WASHINGTON—In the annals of cutthroat Washington politics, it would be hard to find a Cabinet secretary left abandoned and humiliated in the way President Donald J. Trump has left Attorney General Jeff Sessions.
After days of questioning Sessions’s decisions, Trump all but signed his political death warrant on Tuesday by dismissing the attorney general as “very weak,” perhaps the most cutting assessment for a president who prizes strength above all else.
He made no effort to dispel the impression that he wants Sessions out. “We will see what happens,” he told reporters. “Time will tell.”
The consequences go beyond the fate of one Cabinet officer. In escalating his unforgiving campaign against Sessions, Trump opened a rift with conservatives who see the attorney general as their champion.
And he put the White House in a virtual state of war with the Justice Department amid a high-stakes investigation in a way that it has not been since former President Richard M. Nixon’s administration.
Even if the standoff does not end in Sessions’s departure—and the conventional wisdom in Washington assumes it will eventually—the spectacle raised questions about the future of the investigation into Russia’s election interference, led to criticism from conservative news organizations that are usually deferential to the president and left Republican lawmakers unsettled as they defended the attorney general.
While Sessions remained silent, other Cabinet members reached out to allies to express anxiety about what they were witnessing and what it might mean for them.
White House aides sought to defuse the situation, but found it impossible to mollify the president, who was angered that Sessions’s recusal paved the way for the appointment of a special counsel to lead the investigation now threatening his team.
“If an early supporter like this is thrown under the bus, then who is safe?” asked Mark Krikorian, executive director of the Center for Immigration Studies and a supporter of stricter immigration policies like those promoted by Sessions. “You can imagine what the other Cabinet secretaries are thinking.”
That may not bother Trump, who seems to thrive on slapping those close to him and keeping them on edge. Notoriously fickle, he left Sean Spicer, the White House news secretary, on the hook for six months before his resignation last week.
Reince Priebus, the chief of staff, is still on the bubble and said to be looking for a graceful exit of his own.
But that does not necessarily mean that Trump will push out Sessions. Stephen K. Bannon, the chief White House strategist, was in trouble a few months ago, but survived. For Trump, the former reality-show star, the suspense over Sessions is a season-ending cliffhanger: Stay tuned to see whether he gets voted off the island.
Trump raised the dramatic tension on Tuesday with a morning message on Twitter: “Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes (where are E-mails & DNC server) & Intel leakers!”
Trump repeated at a news conference later in the day what he told The New York Times last week: that he would not have appointed Sessions if he had known that the attorney general would step back from the Russia inquiry. “I am disappointed in the attorney general,” he said in the White House Rose Garden.
In an interview with The Wall Street Journal, Trump dismissed the notion that Sessions, as the first senator to endorse his candidacy, deserved special loyalty.
“When they say he endorsed me, I went to Alabama,” Trump said. “I had 40,000 people. He was a senator from Alabama. I won the state by a lot, massive numbers. A lot of the states I won by massive numbers. But he was a senator, he looks at 40,000 people and he probably says, ‘What do I have to lose?’ And he endorsed me. So it’s not like a great loyal thing about the endorsement.”
Image credits: Tom Brenner/The New York Times