Roll Call: Jeff Sessions and Trump—the Working Partnership

Donald Trump on August 21, 2015 in Mobile, Alabama.
Mark Wallheiser/Getty Images

David Hawkings at Roll Call details the growing relationship between Jeff Sessions and Republican populist presidential candidate Donald Trump.

From Roll Call:

In August, Jeff Sessions was the first lawmaker to appear with the billionaire businessman at a campaign rally, where he was photographed sporting a “Make America Great Again” ball cap. Soon afterward the senator, who’s chairman of the Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration, acted as ghostwriter for Trump’s hard-line immigration platform. Then the pair adopted almost identical language for castigating the Iran nuclear deal. Sessions got the only one-on-one meeting when Trump came to Capitol Hill in the fall. This month, Sessions approached conservative opinion leaders to volunteer effusive praise for Trump’s protectionist trade agenda.

Capping it all off, this week the senator gave one of his top aides for the past seven years, Stephen Miller, an indefinite leave of absence to join the Trump campaign as a senior policy and communications adviser.

(Miller was behind a memo Sessions sent to other GOP senators in 2013, which foreshadowed the genesis of Trump’s candidacy by urging the party to embrace an “honest populism” designed “to speak directly to the real and legitimate concerns of millions of hurting Americans whose wages have declined and whose job prospects have grown only bleaker.”)

Sessions’ office won’t say when, or even if, he will formalize his support, but his enthusiasm clearly stands out as far more overt than any other lawmaker’s.

Read the rest of the story here.

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