President Barack Obama’s re-election, the Republican National Committee commissioned a review of the campaign that recommended, among other things, that their path back to the White House depended on more moderate approaches to policy — first and foremost, immigration.
Leading Republicans partnered with Democrats in the Senate that year on a comprehensive reform bill that spelled out conditions for a 10-year path to legal status for undocumented immigrants, while also enhancing border security. But as it gained momentum on both sides of the aisle, Sessions emerged as its chief critic.
By year’s end, no other lawmaker would log as much time speaking on the Senate floor as Sessions. At the same time, Trump, testing a presidential run, was seizing on the issue in new forums of his own.
In one interview that summer with Breitbart News, an emerging force for opponents to the bill and the website whose executive chair, Steve Bannon, would become Trump’s chief White House strategist, Trump said supporting the proposal was a “death wish” for Republicans.
But politics still wasn’t his primary focus.
The next night Trump posted this: “The Miss Universe Pageant will be broadcast live from MOSCOW, RUSSIA on November 9th. A big deal that will bring our countries together!”