Jeff Sessions should primary Trump in 2020
Jeff Sessions should primary Trump in 2020
by Eddie Scarry
| December 20, 2018 11:20 AM
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Maybe it’s time for Jeff Sessions to tell black Americans, and everyone else, “What the hell do you have to lose? Give me a chance.”
Maybe it’s time for Sessions to run a campaign against incumbent politicians who are “all talk, no action.”
The former U.S. attorney general was the last person in the administration who gave a damn about doing the most important things President Trump said he would do, particularly with regard to Trump’s number one issue, immigration. Sessions, as head of the Justice Department, moved immigration enforcement in line with existing law, expanded the immigration courts so that the system moved more quickly, and appointed immigration judges with backgrounds in legal prosecution.
During the 2016 campaign, Sessions, then a senator out of Alabama, was among the first of Trump’s endorsements with real authority behind it. Trump, reviled in Washington, needed it to boost his immigration credentials, which had proved a runaway hit with Republican voters, so much so that he got out of it what every winning national campaign needs: a rallying cry, in this case, “Build the wall."
For zealously doing the job he was selected to do and for putting his neck out for Trump when he didn’t have to, Sessions was ultimately machine gunned with a bunch of dumb tweets by an ungrateful president, who, judging by the available evidence, has given up on pursuing the immigration platform that got him elected.
Trump had immense political capital after the election, with Republicans in control of both houses of Congress and a Democratic Party without direction. He then squandered it on an unpopular tax cut and now prison reform, neither of which he campaigned on.
The one thing Trump had that none of his Republican opponents had in the 2016 primary is a set of balls. For what remains political history’s greatest mystery, he handed them over to House Speaker Paul Ryan after the election.
He’s currently figuring out how to pick up his face after embarrassing himself in negotiations with Democrats to get a meager $5 billion for his border wall “artistically designed steel slats.”
Trump disposed of Sessions, the person who did the most to fulfill his campaign pledge on immigration, and now he seems to have completely forgotten that immigration was a winning issue for him at all.
For anyone who wants to argue that immigration isn’t the most powerful item Trump took to the White House, I give you the New York Times’ smartest writer, Thomas Edsall, who wrote on its potency in 2017 under the headline, “How Immigration Foiled Hillary.”
Where is Sessions now? Maybe he’ll remember why he supported Trump in 2016. Maybe he'll realize why, for the same reasons, he should run against him in 2020.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/o...-trump-in-2020
