Why is Jeff Sessions 'widely liked' by the GOP?

According to the characterization by The Hill, former Senator and now recused Attorney General Jeff Sessions is "widely liked" by Republican peers? That seems odd to this analyst for some reasons.

Jeff Sessions has a deep history of being a racist bigot from Alabama where the constituents demonstrate a historical affinity for that behavior. He was denied a judgeship appointment for those reasons. He has now found a champion in Donald Trump whereby Trump is guilty by having that relationship. How about the party who also enjoys the association?

"After Sessions had become one of the first members of Congress to endorse Trump this February, he became an adviser on almost every major decision and policy proposal Trump made during the campaign:
— A top Sessions aide helped Trump communicate his immigration policy.
— Sessions chaired Trump national security advisory committee.
— Sessions advised Trump on who to choose for vice president. (Sessions was also in the running himself for the No. 2 job.) 

“The president-elect has been unbelievably impressed with Senator Sessions and his phenomenal record as Alabama’s attorney general and U.S. attorney,” a Trump transition statement released Thursday read. “It is no wonder the people of Alabama re-elected him without opposition.” 

The Washington Post

"Sessions is a stumbling block to progress— a man who has argued in court against civil rights, demeaned black aides in his office, and spoken out forcefully against immigration reform. 

The Southern Poverty Law Center went so far as to call him the “champion of anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant extremists.” Last week, six people, including NAACP President Cornell Brooks, were arrested during a sit-in protest in Sessions’ Mobile, Alabama office. 

And in an extraordinary move last week, more than 1,200 faculty members, from 176 law schools in 49 states, signed a letter opposing Sessions’ candidacy for attorney general. They expressed concerns about his stance on mass incarceration, climate change, women, the LGBTQ community, immigration and civil rights. 

Specifically, the faculty members cited Sessions’ 1986 federal judgeship confirmation, in which he was accused of calling a black colleague “boy” and joking about the Ku Klux Klan. President Ronald Reagan had tapped Sessions to serve as a federal judge, but these comments and the controversy they stirred led the Senate Judiciary Committee to vote to reject his nomination. 

“Nothing in Senator Sessions’ public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge,” the letter said."

PBS 

Championing bigotry and racism as US Attorney General.