Trump doesn’t spare loyalists

Unwillingness to moderate his methods helped him win, but it hasn’t accomplished much since

To get anything done in office, President Trump needs friends.

President Trump’s greatest political asset is also turning out to be his most damaging governing liability: After six months on the job, he hasn’t changed.

Trump is still the disruptor who defied the Republican establishment and the chattering class by winning the GOP nomination, then the White House against all odds. Having few traditional allies to rely on, candidate Trump won by waging unapologetic attacks on political norms and niceties.

But to get anything done in office, President Trump needs friends.

Now he has lashed out at one of his few original loyalists, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the first senator to endorse his presidential bid and a regular surrogate on the campaign trail last year. Trump blasted Sessions on Wednesday for his decision to recuse himself from the investigation into possible Russian interference in the presidential election, a step that enabled and contributed to the decision by Sessions’ deputy to appoint a special counsel in the case.

“Well, Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job,” Trump complained in a free-wheeling interview with The New York

Times. “And I would have picked somebody else.”

The president also castigated Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein — “who is from Baltimore; there are very few Republicans in Baltimore, if any” — and special counsel Robert Mueller, a former director of the FBI. The president warned Mueller not to expand his in-