Thursday, July 27, 2017

The Jeff Sessions Affair: Is President Trump (Again) Contemplating Political Suicide?

 

An American hero
 

By Nicholas Stix

There’s never a dull moment with this President. Unfortunately, the excitement extends to him humiliating his greatest supporter.

The DPUSA could have attacked President Trump till the cows came home, without hurting his popularity, so long as he did not hurt his friends. So, what did he do? Stab his best friend in the back.

It makes me wonder. Did Trump survive in public life all these years through the draconian enforcement of iron-clad non-disclosure agreements he had his employees and ex-wives sign?


There is one man, without whom Donald J. Trump would be the answer to a trivia question: “Who was the crazy businessman who claimed to be a billionaire, and who ran for president without any political experience, only to be trounced in one of the biggest landslides in American electoral history?”

“For $200, Alex, ‘Who was Donald Trump?’”

The one man who saved Trump is Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III.

When no senator supported candidate Donald J. Trump, Senator Jeff Sessions enthusiastically took him under his wing, and spoke up at a huge campaign rally in Alabama with him.

But Sessions went beyond even that. He let his most brilliant policy intellectual, Stephen Miller, leave him to work for Trump.

And Sessions has been loyal to a fault to the man he made. Apparently, with Donald Trump, loyalty is a one-way street.

When Trump miraculously got elected, Jeff Sessions gave up the safest seat in the U.S. Senate to be his attorney general. Session had run unopposed both in the primary and in the general election in 2014. He was probably the most popular man in Alabama.

Although I voted for Trump, and do not regret having done so, given the alternative, he was not my dream candidate. My dream candidate was Jeff Sessions. For better or worse, Sessions decided against running. Maybe it was a lack of a war chest, or a judgment on the Senator’s part that he was two short, and lacked the necessary charisma.

Back in 2008, my dream candidate was Colorado Cong. Tom Tancredo, and his campaign was DOA. Next on my list that year was California Cong. Duncan Hunter. Ditto. So, I’m not much of a political handicapper.

Sessions understood all the issues in his sleep that the new candidate needed tutoring on from Ann Coulter (Adios America), Sessions, and Stephen Miller. Illegal aliens’ damage to every aspect of American society? Check. Immigrants’ damage? Ditto. The way out- and insourcing destroy Americans’ life chances? Check.

At first, when Trump started publicly humiliating Sessions for no good reason, observers thought they might patch things up, but after days of such abuse, those same observers now take the departure of General Sessions as a fait accompli.

Trump went to his enemies at the New York Times, for cryin’ out loud, to humiliate General Sessions! And then he did it on Twitter, and in the Rose Garden. As Tucker Carlson pointed out, Sessions couldn’t anticipate the recusal question, but even if he had, Trump couldn’t expect him not to recuse himself on that question.

As I’ve argued before, Trump seems to be in love with a line from The Godfather Part II: “Keep your friends close, but your enemies closer.”

It sounds good, like Nietzsche’s line, “Whatever doesn’t kill me, only makes me stronger,” but they’re both nonsense!

You keep your friends close, and your enemies at arm’s distance.

What doesn’t kill me weakens me to the point where I can be much more easily killed the second time around.

Trump is now floating a trial balloon, whereby he replaces Sessions with Ted Cruz. That’s crazy. No other politician in America understands the gamut of related issues the way Sessions does, and no other politician, save for Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, would be as true to the patriotic vision that got Trump elected. However, there’s no good reason to have to choose between Sessions and Kobach. Trump should have appointed Kobach secretary of DHS, and told saboteur senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham to go suck wind.

Some observers suspect that Trump is using Sessions as part of some diabolical scheme, in order to rid himself of Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller. In this scenario, a new AG will be free to fire Mueller, whereas Sessions wears invisible handcuffs.

Forget it. The new guy will also wear invisible handcuffs.

If there’s anyone who should be fired, it’s Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein, who was an Obama guy, to begin with. Rosenstein, the guy who argued for firing James Comey, is apparently surrounded by a force field.

If Trump fires Sessions, not only will he lose political and moral credibility, but he will be at sea, surrounded by the likes of his feminist daughter Ivanka, and a bunch of other people who do not support the vision that got him elected: Rex Tillerson, H.R. McMaster, Mike Pence, et al.

Trump’s move yesterday to end the experiment permitting the sexually insane to take over the military was a card he’d had up his sleeve for a crisis, in order to divert attention from his problems with the Russia Game and his war on his attorney general. He needed put a stop to the war games, anyway, but that won’t dress his self-inflicted wound in the matter of Jeff Sessions.

If the President insists on publicly eviscerating the finest man in public life today, he can kiss the mid-terms goodbye.

I have no idea what the future will bring, but the way I feel right now, I may never say another good word about Donald Trump, even when he’s in the right, and even if he should come up with a stroke of genius. That’s how deep his betrayal runs.

Donald J. Trump may yet end the answer to a trivia question: “What firebrand Presidential candidate miraculously won, when hardly anyone thought he would, and came into power with both houses of government and the Supreme Court, only to throw it all away via vanity, and spend most of his first and only term as the lamest of lame ducks?”

 


An American heel?

2 comments:

David In TN said...

Per a comment I made at the Countenance Blog, a president has never publicly back stabbed his attorney general in this fashion. Usually the AG is the cabinet member closest to the president.

For Trump to gin up a fight with Sessions is incomprehensible stupidity.

Anonymous said...

So why hasn't Sessions resigned yet?Does Sessions know Trump well enough to ignore the bluster--in order to accomplish what HE (Sessions)wants to achieve?
He doesn't have to resign.Priebus was also getting scoured by Trump earlier in the year--and is still around.Maybe it's a game or test Trump conducts--either premeditated or not--but the fact that Sessions hasn't quit yet,must mean something.
--GR Anonymous