The imminent danger from Jeff Sessions

The new US attorney general stands at the nexus of many of the potential plot lines that the world should fear most about the White House

eff Sessions has now been confirmed as Attorney General and this vaults him to a position in American life that is unique. Perhaps more than any other person, Sessions stands at the nexus of many of the potential plot lines that we should fear most about the Trump presidency. Here are the possibilities we need to worry about. United States President Donald Trump’s refusal to divest in his business holdings creates the possibility of untold conflicts of interest and even full-blown corruption on an unprecedented scale. The hostility of Trump and Republicans to a full, independent probe into Russian meddling in the election may mean there will never be a full public accounting of what happened, which could make a repeat more likely.

Sessions is now in a unique position to facilitate and enable — or, by contrast, to act as a legal check on — all of these possibilities, should they metastasise (or metastasise further) into serious threats to vulnerable minorities or, more broadly, to American democracy. Here are the things to fear:

1) Sessions’ loyalty to Trump

Stephen Bannon has said: “Throughout the campaign, Sessions has been the fiercest, most dedicated, and most loyal promoter in Congress of Trump’s agenda.” The question is what this loyalty will mean for the new attorney general’s independence from the Trump White House. His handling of the spectre of Trump’s corruption is also a big unknown.

2) Possibility of more voter suppression and weakened civil rights protections

If Trump does join with congressional Republicans to push more voter suppression efforts on the national level, the attorney general might be at the centre of that. The US Justice Department could refuse to enforce key remaining provisions of the Voting Rights Act or launch crackdowns on voter fraud that are designed to purge voter rolls, harming real voters. Meanwhile, it will bear watching whether the Sessions Justice Department guts the department’s Civil Rights Division or scales back the department’s focus on police misconduct.

3) Crackdowns on Muslims, undocumented immigrants and critics

The Justice Department is already aggressively defending Trump’s immigration ban in court. The discriminatory intent of this seems obvious already. But if it were to be extended and expanded to more Muslim-majority countries, the Justice Department would then be clearly defending what is, in effect, a Muslim ban. Meanwhile, the Justice Department might have a hand in a revived registry for people from Muslim-majority countries, which remains possible. And Justice Department lawyers will opine on the legality of any other policies that might target Muslims.

Sessions is also expected to lead Trump’s charge against “sanctuary cities” that decline to cooperate with federal deportation efforts.

4) The Sessions’ worldview

All of the above admittedly represent dire scenarios and we do not know if anything like them will actually materialise. However, Sessions is also at the centre of another big story-line, one that is centred on enduring questions about the true nature of Trumpism itself.

The unknown is whether Trumpism will fulfil the worst fears of its critics and function as a blueprint for a Trump agenda that is not just anti-globalist in economic terms and driven by justifiable scepticism about immigration, but rather one that is fundamentally ethno-nationalist or white nationalist in orientation.

It’s hard to say how or whether we will know this is happening, but ultimately the aggregation of various individual initiatives may add up to a clear indicator. Bannon has declared that Sessions “has played a critical role as the clearinghouse” for the “policy and philosophy” at the core of the “populist nationstate policies”, otherwise known as Trumpism, and that he has been “at the forefront of this movement for years”.

Sessions is now in a remarkably good position to help translate this “philosophy” into reality. And we may now see what that philosophy actually looks like in the real world — for better or, more likely, for much, much worse. Greg Sargent is a senior columnist and writes for the Washington Post.