Adapt or die...

Sessions to GOP: Adapt to Trump or die

In an exclusive interview for POLITICO's 'Off Message' podcast, the Alabama senator warns fellow Republicans to fall in line.

By Glenn Thrush

Sen. Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, Donald Trump’s friendly but fierce Alabama ally, has a message for Republicans still queasy about their party’s nominee: Tide’s about to roll over you.

Sessions, a 69-year-old former state attorney general who famously donned the “Make America Great Again” trucker’s cap at a massive rally in Mobile last August, thinks Trump is more a movement than a man. And this sprightly son of country preachers and teachers is on a mission to evangelize maybe-Trumpers like House Speaker Paul Ryan on the Gospel According to Donald – with a sermon on self-preservation.

“I think [Ryan] needs to recognize, on some of these issues, Trump is where the Republicans are and if you’re going to be a Republican leader you should be supportive of that,” Sessions told me during a taping of POLITICO’s “Off Message” podcast in his Senate office last week.

“My advice is to listen and accept the will of the American people, the Republican voters – the Republican Party is the Republican voters,” he added – a pointed reference to Ryan’s suggestion that he, and not the presumptive party nominee, represents authentic conservative values. “Give me a break! A lot of our drift within our party has gotten away from [the will of the voters] … I think the leaders in all parties tend to adjust to reality. They just have to or they won’t remain in office … Already many are sensing it.”

Trump has said he needs an experienced Washington hand as a running mate to offset his own inexperience, and Sessions (as you’d expect) has said, oh gosh not me. But he’s clearly positioned himself as Trump’s man on the Hill, and told me he takes some satisfaction in watching the cloakroom skeptics line up behind a guy they once dismissed as a joke.

Sessions is deeply simpatico with Trump on immigration, taxes, and he’s a fervent, if recent convert to, the developer’s opposition to all free trade agreements (“I supported the Korean trade agreement in 2011,” he says sheepishly). But there’s a more visceral, pragmatic motive behind Sessions’ embrace of the big Yankee: survival. Win or lose, Trump has tapped into the GOP base’s deep feelings of alienation and Republican candidates of all stripes, and from all parts of the country, will adapt or die.

He has said this is going to be a new Republican Party, a workers’ Republican Party, instead of just the elite Republican Party,” said Sessions, who was quietly ridiculed by other GOP senators when he embraced (but didn’t quite endorse) Trump last summer.

Thanks to Trump – and Bernie Sanders – a vote for the Trans-Pacific Partnership is an act of political suicide. “It would endanger you — yes,” he said of anyone who votes in favor of the agreement, which is stalled in the Senate despite the support of leading Republicans. “I think they would have a hard time getting elected.”

The core argument many mainstream Republicans make against Trump is that the extremity of his language and the impracticality if his proposals will render him unelectable, no matter how well he’s fared in recent polls. Sessions argues against that – but the foundation of his argument is that everything-except-Trump has already failed, so why not give the people what they want?

“Romney didn’t get beyond the numbers,” Sessions explained. “He couldn't get 50 percent. Romney got killed by the under-$50,000-a-year income voter. He just got killed in that. You cannot win. You cannot be president of the United States if people below $50,000 don't think you care about them and you have no real communication that motivates them to vote for you. And that's the trend we've been on, and Trump has broken that.”

In a major blow to Ted Cruz, Sessions endorsed Trump in February – citing the developer’s harder-line stance on immigration, even though he’s not sure the wall will stretch the length of the Mexican border, and he doesn’t know exactly how Trump will cajole the Mexicans into paying for it.

“He's never said it's going to go from one end of the country, from the Gulf to the Pacific, and he'll use good judgment about that,” Sessions said. “And there are ways, through tax and regulation policies, that we can — and immigrant fees – that this could be paid for. I have not studied the details of it but, absolutely, I think that is possible.”

Curiously, Sessions professed ignorance when I asked him about Alabama’s controversial 2011 state law – HB-56 – that cracked down on undocumented immigrants and gave local police broad powers to question people they believed to be in the country illegally.

