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Senate Democrats—and the handful of Republicans who are deciding whether or not they have principle—take note: If the last nine days have horrified you, Jeff Sessions as attorney general will blow this nation up. Because he's the guy who is behind it all, the "intellectual godfather" as the Washington Post says.
The early days of the Trump presidency has rushed a nationalist agenda long on the fringes of American life into action — and Sessions, the quiet Alabaman who long cultivated these ideas as a Senate back-bencher, has become a singular power in this new Washington. […]
The author of many of Trump’s executive orders is senior policy adviser Stephen Miller, a Sessions confidant who was mentored by him and who spent the weekend overseeing the government’s implementation of the refugee ban. The tactician turning Trump’s agenda into law is deputy chief of staff Rick Dearborn, Sessions’ longtime chief of staff in the Senate. The mastermind behind Trump’s incendiary brand of populism is chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, who promoted Sessions for years as chairman of the Breitbart website. […]
In a lengthy email, Bannon described Sessions as “the clearinghouse for policy and philosophy” in Trump’s administration, saying he and the senator are joined at the center of Trump’s “pro-America movement” and the global nationalist phenomenon.
“In America and Europe, working people are reasserting their right to control their own destinies,” Bannon wrote. “Jeff Sessions has been at the forefront of this movement for years, developing populist nation-state policies that are supported by the vast and overwhelming majority of Americans, but are poorly understood by cosmopolitan elites in the media that live in a handful of our larger cities.”
Replace "populist nation-state" with "white nationalist" in that above quote, and you've got it. Trump himself calls Sessions "a truly fine person," probably because he "was one of my earliest supporters." Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner "considers Sessions a savant and forged a bond with the senator" last summer.
The Muslim ban? Jeff Sessions. All of the poorly-thought out, unvetted, and chaotic executive orders of the last nine days? Sessions wanted all of that to happen faster. "The senator lobbied for a 'shock and awe' period of executive action that would rattle Congress, impress Trump’s base and catch his critics unaware, according to two officials involved in the transition planning."
Turns out Bannon is not alone in running Trump. He's got Sessions' help. Any Democrat who does not do everything in his or her power to delay and obstruct this nominee is going to be complicit in the horrors he will try to inflict.
