Intent on alienating his few remaining allies, Donald Trump says he regrets having hired Jeff Sessions
Donald Trump’s crushing unpopularity and exploding scandals mean that he’s quickly running out of the few allies he had to begin with. Senate Republicans are no longer willing to play along with his desire to rip up ObamaCare out of spite. Committee chairs are now allowing their Democratic counterparts to push forward with investigations into Trump’s improprieties. Now Trump seems intent on alienating the few allies he still has left.
Specifically, Donald Trump is now picking a very public fight with his own Attorney General Jeff Sessions. In a new interview with the New York Times, Trump has said “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else” (link). This is an utterly bizarre sentiment for Trump to put out there publicly, for a couple of reasons.
The first is that Trump can fire Sessions any time he wants to. But instead of firing him and appointing someone in his place, Trump is instead content to sit back and complain about Sessions to the media. This suggests that Trump doesn’t think he can get a new Attorney General nominee through Senate confirmation hearings, or at least not the kind of nominee who would be willing to protect him from scandal, as he believed Sessions would.
The second oddity here is that the evidence increasingly suggests Donald Trump and Jeff Sessions worked together to conspire with the Russian government to rig the election in Trump’s favor. The two men presumably each have dirt that could take down the other. And yet Trump seems willing to poke that bear, in public no less. Is Trump, consciously or subconsciously, trying to taunt Sessions into cutting a deal and flipping on him? Is Trump that eager to get his failed presidency over with and get ousted?
