I wish Jeff Sessions held more libertarian views on things like the so-called War on Drugs and asset forfeiture. But if Americans wanted a more libertarian attorney general, then they should have elected Rand Paul or Ted Cruz.

They elected Donald Trump, Donald Trump is entitled to appoint an attorney general who broadly shares his policy views, and Jeff Sessions is probably the best the Trump administration is going to do: He is smart, competent, and principled — and so, naturally, the Trump administration wants him gone.

Sessions should not go gently.

Trump does not take advice very well. But Senator Mitch McConnell, who rarely indulges lost causes, has nonetheless tried to advise the president that Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the Russian investigation — the proximate cause of Trump’s displeasure with him — was proper and ethically necessary. Even Newt Gingrich, whose rapid descent into sycophancy has been terrible to behold, has tried to advise the president that firing the attorney general over his compliance with a fairly straightforward ethical standard would be an error.