It was last spring, months before Donald Trump had sewn up the Republican nomination, won the White House and offered Sessions the job as attorney general in his new administration. In an extended phone interview, Sessions was explaining how he had come to oppose new free-trade agreements after a long career of supporting them. His reasoning echoed the America-first, populist message that would carry Trump to victory.

At a time when Trump was winning primaries and hopes for the Trans-Pacific Partnership were fading in Congress, Sessions said, renegotiating trade deals, as Trump promised, suddenly seemed like a winning strategy.

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“The intellectual case for, 'any trade agreement is a good trade agreement' is bankrupt and cannot be sustained,” Sessions said. “It’s just a religion, that all trade deals are good, and anyone who opposes them is a liberal, or something. But I think it’s a good, conservative principle to say that trade should serve our interests.”

At several points, Sessions linked trade to immigration, an issue that would be far more in his wheelhouse as attorney general than would trade agreements. And then he linked both back to the elections.

“In addition to the fact that Americans have to compete against immigrant labor, they have to compete against imports, they also have to compete against robots and computers,” Sessions said. “We’re not going to stop that, hell. But somebody who wants to be a government leader, one of the first things on their mind has to be, how am I going to get jobs for people already in the country?”

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After Mitt Romney lost to President Obama in 2012, Sessions said, Republican leaders “declared we need to be more moderate, and we have to have amnesty [for immigrants in the country illegally]. I thought that was wrong. We need to listen to the American people for a change. The American people want us to fix immigration.”