“You know who I’m talking about? Who am I talking about?” It was last February, and Donald Trump was at an outdoor rally in Madison, Alabama. “Nobody knows right now, because we’ve kept it a surprise: Senator Jeff Sessions!” There were ways in which Sessions’s appearance was a surprise, at that point: few Republican elected officials at any level had endorsed Trump; that day in Alabama, his home state, Sessions became the first sitting senator to do so. Also, Sessions had been known as one of the few senators who could tolerate Senator Ted Cruz, who was still in contention and openly anticipated Sessions’s support. But, in terms of policies, beliefs, and a capacity for bigotry, Sessions’s endorsement of Trump, and his vigorous campaigning for him in the months that followed, should have been no surprise at all. Nor is the news, Friday morning, that Trump will nominate Sessions as his Attorney General. It is not any less dismaying, or potentially damaging.

What might be called the greatest racist hits attributed to Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III have become well known: many such allegations emerged in 1986, when attempts to confirm him as a federal judge failed. There was the one about the time he said that he was fine with the Ku Klux Klan until he learned that its members smoked marijuana; the times he called a black lawyer who worked in his office when he was a United States Attorney in Alabama "boy," and said that he ought to watch how he spoke to “white folks”; his musing about whether a white lawyer who defended blacks was a disgrace to his race; his description of the A.C.L.U. and N.A.A.C.P. as “un-American” organizations. That last remark was one he actually defended at his confirmation hearings; the others he either said were jokes or claimed to not quite remember. That workaday racism should be, in rational times, enough on its own to scuttle his confirmation as Attorney General, or as the head of any large (or, really, small) bureaucracy filled with people whose talents Sessions is likely to misjudge and waste. But, given the particular responsibilities of the Department of Justice, which range from defending voting rights to oversight of the F.B.I., Sessions’s appointment would be even more upsetting, and frankly dangerous, than those slurs suggest. He has a record of turning what some might be tempted to write off as personal bigotry into political action.

In 1984, certain Alabama officials apparently became persuaded that they had spotted an outrage: too many black people were voting, or maybe just for the wrong people. This was seen as an urgent problem in counties where actual democracy might mean black elected officials. A state prosecutor, Roy Johnson, began an investigation. He turned to Sessions, then the U.S. Attorney, to bring federal powers to bear. Their particular focus was on the most vulnerable voters: the elderly, particularly those in very rural areas, who might require help getting and filling out an absentee ballot. In a series of court cases, some brought by failed candidates, the secrecy of those ballots was breached. With Sessions’s help, the F.B.I. was brought in. As Lani Guinier, who would help defend the investigations’ targets, recounted in her book “Lift Every Voice,” “Dozens of F.B.I. agents made repeated visits to scores of rural shacks with no indoor plumbing,” where they “showed their badges and flashed a copy of each voter’s ballot.” They would ask if anyone had helped them to vote, for whom they had voted, and if they could read and write. (Some couldn’t.) These included people in their eighties, who had been children at the turn of the century and young adults at the time of the Klan’s revival in the twenties. They were the ones who would have the chance to make their grandchildren less fearful. There was no similar inquiry into absentee ballots in white areas. Eventually, the prosecutors decided that there were fourteen suspicious ballots, and Sessions led the prosecution of three voter-registration activists who became known as the Marion Three. When the evidence was put before a jury in Selma, the Marion Three were quickly acquitted. (Other cases in the same drive ended in acquittals, plea bargains, or convictions on lesser charges.)

Later, when Johnson died, Sessions, by then a senator, praised him: “During the mid-nineteen-eighties, we worked together on the prosecution of three individuals for voter fraud in Perry County. The prosecution caused a great deal of furor locally and nationally. . . . The bond which we developed in that case was never broken.” There are many bonds, it seems, that Sessions has never broken. When one thinks about the Trump Presidency, one of the few reassurances is that Congress will have to face the voters in two years, and Trump will meet them again in four. But will there be a Justice Department that makes sure that everyone who has a right to vote gets to go to the polls?

Sessions helped elect Trump on Trump’s terms. There were plenty of Trump sycophants on the campaign trail—Governor Chris Christie, of New Jersey, comes immediately to mind—but Sessions always had a slightly different air. He was more of a true believer, who always seemed to be looking up at Trump when they were standing together on the stage. When, in his endorsement speech in Madison, he said, “You know, nobody is perfect. We can’t have everything, can we, Mr. Trump?,” Sessions spoke as if he was confessing his own inadequacy. He continued by saying that, “at this point in American history, we need to”—here he paused, reached into his inner suit pocket, and pulled out a red hat—“Make America Great Again!” He put the hat on; he did that at a lot at rallies, where one indication of his minionhood was his regular role as the warmup to the warmup, introducing

There, and in his solo appearances, Sessions’s areas were immigration and desperation. At rallies from Arizona to New Hampshire, he called Trump the “last chance” for a “lawful” system of immigration, the “last opportunity we have for the people’s voice to be heard,” exhorting supporters, “If we don’t fix the broken immigration system now, it will not be fixed!”—suggesting that otherwise everything would be overrun. At a rally in Maine, he said, “This is a huge choice,” and added, in response to shouts from the crowd, “ ‘Build that wall’ is right!” (He also depicted Obama as a lawless dictator, declaring, “We have sat by and allowed a President with a pen” to run the country.) In the Senate, Sessions has put his fears into practice by working to block immigration reform. (He also voted against criminal-justice reform, against repealing the ban on gays and lesbians serving openly in the military, against strengthening the ban on torture, and for defunding Planned Parenthood.)

But not all immigrants are alike to Jeff Sessions. Not all Americans are, either. Even before Sessions endorsed Trump, he was out defending his call for a ban, temporary or not, on Muslims entering the country. “Their faith commands them to do these things,” he said, last December. “So I think it’s appropriate to begin to discuss this,” and Trump, he said, “has forced that discussion.” The next summer, when Trump reaffirmed his antipathy for Muslim immigration in a major speech, Sessions told CNN’s Dana Bash, “We respect your religion in this country. We will defend your right to free exercise of religion, but a person with an ideology that goes beyond normal religion, that believes you can kill gays, that kills people who change their view about the religion they have—that is a dangerous thing, and we do not have to admit people like that.” Will we now have a Justice Department that, in its defense of the First Amendment (and a few other Amendments as well), is only interested in what Sessions considers a “normal religion”? The judgment seems to extend unto generations: when Bash noted that the criminals in cases Sessions cited had been born in the United States, he added, “Well, their parents came here with an ideology, and it seemed to have impacted them.”