“What is that?” he said when I asked him about the law – adding: “I didn't have anything to do with it, and never, to this day, haven't read it, the details of it. I just read about it in the paper.”

The populist war waged by Sessions is among the most venerable in American history – it’s been raging since the Andrew Jackson railed against the monied and manipulative Eastern elites to win the White House in 1828 – and has extended through William Jennings Bryan, George Wallace and Trump.

Like many southern Republicans of his generation, Sessions views the civil rights era as settled history, not on an ongoing issue that remains unresolved. For much of his career Sessions has been a reliable mainstream Republican (his enthusiastic support of the Iraq War, for one, puts him at variance with Trump, who believes it to have been a Bush family catastrophe), but he’s adopted a harder populist edge in recent years. Unlike many southern conservatives, Sessions became a Republican early – in the mid-60s. His intention, he told me, was to embrace the Jacksonian economic populism of the Democratic Party while ditching its ties to segregation, slavery and racism.

His father, a lifelong Democrat who ran a country store, tolerated his son’s political apostasy. To a point. “He let me put a Goldwater sticker on his pickup truck, but he never put a bumper sticker on his car,” Sessions told me with a laugh. (The elder Sessions, a World War Two veteran, voted for Dwight Eisenhower in a minor apostasy of his own.)

Yet Sessions couldn’t quite out-run race as an issue in his own career. As a young federal judge in the 1980s, he made off-color racial jokes and was quoted as accusing civil rights advocates of shoving their views “down the throats” of southerners. As a result, the Senate voted down his nomination for a coveted appointment to federal district court in 1986. Ten years later, he achieved a measure of revenge when he won his seat in the upper chamber.

Given Alabama’s violent history and still-simmering racial dynamic (and the fact that Trump’s audiences in the south have been overwhelmingly white) I asked Sessions if he thought race was a factor in Trump’s rise. Did he agree, for instance, with his ally Rep. Mo Brooks (R-Ala.), who recently accused the Democrats of waging a “war on whites?”

Sessions, who grew up in a segregated, flyspeck hamlet outside of Selma at the height of the civil rights movement, said no, he didn’t. “Trump is going to appeal better to African Americans, Hispanics, and others than previous Republican candidates because he's talking about what they want: a fair chance to have a better life economically,” he said.

“I just don’t think there’s that many people who think it’s wrong to have control on our borders. That's not racism,” added Sessions.

Even when I pointed out that Trump is facing the possibility of an unprecedented backlash from black and Hispanic voters, Sessions is convinced he’ll out-perform Romney as people of color come to realize electing Trump is in their economic interest. “How do you appeal to Hispanics and African Americans that we’ve not done well with at all? Is it by saying we’re going to have open borders and more welfare?” asks Sessions, who has himself performed poorly with black voters in his five Senate wins.

When I asked him about his childhood in tiny Hybert, he described “an almost idyllic environment” of swimming in local creeks and ballgames with neighborhood kids who went on to be doctors, lawyers and university presidents.

Then I asked him about racism, and his family’s attitude toward the historic civil rights battles waging a few miles from his porch. “It was pretty brutal, actually,” he said, referring to segregation. “It didn’t appear to be, on the surface… People got along and we had great relationships… but people were in denial about that fact.”

When I asked about the views of family and neighbors during that period, he spoke in generalities but referred to criticism by civil rights advocates as “attacks” on the Alabama system. “They would react defensively and too strongly, so the attacks would be taken as a personal attack on everything I’ve ever done, and basically you’re an evil person,” he said. “Emotionally, it was — one moment would be defensive and the next moment a recognition that this was not a sustainable lifestyle and it had to change, and it was wrong.”

The childhood image that resonates with Sessions is one of two races moving in different directions – the sight of a school bus full of black kids passing his all-white bus every morning, as the two Alabamas rolled on a country road to their separate but unequal educational fates.

“I don’t feel like I did anything to damage the advancement of racial reconciliation and civil rights,” he told me, voice lowered to a near-whisper. “But I didn’t – I wasn’t any hero in it either.”