Jeff Sessions Continues to Represent a Massive Liability for Donald Trump

Ever since it became obvious that the Democratic Party had no interest in pivoting to addressing the very real economic insecurities faced by tens of millions of Americans following Hillary Clinton’s embarrassing loss in the 2016 election, I knew that Trump was being gifted a very real opportunity for a second term. That’s how corrupt and stupid Democratic leadership is.

Meanwhile, the entire “Trump colluded with Russia to influence the election” conspiracy theory is rapidly unravelling and Democrats still can’t let go. As such, if the party’s leadership is stupid enough to nominate another Wall Street-coddling neoliberal warmonger in 2020, Trump has a very strong chance of winning. The only thing that can really hurt his odds at this point is if he continues to alienate his base.

Here’s something I wrote on the topic in the post, The Consensus Echo Chamber Take on Trump Firing Comey is All Wrong:

While Trump often doesn’t seem to understand this, his true power comes from his base. By base, I don’t mean the tens of millions of people who voted for him, rather, I’m referring his hardcore fans who voted for him largely to disrupt the status quo. I’m referring to the dedicated MAGA people who had never really participated in politics before, but became energized by Trump. These people are the key to winning reelection in 2020.

Despite all the noise made by D.C. “Never Trump” think tankers and pundits, they proved themselves to be irrelevant in 2016, as Trump won despite their vitriol. Trump’s base got him elected and Trump’s base will determine his prospects in 2020. Your average Republican doesn’t really matter. The average GOP voter would vote for a fire hydrant before Hillary Clinton, and these people aren’t going to vote Democratic or stay home in 2020 because Trump fired James Comey. In contrast, if Trump sufficiently pisses off the base, he’s finished.

Trump has already foolishly managed to alienate much of this base by stocking his administration full of Goldman Sachs parasites, as well as pursuing a neocon foreign policy, specifically defined by a closer alliance with the terrorist-supporting absolute monarchy of Saudi Arabia. While his base has nowhere to really turn due to an understandable hatred of the corporate media and the Democratic Party, they are nonetheless not as fired up. As we learned from Axios earlier this week:

Sources both inside and close to the White House are worrying about a loss of energy among the President’s base — or as one advisor colorfully put it, the folks who’d “walk over glass” for Trump.

Two trends that are troubling them:

1. Trump’s strong approval has fallen quickly: As Nate Silver outlines in this late May article titled “Donald Trump’s base is shrinking”: “There’s been a considerable decline in the number of Americans who strongly approve of Trump, from a peak of around 30 percent in February to just 21 or 22 percent of the electorate now. (The decline in Trump’s strong approval ratings is larger than the overall decline in his approval ratings, in fact.) Far from having unconditional love from his base, Trump has already lost almost a third of his strong support.”

2. Slide among whites without college degrees: Only 46% of whites with no college degree approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, according to the most recent Quinnipiac University poll. In the same poll in early March, 60 percent of whites without college degrees — a group that was key to Trump’s victory — approved of his job performance.

If the White House is aware of the above and genuinely concerned, someone with an ounce of sense needs to have a conversation with Jeff Sessions on the topic of cannabis.

Sessions has a bizarre and completely ignorant obsession with cannabis, and is very much acting like a modern day Don Quixote charging at windmills. The debate is already over and the culture has moved on. At the very least, most of us do not want government thugs cracking down on adults deciding to consume a relatively benign substance.

Even worse, it appears he’s actually stupid enough to target current medical marijuana policy, something that is extraordinarily popular across the country. The Washington Post reported the following yesterday:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions is asking congressional leaders to undo federal medical-marijuana protections that have been in place since 2014, according to a May letter that became public Monday.

The protections, known as the Rohrabacher-Farr amendment, prohibit the Justice Department from using federal funds to prevent certain states “from implementing their own State laws that authorize the use, distribution, possession or cultivation of medical marijuana.”

In his letter, first obtained by Tom Angell of Massroots.com and verified independently by The Washington Post, Sessions argued that the amendment would “inhibit [the Justice Department’s] authority to enforce the Controlled Substances Act.” He continues:

I believe it would be unwise for Congress to restrict the discretion of the Department to fund particular prosecutions, particularly in the midst of an historic drug epidemic and potentially long-term uptick in violent crime. The Department must be in a position to use all laws available to combat the transnational drug organizations and dangerous drug traffickers who threaten American lives.

Sessions’s citing of a “historic drug epidemic” to justify a crackdown on medical marijuana is at odds with what researchers know about current drug use and abuse in the United States. The epidemic Sessions refers to involves deadly opiate drugs, not marijuana. A growing body of research (acknowledged by the National Institute on Drug Abuse) has shown that opiate deaths and overdoses actually decrease in states with medical marijuana laws on the books.

Here’s a screenshot from the letter:

With all of the problems in America today, Jeff Sessions is obsessed with marijuana. This is complete and total insanity, and can be best described as someone with a solution looking for a problem.

But it’s not just unethical, anti-populist and authoritarian, it might be the most politically suicidal mission possible. I stated the following on Twitter yesterday, so let me explain in detail why I think that.

I’ve said it before and I will say it again.
Trump is finished if he lays a finger on states rights on cannabis.

— Michael Krieger (@LibertyBlitz) June 13, 2017

For one thing, this is a pet issue for Sessions and he is completely out of touch with the majority of the American public. Moreover, if anything, the trend is moving rapidly away from him as older people die off and young people don’t want any part of this idiotic crusade.

Here is the national mood Sessions is fighting against:

The Rohrabacher-Farr amendment has significant bipartisan support in Congress. Medical marijuana is incredibly popular with voters overall. A Quinnipiac poll conducted in April found it was supported by 94 percent of the public. Nearly three-quarters of voters said they disapprove of the government enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that have legalized it either medically or recreationally. 

The next thing people will say is that if Trump supporters can ignore his Wall Street coddling and neocon foreign policy, why would cannabis prohibition be any different? The answer is that it is very different, in a very concrete and definitive way.

As passionate as people are about financial theft and foreign policy, the immediate impact of what Trump has done there is still nebulous and not impactful to day-to-day activities of American citizens. In contrast, any crackdown on medical or recreational marijuana will immediately and significantly impact the lives of decent, law-abiding people of all political stripes, many of whom are Trump supporters. It would be political suicide and a potential extinction level event for Trump.

Finally, I think Glenn Greenwald put it best:

Hard to imagine many things more evil than putting people into cages because they dispense medical marijuana to sick adults in need. https://t.co/5xyEHBKmFu

— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) June 13, 2017

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In Liberty,
Michael Krieger

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