07/25/2017
On Thursday, Tucker Carlson criticized President Trump for his unwise bashing of the attorney general he chose, former Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions. Tucker was responding to the July 19 New York Times article, Citing Recusal, Trump Says He Wouldn’t Have Hired Sessions.Senator Sessions must have seen the position of attorney general as a greater opportunity to improve law enforcement, particularly in the immigration realm which has veered into near-anarchy after eight years of open-borders Obama. Sessions likely could have kept his Senate seat indefinitely: one measure of his popularity at home is that he ran unopposed in both the primary and general election in 2014.
On March 22, General Sessions announced that the government would begin to withdraw funding from sanctuary cities that protect dangerous illegal alien criminals. On April 28, the AG visited Long Island to offer strategies of help for law enforcement officials plagued by gang violence.
Certainly MS-13 arrests are up under the new administration, and Border Patrol agents report greater job satisfaction when allowed to perform their duties (Border Patrol union president says morale at 2-year high under Trump, Washington Times, July 17, 217). So the Sessions’ model of pro-borders law enforcement is already showing results.
It’s clear that President Trump is still angry about Sessions’ recusal, but sniping in the Fake News press is no way to treat him.
TUCKER CARLSON: (0:57) Now take a step back and you can kind of see how this all happened. The president is a 71-year-old political novice, and all of a sudden he’s the subject of a vague, open-ended federal investigation whose goal may be to imprison him and his family. Ask anyone who’s had an independent counsel on this case — and there are a lot of them here in Washington — what that’s like. It’s terrifying. The pressure is soul-distorting. You can wind up lashing out at the people around you, even maybe especially, the ones trying to help you the most.So that’s probably what’s going on, and yet attacking Jeff Sessions was still a useless and self-destructive act. The first rule in politics, as in war, as in life: don’t shoot the friendlies. Sessions is the closest ally Trump has in this administration, one of the very few who even understands why the president won in the first place. Unlike most political appointees in Washington, Sessions made big sacrifices to work in this administration. A year ago, he’s one of the most popular people in the state of Alabama with a Senate seat he could have held forever. Many on his staff didn’t want him to endorse Donald Trump, but he did anyway, purely because he felt it was important.
Sessions was worried about what an unsecured border and mass immigration would do to America, even though the biggest effects from those wouldn’t be seen until decades after he was long gone from this earth.
So he jumped in and accepted Trump’s offer to become Attorney General. He didn’t do it to get rich and certainly not to become more popular; he instantly became less. You’ll remember that many of his former colleagues in the Senate slandered him as a bigot during his confirmation hearings.
As Attorney General, Sessions has been the rare person in the entire executive branch making actual progress implementing the agenda his boss ran on because he’s a rare person who believes in it. In an administration brimming with opportunists and ideological saboteurs — people who literally couldn’t be less interested in what voters think — Sessions has never lost sight of the lessons of the last election. He’s gone after sanctuary cities, he’s enforced immigration laws, he’s ended the Obama administration’s attacks on local police departments and a lot more. He’s likely the most effective member of the Trump cabinet.
In return, the president attacked him in the failing New York Times — that’s not just criticism, it’s an insult. It’s also a worrisome sign that the president may be forgetting who is on his side. Goldman Sachs did not elect Donald Trump: America’s long ignored middle class did.
Trump voters may find his tweets about the media amusing and well-deserved because obviously they are, but they’re not the point of this exercise: the point is to shine some light on the broad middle of this country, on the millions of normal people who are hurting and who could badly use an ally in power for the first time in a long time.
Now the hope is that what happened yesterday was just a stress-related aberration the political equivalent of yelling at your kids when you had a bad day at the office. If so, it will not be hard to fix this going forward: just pay a little less attention to the New York Times, pay a little more to Matt Drudge.
And for God’s sake, lay off Jeff Sessions: he is your friend, one of the very few you have in Washington.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.