Senator Jeff Sessions was the first senator to endorse Donald Trump, back on Feb. 28. Even earlier, in August 2015, he appeared at a Trump rally in Alabama and wore a “Make American Great Again” baseball hat. Sessions, like Trump, has advocated restrictive immigration laws, more deportations and stronger enforcement; he has been the Senate’s leader on that side of the issue. But in temperament and on many cultural issues they are not a particularly good fit.
One clue to Sessions’ endorsement is that his acquaintance with Trump goes back more than a decade. In 2005 Trump had criticized the United Nations plan, supported by the U.S. State Department, for a $1.2 billion renovation of the United Nations building. Trump said that he could do the job, better, for about $500 million. He noted that he had put up a 900-foot apartment building near the UN for $300 million.
Sessions and Oklahoma Sen. Tom Coburn invited him to a hearing in Washington on the project. “He was the best witness I have ever seen,” Sessions said in an interview on the floor of the convention. “He explained how he would refurbish two or three floors at a time, in detail, step by step. He came by my office afterwards, with Melania,” Sessions said, “and I had to go to the Senate and cast votes, so he stayed and ate Subway sandwiches with my staff.”
Trump and Sessions got reacquainted at the rally in Sessions’ home town of Mobile. And in January a Sessions top aide, Stephen Miller, a young tough conservative from the unlikely home town of Santa Monica, accepted a job on Trump’s campaign staff. “‘If that’s what you believe in,'” Sessions says he told him, “‘that’s what you should do.'”
Sessions seems uncomfortable with some of Trump’s rhetoric and accusations. But he believes they share a concern for ordinary working people whom elites have scorned. And, judging from his recollection of Trump’s 2005 testimony, he seems to believe that Trump could make the clumsy instrumentality of government actually work, that a disruptive candidate who proved able to win the Republican presidential nomination could be a disruptive chief executive who could get worthwhile things done.
