Trump Fires Attorney General Jeff Sessions

The Ouster

On November 7, 2018, one day after Republicans lost control of the House of Representatives in the midterm elections, President Trump demanded and received the resignation of Attorney General Jeff Sessions. Sessions submitted an undated resignation letter that Trump’s chief of staff, John Kelly, had requested months earlier — a sign that the firing had long been planned and was simply waiting for the politically convenient moment after the election.

Sessions had been one of Trump’s earliest and most prominent supporters in the 2016 campaign, the first U.S. senator to endorse him. But their relationship had been poisoned by a single decision: Sessions’s recusal from the Russia investigation in March 2017 after it was revealed he had failed to disclose his own meetings with the Russian ambassador during the campaign.

Trump’s Fury Over Recusal

Trump never forgave Sessions for recusing himself, which led to the appointment of Special Counsel Robert Mueller. In public and private, Trump berated Sessions relentlessly. He called Sessions “beleaguered” and “weak” on Twitter, told The New York Times the recusal was “very unfair to the president,” and repeatedly suggested Sessions should resign. The sustained public humiliation of his own attorney general was unprecedented in modern presidential history.

Sessions, for his part, implemented much of the conservative agenda Trump favored — pursuing aggressive immigration enforcement, rolling back civil rights protections, and reversing Obama-era criminal justice reforms. But none of it mattered because Sessions had failed what Trump considered the attorney general’s primary duty: personal loyalty to the president and protection from legal accountability.

The Whitaker Appointment

Rather than elevating Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, who had been overseeing the Mueller investigation since Sessions’s recusal, Trump installed Sessions’s chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, as acting attorney general. Whitaker had previously appeared on CNN criticizing the Mueller investigation and had publicly outlined strategies for defunding or constraining it. Legal scholars questioned whether his appointment was constitutional, since he had never been confirmed by the Senate.

The move was widely seen as an attempt to place a Trump loyalist in control of the Mueller probe. Democrats and some Republicans demanded that Whitaker recuse himself from overseeing the investigation, but he refused. Protests erupted across the country under the banner “Nobody Is Above the Law,” with demonstrators warning that Trump was attempting to obstruct justice by removing the attorney general who had allowed the investigation to proceed.

The Precedent

Sessions’s firing reinforced a pattern that defined the Trump presidency: anyone who placed legal obligations or institutional norms above personal loyalty to Trump would be punished and ultimately removed. It sent a clear message to future attorneys general that Trump expected the nation’s top law enforcement officer to serve as his personal protector, not as an independent steward of the rule of law.