He was unquestionably, and crucially loyal to Trump during the 2016 campaign. When then-Sen. Sessions appeared onstage at a Trump rally in Mobile, Ala., on a humid night in August 2015, donned the infamous “Make America Great Again” hat, and later, in February 2016, formally endorsed then-candidate Trump, he validated the president to many in Washington. After all, Washington had always viewed the Alabama senator as a serious conservative. If Sessions could find a way to #MAGA, couldn’t they? In the Acela Corridor’s media ecosystem, he was a tireless promoter of Trump’s shambolic gaffe machine.

His Justice Department has fought rabidly to defend Trump’s clumsy, ill-conceived Muslim travel ban. As attorney general, Sessions is on the tip of the Spear of Steves — the Stephen Bannon-Stephen Miller anti-immigrant push, as his “This is the Trump era” speech on the U.S.-Mexico border signaled in April. In many ways, Trump’s immigration policies were shaped by Sessions, a man he now reviles. Miller, once a Sessions acolyte, remains in the White House, his silence loudly suggesting that he’s content to let his old boss twist in the wind…

Sessions reversed an Obama-era reform that had been heralded across the political spectrum when he reapplied civil asset forfeiture regulations, allowing law enforcement agencies to seize property for people suspected of crimes — a move that law professor and conservative USA Today columnist Glenn Harlan Reynolds rightly argues is a message that “the feds see the rest of us as prey, not as citizens.” Not a huge surprise coming from the Trump-Sessions Justice Department.