Jeff Sessions has been pushed out of the administration in the first of many expected departures following the GOP’s midterm loss:

Attorney General Jeff Sessions resigned Wednesday at President Donald Trump’s request.

Sessions has been a political dead man walking for the last year and a half, and he was expected to be an early casualty of the post-election shake-up of the administration. Trump’s hostility to Sessions over the latter’s recusal has always struck me as excessive, but then I suppose that is true of all of his personal vendettas. Sessions was one of Trump’s earliest and most dedicated supporters during the campaign, and he has generally been as reliable a yes-man as Trump could have hoped to find. Getting rid of Sessions is an insult to many of Trump’s core supporters, but that obviously doesn’t matter to the president. Trump has a peculiar understanding of loyalty where everyone else around him owes him absolute servility and he owes them nothing at all, so it’s no wonder that there is such rapid turnover among his appointees and advisers.

Of course, the purpose of removing Sessions is to install someone else who will do Trump’s bidding without question and quash the Mueller investigation. Trump has named Sessions’ chief of staff, Matthew Whitaker, as acting Attorney General, and he must be assuming that Whitaker will do just that.