OPINION | When Trump insults Sessions, he insults his conservative base

As I noted in my column for The Hill newspaper today, by insulting, berating and humiliating Attorney General Jeff Sessions, President Trump hopes to pressure Sessions to resign — or fire him if he refuses to resign — and then make a recess appointment to replace him when Congress leaves for the summer.

Then, he will order Sessions’ replacement to fire special counsel Robert Mueller.

Let’s consider Trump’s abusive treatment of Sessions from a second point of view: Trump’s unprecedented barrage of public insults against Sessions, day after day, during the past week, is an insult to his conservative base that regards Sessions as one of their political heroes.

{mosads}When was the last time any president engaged in an ongoing onslaught of public insults against a member of his cabinet, let alone the leader of the Department of Justice, which is supposed to be above partisan politics and petty insults?

One can only imagine what it feels like for a cabinet member to wake up every morning for a week, knowing he will probably be insulted by the president. There is an obsessive weirdness and cruelty to Trump’s treatment of Sessions that, to my knowledge, is unprecedented in American presidential history. 

While I strongly disagree with most of the actions taken by Attorney General Sessions, it is far more politically important that huge numbers of people in the Trump base and the conservative base side with Sessions and are deeply offended by Trump’s publicly abusive treatment of him. 

In the last 48 hours, there has been an uprising of support for Sessions from the conservative movement, the Trump base, a significant number of Republican members of the House and Senate and conservative opinion-makers in the media. In increasing numbers, they are going public, supporting Sessions and calling on the president to end his attacks against him.

On the matter of opposing the firing of Sessions and replacing of him with a recess appointment, there is now a de facto alliance, which will be short-lived indeed, between progressives such as myself, who do not want Trump to remove Sessions and Mueller to obstruct justice, and conservative supporters of Sessions, who believe in what Sessions stands for.

Perhaps Trump does not intellectually understand that by humiliating Sessions, he is insulting and alienating key groups at the core of his political support, without whom he would face a catastrophic collapse of his already-low national support.

Alternatively, perhaps Trump is so afraid of what the special counsel will learn that he will pay the price of angering many of his core supporters in order to fire Mueller, even if this requires firing Sessions first, regardless of the political cost.

The ultimate test for Trump will come in the following days and weeks. Will he stop his attacks against Sessions? Or, will he continue his attacks and provoke a conservative backlash, followed by a national firestorm that would engulf his presidency when he fires Mueller, which he surely will if he removes Sessions?

Warning to Republicans, conservatives and Trump supporters: Trump demands loyalty to himself and his family, but offers loyalty to no-one in return. 

Trump offers no loyalty to his cabinet members. He offers no loyalty to members of his White House staff, who he regularly berates. He offers no loyalty to House and Senate Republicans and, at times, attacks some of them on the record. He offers no loyalty to the higher principles that motivate many to participate in politics, whether they are principled liberals or conservatives.

Philosophically, Trump has created a crisis of conservatism, trying to force conservatives to take stands they disagree with, in order to be loyal to him. Legally, Trump is within reach of creating a constitutional crisis, which will put his presidency in peril if he fires Sessions and Mueller. Politically, Trump has created grave dangers for Republicans in the midterm elections, which could threaten GOP control of the House and potentially the Senate if his popularity continues to decline from his already historically-low levels.

Trump’s vision of politics is to govern as though democracy is a cult of personality, with him as the cult leader and those who disagree with him facing repeated barrages of personal and political attacks. Trump will throw anybody under the bus who does not serve his interests on a given day.

If Trump throws Sessions and supporters of Sessions under the bus in the coming days, he will rue the day he made the worst political blunder since Richard Nixon fired his attorney general and then his deputy attorney general, in order to fire special prosecutor Archibald Cox.

Brent Budowsky was an aide to former Sen. Lloyd Bentsen (D-Texas) and former Rep. Bill Alexander (D-Ark.), then-chief deputy majority whip of the House. He holds an LL.M. in international financial law from the London School of Economics. 

The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.