Most important was Alabama senator Jeff Sessions, the first Republican in the Senate to endorse Trump for president. Of the eleven candidates in the primary field, Sessions had been expected to back Texas senator Ted Cruz, who began the race as the far right’s favorite. Sessions, Cruz said, was “the strongest opponent of amnesty in the United States Congress.” On February 27, 2016, a week after Trump beat Cruz in the South Carolina primary, Sessions had an hour-long phone conversation with Steve Bannon, the head of Breitbart News. Sessions and Bannon had spent several years on the political margins, scheming to move the party’s center of gravity to the far right. In 2013, Bannon had even tried to recruit Session to run for president on a nationalist platform built around immigration and trade, but Sessions declined. Two years later, on the morning of June 16, 2015, Bannon was at Breitbart’s headquarters, in a Washington town house, watching Trump descend the escalator at Trump Tower to the soundtrack of Neil Young’s “Rockin’ in the Free World.” Soon, he was advising Trump and recruiting other ideologues to the cause. “Trump is a great advocate for our ideas,” Sessions admitted to Bannon on the phone in February. His only reservation was whether Trump could break through. “Do you think he can win?” he asked. Bannon replied, “One hundred percent. If he can stick to your message and personify this stuff, there’s not a doubt in my mind.” The next day, on a stadium stage in Madison, Alabama, Sessions stood next to Trump and said, “This isn’t a campaign. This is a movement.” With Sessions convinced, others followed. “Sessions was Trump’s Good Housekeeping seal of approval,” said Mark Krikorian, the head of the influential anti-immigration think tank Center for Immigration Studies.
Sessions was a short, mousy man in his early seventies with an impish smile and a thick Southern drawl. He had spent the entirety of his political career as a lightning rod and a punch line. In 1986, while he was serving as a US attorney in Alabama, Reagan nominated him to be a judge, but allegations of racism blocked his confirmation. At the time, Sessions was the first nominee for a federal district judgeship not to be confirmed in more than thirty years. This was an embarrassing setback, but it also made him an early martyr for white identity politics. He claimed to stand for a “humble and honest populism.” Ten years later, he was elected to the US Senate, where his career was defined by his rabid opposition to immigration. In 2007, he attacked George W. Bush for proposing comprehensive immigration reform, and in 2013 he assailed Obama for the same thing. Sessions may have lacked the clout to pass any bills, but he generated enough heat to scuttle them.
In 2015, after the Republicans took control of the Senate, Sessions rebutted the consensus inside the Republican establishment that Mitt Romney had lost the 2012 presidential election because he’d moved too far to the right. In a memo titled “Immigration Handbook for the New Republican Majority,” Sessions argued that the GOP had lost the election because it hadn’t been aggressive enough. “The last four decades have witnessed the following,” he wrote. “A period of record, uncontrolled immigration to the United States; a dramatic rise in the number of persons receiving welfare; and a steep erosion in middle class wages.” He went on, “The largest untapped constituency in American politics are the 300 million American citizens who have been completely left out of the immigration debate. Speak to that constituency—with clarity and compassion—and change the issue forever.”
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