If there was any doubt that this country is now being effectively run by a white supremacist rather than the Reality TV con-man voted into office last November, a photograph taken yesterday inadvertently revealing White House Chief Strategist and Senior Counselor Stephen Bannon's odious "blueprint" for the country should put that doubt to rest.
Rabbi Shmuley Boteach, a rightwing orthodox Jew and hardline supporter of Israeli policies (who has become Trump’s primary go-to mouthpiece on all things Jewish) visited the White House yesterday for an “Israel Independence Day” celebration. The Twitter-friendly Boteach sought photographs of himself in tandem with every White House personage he could find, including, curiously, the anti-Semitic, white “nationalist" champion Bannon. While the pair made a curious combination for that reason alone, it was the scribbled-on whiteboard in the background of the photograph that was far more interesting:
As the Washington Post notes, this “whiteboard” lists Bannon’s personal policy goals, with an outsize focus on rabidly xenophobic, anti-immigrant policies. “Repeal and Replace Obamacare” is at the top left (another goal Bannon lists is lowering the corporate tax rate to a specific 15%, which Trump actually proposed just last week). The fact that Bannon has the Board so publicly displayed is also indicative of how proud he is to display his goals to the rest of us.
Behind Boteach and Bannon (and, in one photo, Boteach’s wife Debbie) is a handwritten whiteboard list that apparently shows the goals that Bannon is working toward at the White House. Broken out into categories, many are obscured by the people in the foreground. Some have check marks next to them, apparently meant to indicate completion. What’s more, it’s my understanding that this is a subset of the goals publicly presented in Bannon’s office, so we’re looking only at a subset of what Bannon hopes to achieve.
The Post decrypted Bannon’s scribbled list to the extent it was visible and legible, part of which appears below:
Pledges on immigration
Completed
- Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities
- Suspend immigration from terror-prone regions
- Implement new extreme immigration vetting techniques
- Suspend the Syrian refugee program
- Create support program for victims of illegal immigration
- Expand and revitalize the popular 287(g) partnerships
- Issue detainers for all illegal immigrants who are arrested for any crime, and they will be placed into immediate immigration removal proceedings
- End “catch-and-release”
- Hire 5,000 more Border Patrol agents
- Restore the Secure Communities Program
- Triple the number of ICE agents
-
To-do
- Build the border wall and eventually make Mexico pay for it
- Sunset our visa laws so that Congress is forced to periodically revise and revisit them
- Finally complete the biometric entry-exit visa tra …
- Propose passage of Davis-Oliver bill
- Immediately terminate Obama’s “two illegal e …
- … to pass “Kate’s Law”
-
It’s important as well to recognize that for the most part these are the goals that have been prioritized by this Administration for its initial 100 days. In fact, it’s difficult to think of any initiative sought by Trump himself that isn’t on Bannon's personal “to-do list."
So unless we are to believe that Trump himself formulated these goals, it’s fairly clear who has really been running this country from Day One of the “Trump Administration” forward.
It just happens to be someone who nobody voted for.