Is anyone else out there wondering why Jeff Sessions is so desperately clinging to a job that his boss clearly doesn’t think he’s good at? After all, the current bully-in-chief is going the extra mile to let the whole world know he thinks Jeff stinks at his job and should be replaced. Of course, Trump can’t do anything normally. Instead of directly and discreetly letting Sessions know he is displeased with him, he’s chosen to break up with him in a manner befitting the most immature of middle-schoolers—whereby, without warning, he suddenly stops speaking to his partner, starts rumors about them, and publicly calls them names.
Now, any rational person might give up on a relationship that is so obviously going nowhere. But not good ol’ Jeff. He’s firmly entrenched and it has very little to do with any loyalty he feels toward this president. He has his own reasons for wanting to stay, and they have everything to do with the nefarious political agenda he’s been crafting over decades.
The answer is that Sessions isn’t in the Trump administration primarily to serve Donald Trump. He’s there to enact a robust — even aggressive — policy agenda, aimed at protecting police officers, cracking down on unauthorized immigrants, and using criminal justice policy to send a “tough on crime” message.
It’s an agenda that falls in line with the law-and-order populism Trump espoused before arriving in office (and, less frequently, during his presidency). But before it was “Trumpism,” it was Sessions-ism. And Sessions’s commitment to the policies that first attracted him to Donald Trump’s presidential campaign certainly appears to outstrip his commitment to President Donald Trump.
This is exactly what so many of us were afraid of when we said that Jeff Sessions was a danger to the American people and should never be allowed to hold the position of attorney general. And to his credit, so far, Sessions-ism is working. From their own mouths, agents at Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) say that enforcement has gotten more aggressive in the Trump era, as well as standards and protocols being disregarded and more ethnocentrism showing up among agents. Sessions has also pushed forward with a revived War on Drugs which isn’t at all based in any reality other than he desperately wants to lock up as many poor people and people of color as possible. And more recently, he expanded the Justice Department’s ability to seize property from Americans suspected of participating in crimes, regardless of whether they have actually been convicted.
So from Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III’s point of view, this job is a dream gig that allows him to do all the things he’s wanted to do for a long time. And he’s not giving it up for anyone—including Donald Trump.
Sessions has decades of experience in the federal government, as a US attorney and a senator. But he’d never been in the Republican mainstream. While many in his party supported expanding legal immigration, Sessions stood firmly against immigration both legal and unauthorized; while other Republicans embraced criminal justice reforms like reducing mandatory prison sentences, Sessions remained a down-the-line “tough on crime” Republican.
Then Trump came along, and took the lead in the Republican presidential primary for taking a hard, culture-war-inflected line on immigration and a populist tone — a chance to take Sessions-ism mainstream.
Like the kid who was long bullied and rejected in school for not being cool enough, this is Jeff’s moment to shine—a chance to watch all those establishment Republicans get their comeuppance. Except Sessions is the underdog you definitely don’t want to see win. His vision of making the country great again is transforming it into virtually a police state, one that overwhelmingly punishes black and brown people, members of the LGBTQ community, and anyone who is vulnerable and unlike him and his friends. And he’s not likely give it up until he is forced out.
The Trump presidency was an opportunity for Sessions to do what he’s been calling on the federal government to do for years: step in aggressively to promote social order by taking an uncompromising approach to law enforcement at the federal and local levels. He doesn’t need the personal confidence of the president to carry out that agenda. And if he decided to pick up and leave, he’d have every reason to believe the agenda would collapse behind him.
The real dilemma here is how badly progressives want Jeff Sessions out, and what we are willing to support in order to get it. He had no business in the job to begin with, and in the five-plus months that he has had it, he has already worked to dismantle much of the progress we were making toward a fairer, more equitable society. Surely if he goes, some of his hideous beliefs and attempts to use the law to harm marginalized people would go with him. And yet, it’s also horrific and frightening to imagine who would come in behind him. Names like Rudy Guiliani and Ted Cruz are being floated as his possible replacements. That would be disastrous. It would also mean that Trump would happily accept Sessions’ resignation only to appoint someone who could put the kibosh on the entire Russia investigation. So whether he stays or goes, it’s pretty bad.
As incredibly painful as it may be, we need to face reality. This is a provocative question, not meant to ignore the damage Sessions has already done and can continue to do, but it may be worth asking ourselves: At this point, is the devil we know better than the devil we don’t?
It’s incredibly depressing to think about.