Donald Trump and his preferred candidate in the hotly contested Alabama Republican Primary Runoff on July 14 have much in common.
Tommy Tuberville, a retired college football coach, has never held elected office, but his runoff opponent, Jeff Sessions, has. Trump, of course, had never been elected to any political office before 2016.
Sessions was the first United States Senator to endorse Trump’s unlikely presidential campaign in 2016 because both are immigration hawks.
In appreciation for that, Trump chose Sessions to be his Attorney General, on the assumption that Sessions would protect him from all legal and political attacks as his personal attorney.
But Sessions had taken an oath to uphold the rule of law, so when serious questions were inevitably raised about how Trump’s 2016 campaign had been greatly assisted by Russian hackers, Sessions recused himself from the investigation, and then Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, also a Republican, appointed highly respected former FBI Director Robert Mueller III (also a Republican) to lead the investigation into the close political friendship between Vladimir Putin and Trump.
Trump became totally incensed when Sessions refused to unrecuse himself, so he summarily sent Sessions back to the Heart of Dixie State, where the former Senator is vying to reclaim his Senate seat, which is now held by vulnerable Democratic Senator Doug Jones.
In typical slash and burn style, Trump is doing everything he can to slam Sessions’ primary campaign in favor of Tuberville (https://www.politico.com/news/2020/05/08/sessions-grapples-with-new-round-of-trump-attack-s-244991).
And associate solitary reporter Eddie Cook, a fervent Trump supporter in Colorado, is very pleased about that.
In other news, a second White House staffer has tested positive for COVID-19. Her name is Katie Miller, and she is Mike Pence’s Press Secretary, and she’s married to Trump’s top xenophobe, Stephen Miller — yes, the same Stephen Miller who, as Senator Sessions’ Communications Director, developed what Miller calls nation-state populism, which slams globalization and immigration. Stephen Miller was one of the top hatchet guys who killed the Senate’s bipartisan Gang of Eight’s efforts to reform our immigration laws in 2013.
Katie Miller has recently been photographed in pubic without a face mask, and our Chief Medical Correspondent, Dan McGuiness, says that’s one of many reasons why she came down with the dreaded virus.