In politics as in sports, it's probably best not to tell the other side what you plan to do.
White House Senior Advisor Steve Bannon keeps a somewhat infamous whiteboard of his master plans in his office. In an age of constant hacking, writing your plans on an erasable whiteboard doesn't seem so crazy, but all that goes to hell if you or someone else takes a picture of that whiteboard and sends it to the masses on the web.
A man by the name of Rabbi Shmuley Boteach visited the White House on Tuesday in honor of Israel's Independence Day. A quick look at his Twitter feed will tell you he mostly spent the day taking photos with politicians and other folks associated with 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. One of those folks was Bannon, and those photos took place in the senior advisor's office, in front of that whiteboard.
The heads and shoulders of the people pictured obscure a good chunk of the board, but it's easy enough to zoom in and see what weighs most on Bannon's mind.
Viewers can, for example, see a bullet point that reads, "Build the Border Wall and eventually make Mexico..."
We're assuming the end of that sentence is "pay for it," but hey, maybe it says "become our best friend."
The good news for Bannon: Most of what's visible on the white board is stuff we already know he wants to do. The board mentions suspending the Syrian Refugee Program, scrapping federal funding for sanctuary cities, beefing up the number of border patrol and Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, and several other plans that would dramatically alter the immigration policies of the Untied States.
This, by the way, has happened before. A couple weeks after the U.S. elected Trump, the then-president-elect met with Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach, who shares many of Bannon's and Trump's views on immigration. In a photo taken of Trump and Kobach, Kobach is holding a slip of paper that includes immigration plans such as restarting a de-facto Muslim registry.
For a team so supposedly interested in security, they've not exactly kept a lock on their plans.
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