GOP Wonders: Are We All Jeff Sessions?

I'm old enough to remember Jeff Sessions' last time in the barrel, back in 1986, when Reagan nominated him for a federal judgeship and witnesses before the Senate's Judiciary Committee recalled him calling the NAACP and the ACLU Communist-inspired and counseling a black Assistant US Attorney, whom he fondly called "boy," to "be careful what you say to white folks" after he'd admonished a white secretary for making an offensive remark. But of course you don't have to go back that far to find bad things to say about the ex-Attorney General, who was an early political mentor to Donald Trump and the first sitting US senator to endorse him.What Sessions loved about Trump were all the things that the self-styled moderate Republicans and centrist Democrats who reluctantly voted for him in 2016 claimed to find regrettable but presumed would be held in check by the "adults in the room" as he grew into his office: his xenophobia, his racism, and his protectionism. Despite Trump's vindictive crusade to destroy him for his one moment of integrity, Sessions claims to have no regrets. His recusal "followed the law" and saved "the president's bacon in the process," he says. Sessions fairly reveled in locking up kids in cages when he was still Attorney General. And he fulsomely supports Trump's agenda and all "the great work he has to do" in a second term.The true horror of Trump, as Dahlia Lithwick wrote in her review of Mary Trump's book in Slate yesterday, are his enablers, "the media that failed to scrutinize him, the banks that pretended he was the financial genius he was not, the Republican Party, and the 'claque of loyalists' in the White House who continue to lie for him and to him in order to feed his insatiable ego and self-delusion." Jeff Sessions was and remains his greatest sycophant and, politically speaking anyway, his biggest victim. Sessions doesn't mind being Trump's doormat, in fact he says it is an honor.For those of us who never loved or even liked Trump or Sessions, his humiliation is a grotesque and sickening spectacle. For those who support Trump's "policies but not his tweets," it is, one hopes, a bit frightening, if not sobering. For what it's worth, voter turnout was much lower than expected yesterday, despite Trump's active participation in the campaign.