Trump ignores his advisors. Again. Wants photo-op with Taliban at Camp David
- On This Day In The Trump Administration
- Sep 8, 2024
- 2 min read
September 8: On This Day In 2019
The optics would have been horrendous. Trump wanted to host a meeting with top Taliban leaders…at Camp David…on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11. His aides told Trump not to do it, but he was “taken with the idea of sealing a landmark peace agreement in one of the most presidential settings,” CNN reported.
Marc Thiessen*, of the WaPo, is probably Trump’s biggest apologist at any of America’s major newspapers (other than the WSJ). Even he wrote: “Trump’s Taliban invite is one of the most shameful moments of his presidency: Imagine if…President Barack Obama had … invited Islamic State leaders to Camp David to sign an agreement cementing his withdrawal plan.”
Thiessen continued: “Even (Obama) was not dumb enough to seek a photo op with terrorists. Yet this is precisely what President Trump tried to do when he initially invited the Taliban to Camp David…”
Nevertheless, Trump forged ahead…until yet another Taliban car bomb killed yet another U.S. solider. Even Trump finally saw how inappropriate his scheme would be. So he canceled his summit at the last minute via tweet OTDI 2019.
That episode—which contributed to the disastrous U.S. withdrawal from Kabul years later—was one of dozens of times the amateurish Trump overruled his experienced advisors, and one of many times his choices later backfired.
A partial list of Trump's stupid choices for which he ignored his advisors includes:
Congratulating Russia’s Vladimir Putin on his re-election (let alone meeting with him so often in secrecy)
Abandoning America’s Kurdish allies in northern Syria
Announcing a troop withdrawal from Afghanistan and Syria
Pulling out of the Iran nuclear deal
Pardoning service members alleged to have committed war crimes
Meeting with (and saluting the generals of) North Korea’s Kim Jong Un
Raising tariffs against China and allies
This pattern culminated, of course, in 2020. That was the year he ignored endless streams of advice to take Covid seriously. It was also the year he refused to listen when told he had lost the election and instead seems to have staged a coup.
Dive Deeper
* Thiessen was a colleague of Roger Stone and Paul Manafort. Their consulting firm worked for some of the world’s more unsavory clients, such as Ferdinand Marcos, Mobutu Sese Seko, The Tobacco Institute, and…Donald J. Trump.
Thiessen’s evaluation
The BBC has the details about Trump’s aborted Camp David meeting with the Taliban leaders
Check out CNN’s reporting on Trump overruling his advisors
The New York Times wrote about Trump casting aside advisors who disagreed with him
On This Day In The Trump Administration: Trump ignores advisors again; wants Taliban meeting at Camp David