Shmuley’s selfie shows Bannon’s wall of promises
The man who calls himself “America’s Rabbi” revealed the agenda of America’s most powerful nationalist in a photo op with Stephen Bannon.
Shmuley Boteach, a Jewish Standard columnist, author, speaker, and adviser to several celebrities, living and dead, tweeted a photo of himself with Bannon, President Donald Trump’s chief strategist, on Tuesday.
It was not the first time that Boteach, who ran for Congress as a Republican in 2012, has posted a photo with Bannon. The strategist — the former executive chairman of Breitbart News, the far-right news site — is the driving force behind the immigration policies that triggered nationwide protest.
Bannon, who leads the so-called nationalist bloc of Trump advisers, famously has an itemized agenda of goals handwritten on a whiteboard in his office. And because that whiteboard was the backdrop for Boteach’s photo, it is now (partially) the world’s to see.
Bannon’s list of immigration goals, we now can see, has a few items checked off, while others remain unfulfilled. On the checked-off list are goals like “Hire 5,000 more border patrol agents,” which Trump called for in a February executive order but has not been implemented, and “Restore the Secure Communities Program,” which was restored in a January executive order.
One item appears to undermine claims that the Justice Department has made in court. “Cancel all federal funding to sanctuary cities” repeats a Trump campaign pledge, but in court filings the administration insisted that it only wanted to stop certain discretionary grants. Even before the whiteboard was made public, however, the federal court was not convinced, and it has stayed the executive order.
Also on Bannon’s list? The words “Iran deal” and “Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.” These presumably refer to Trump’s pledges to move the U.S. Embassy in Israel to Jerusalem and to scrap or renegotiate the 2015 agreement on Iran’s nuclear program. Neither has happened.
JTA Wire Service
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