DREAM Act Portal Forum - The Daily 202: Trump’s DACA ‘deal’ is another humiliation for Jeff Sessions

Lolll....relished reading this!

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The Daily 202 Analysis
The Daily 202: Trump’s DACA ‘deal’ is another humiliation for Jeff Sessions
By James Hohmann
September 15 at 6:54 AM
Play Video 10:18
Sessions's full announcement on the end of DACA

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Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced the end of Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals on Sept. 5. (The Washington Post)
With Breanne Deppisch and Joanie Greve

THE BIG IDEA: Photographers caught a giddy Jeff Sessions cracking a satisfied smile last week as he prepared to announce that 690,000 undocumented immigrants who had been brought into the United States as minors would no longer be shielded from deportation.

The Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program “is being rescinded,” the attorney general declared in the first line of his statement. “There is nothing compassionate about the failure to enforce immigration laws. … Failure to enforce the laws in the past has put our nation at risk of crime, violence and even terrorism. … The effect of this unilateral executive amnesty, among other things, contributed to a surge of unaccompanied minors on the southern border that yielded terrible humanitarian consequences. It also denied jobs to hundreds of thousands of Americans by allowing those same jobs to go to illegal aliens.”

Fact checkers called these and other claims Sessions made about the immigrants known as “dreamers” dubious or outright false. Perhaps that’s why he didn’t take questions afterward. Regardless, the speech was widely covered as a triumph for the nation’s chief law enforcement officer and a sign that he was out of President Trump’s doghouse. Not only did Sessions get the outcome he wanted; he also got to deliver the news from the Justice Department briefing room.

Trump’s DACA decision last week seemed to validate Sessions’s decision to slog on through the summer even after being frozen out of the inner circle. From interviews to tweets, Trump repeatedly attacked his attorney general throughout July as “weak” and “beleaguered.”

The main reason Sessions chose to put up with indignities that might cause most people to quit was because he believed he could make a difference on immigration policy. That has always been his signature issue and animated his two decades in the Senate.

But it took less than 10 days for Trump to once again undercut Sessions. The president on Thursday signaled his embrace of granting permanent legal status to these “dreamers” as part of a deal with Democrats that he said is close to being finalized. He also acknowledged that he’s not going to make a deal to save DACA contingent on getting funding for the wall he wants to build along the U.S.-Mexico border.

Discussing the exact same group of people that Sessions painted with such a sinister brush one week earlier, Trump tweeted yesterday: “Does anybody really want to throw out good, educated and accomplished young people who have jobs, some serving in the military? Really!” Trump tweeted yesterday. “They have been in our country for many years through no fault of their own — brought in by parents at young age.”

Adding insult to injury, the New York Times reported last night that Trump “berated” Sessions during an Oval Office meeting this spring. “Accusing Mr. Sessions of ‘disloyalty,’ Mr. Trump unleashed a string of insults on his attorney general,” Michael Schmidt and Maggie Haberman report. “Mr. Trump told Mr. Sessions that choosing him to be attorney general was one of the worst decisions he had made, called him an ‘idiot,’ and said that he should resign. … Ashen and emotional, Mr. Sessions told the president he would quit and sent a resignation letter to the White House … Mr. Sessions would later tell associates that the demeaning way the president addressed him was the most humiliating experience in decades of public life.”

Here’s how the May 17 meeting went down: The president blames Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation for the appointment of special counsel Robert Mueller. Sessions was in the Oval Office with Vice President Pence, White House Counsel Don McGahn and others to discuss who should be tapped to replace James Comey as FBI director. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein called McGahn during the meeting to say that he was going to name Mueller that evening. Trump erupted when he learned the news.
“An emotional Mr. Sessions told the president he would resign and left the Oval Office,” the Times reports. “In the hours after the Oval Office meeting, however, Mr. Trump’s top advisers intervened to save Mr. Sessions’s job. Mr. Pence; Stephen K. Bannon, the president’s chief strategist at the time; and Reince Priebus, his chief of staff, all advised that accepting Mr. Sessions’s resignation would only sow more chaos inside the administration and rally Republicans in Congress against the president. … The president relented, and eventually returned the resignation letter to Mr. Sessions.”

-- A spokesman for the Justice Department declined to comment on both the president’s DACA comments and the Times’s story.

-- Rachel Maddow asked Hillary Clinton on her show last night about Trump’s eruption at Sessions. “Well, look, this is a man who engages in humiliation and domination as a tactic of control,” replied the 2016 Democratic nominee, who is giving a flurry of interviews to promote her new book. “I think that's pretty deeply embedded in his character. … I think the goal might well have been, psychologically, to really make Jeff Sessions, who is a very proud man, … more dependent on pleasing the president. … It's all part of his manipulation.”
Sessions believed at the start of this year that he and the incoming president were genuinely friends. He was the first member of the Senate to endorse Trump’s outsider campaign. It stung this summer when the president told reporters that he only backed him because of his popularity in Alabama. Sessions felt like he had really gone out on a limb and snubbed Ted Cruz, a friend and colleague, to do so.
The thrice-married Trump has long struggled with staying loyal, even to people he once loved. As Ashley Parker and Philip Rucker wrote last weekend after the debt ceiling deal, Trump has a long history of broken alliances and agreements: “In business, his personal life, his campaign and now his presidency, Trump has sprung surprises on his allies with gusto. His dealings are frequently defined by freewheeling spontaneity, impulsive decisions and a desire to keep everyone guessing — especially those who assume they can control him. He also repeatedly demonstrates that, while he demands absolute loyalty from others, he is ultimately loyal to no one but himself. … Foreign diplomats euphemistically describe the president as ‘unpredictable.’”