If you’ve been following Donald Trump’s tweets for the last several months, you’ll know that the president is absolutely furious with his Attorney General Jeff Sessions after the former Alabama Senator and member of Trump’s campaign team recused himself from Trump’s Russia investigation.
Trump has repeatedly attacked Sessions on and off Twitter in several pathetic attempts to bully him into shutting down the Mueller probe, referring to it as a “rigged witch hunt.” Trump has been tweeting like a madman to turn American sentiment against Sessions, but there’s one man he won’t convince — his own Vice President, Mike Pence.
While it’s pretty embarrassing when Trump and his administration members don’t see eye to eye (or even communicate on important issues), it’s even more humiliating when there’s a major disconnect between the president and his VP. In stark contrast to many of the president’s recent comments on Sessions, Pence seems to have broken free from Trump’s grasp with a public statement about how he holds Sessions in “the highest regard.”
Wow. Asked if he has confidence in Jeff Sessions, Vice President Mike Pence says, “I hold Jeff Sessions in the highest regard. I appreciate his service to the nation.”
— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) September 5, 2018
This is major — not only because of Trump’s more recent public lashings of Sessions but because of some very controversial statements Trump made about Sessions in the past, which have been revealed in an anti-Trump book by award-winning author Bob Woodward. In the book, Woodward writes about Trump calling Sessions “mentally retarded” — and Pence’s contrasting comments about the Attorney General seem to be directly related to that. According to Woodward, Trump said this about Sessions:
He’s this dumb Southerner. … He couldn’t even be a one-person country lawyer down in Alabama.”
Trump has spent a lot of time today denying this, but from the looks of it, not even Pence is convinced. Pence is actively trying to create distance from the president with his comment about Sessions, signaling that there may soon be a very public breakdown between Trump and his right-hand man.
Featured image via screen capture
