Donald Trump just blew up his own Camp David Taliban story
When Donald Trump announced over the weekend that he’d secretly invited Taliban leaders to visit Camp David, and that his plan had resulted in the Taliban attacking the U.S. military and killing a U.S. soldier, it left us with several questions. One of them was this: if Trump was admitting to a version of events this awful, how much worse was the real story?
Things got uglier when someone leaked to CNN today that Mike Pence had opposed Donald Trump’s Camp David plan. This leaker’s name surely rhymed with “Pike Mence,” in the hope of making sure he didn’t take the blame for Trump’s debacle. This morning Palmer Report explained why there was good reason to believe that no such meeting was going to happen anyway, or even could have happened. Now Trump has more or less confirmed this, in unwitting fashion.
After Trump took to Twitter to deny the report that Mike Pence had opposed his Camp David Taliban meeting, Trump then posted this: “We have been serving as policemen in Afghanistan, and that was not meant to be the job of our Great Soldiers, the finest on earth. Over the last four days, we have been hitting our Enemy harder than at any time in the last ten years!”
Wait a minute here. If Trump was all set to host the Taliban at Camp David on Sunday, and he didn’t pull the plug until Saturday, why has he been hitting the Taliban hard for the past four days? That doesn’t even make sense. Trump just blew up his own timeline, demonstrating that this meeting was never going to happen in the manner that he’s claiming.
Bill Palmer is the publisher of the political news outlet Palmer Report