Donald Trump has endorsements of his own, including Phyllis Schlafly and Virgil Goode. But there's one towering figure who has split the difference thus far, Senator Jeff Sessions.
Trump conferred with Sessions when he was crafting his immigration policy and Sessions famously appeared on stage with Trump at a rally in Alabama, wearing a Make America Great Again hat.
However, Sessions has arguably saved Cruz's entire candidacy by defending the Texas Senator's record on immigration, pushing back against Donald Trump's charge that Cruz supported amnesty. Cruz's campaign as a "consistent conservative" would have utterly collapsed if the most prominent, credible spokesperson on immigration hadn't said Ted Cruz was by his side during the immigration debate.
But two events in recent days suggest Sessions is tilting back to Trump. First, Trump hired Jeff Sessions's top aide to help him craft his policy platform.
Stephen Miller, a trusted aide to Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, will join Donald Trump’s presidential campaign on Wednesday, serving as a senior policy adviser to the Republican front-runner...This is fantastic news for immigration patriots. It will go a long way towards assuring conservatives Trump is serious.The hiring of Miller is the latest sign that Trump’s tight-knit campaign team is expanding as he continues to lead GOP polls and planning to release more policies in the coming weeks as the primary race unfolds.
It also underscores Trump’s increasingly cozy relationship with Sessions, a prominent immigration hard-liner in Congress who has yet to endorse a candidate.
[Top Sessions aide joins Trump campaign, by Robert Costa, Washington Post, January 25, 2016]
The Trump campaign said that Miller will be in Iowa on Thursday to work with the candidate ahead of that evening’s Fox News debate, the final Republican forum before the Iowa caucuses on Feb. 1.And it's even better news for Trump fans nervous about The Donald's grasp of specifics when it comes to debates.
But even more importantly, America's Senator himself is also defending the Donald on a critical issue, that of trade.
Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-AL), the intellectual leader of the modern conservative movement and the catalyst behind much of the rise of nationalist populism in this election cycle, told Breitbart News exclusively that he thinks there's much about 2016 GOP presidential frontrunner Donald Trump for voters to like when it comes to the issue of trade negotiations...Sessions said:
It’s complicated but fundamentally the United States—and Wall Street, and the Wall Street Journal and the trading centers and like London and Tokyo and Hong Kong—they have this ideal of ‘free trade. They has never been a trade agreement they haven’t supported. It’s sort of become conventional wisdom that Republicans push for free trade agreements, although Republican voters are more hostile in general to it than Democratic voters are according to polling. But we think we know better. What our trading partners—particularly our allies, but our aggressive pacific trading partners—they have assiduously worked to use to those rules to gain an advantage and to increase their exports to the United States while decreasing our exports to their country. And we’ve done nothing about it. We’ve not responded in any effective way. Working people get it—and they’re not happy. That’s part of the clarity of Trump’s position on all this—although I don’t think I would share everything he says about trade, but fundamentally the fact that we’re being taken advantage of is costing Americans jobs and weakening America. [On that, Trump] is right on. I think people have instinctively felt that and that’s been a source of his support.
[Exclusive—Jeff Sessions: 'Clarity of Donald Trump's Position' on Trade Is 'Right' as Americans Lose Jobs Overseas, by Matthew Boyle, Breitbart, January 25, 2016]
