Whoever it was that put it in Trump’s head to invite the Taliban to come to Camp David for a secret meeting around the same time as the anniversary of the September 11, 2001 attacks needs to be fired.  Oh, wait… it was probably Trump himself.

But never mind.  Trump called the whole thing off, firing off a series of tweets that both revealed this mind-spinning idea and then put the kibosh on it because the Taliban did what the Taliban does: blow up cars and kill people.

Digby:

The fact that the president tweeting out a temper tantrum about a supposed secret meeting with the Taliban at Camp David that was scheduled for the next day being canceled isn’t even considered weird is astonishing enough. That he thought this would be a good idea in the first place is simply gobsmacking. Presumably, he wanted to have the Taliban leaders around for the 9/11 commemorations so he could do some sort of Kim Jong Un photo-op and declare the Taliban a lovely group of guys who are looking to build some condos in Kabul.

Unfortunately for him, they don’t seem to understand the way to Trump’s heart is to kiss his ass first and save the violence for later when he will defend them in order to save face.

It also occurs to me that someone — certainly not Trump himself — remembered that Jimmy Carter negotiated a peace agreement between Anwar Sadat of Egypt and Menachem Begin of Israel at Camp David in 1978, and Bill Clinton did the same with the PLO and Israel in 2000.  It was great optics for the presidents and there were Nobel Peace Prizes in play.  So someone must have put a bug in Trump’s ear that if he was able to work out some kind of deal with the Taliban, he’d be hailed as a peacemaker and have a lock on the Nobel.  (Trump’s interest in making the trip to Stockholm is based solely on his obsession with Barack Obama and his winning the prize in 2009.)

The fact that the high-profile meetings that Trump has had with our foreign adversaries such as Russia, China and North Korea have all blown up like a wet firecracker and that Putin, Xi, and Kim have played Trump like a five-dollar fiddle doesn’t mean anything to Trump.  He wants the optics and the BREAKING NEWS banners on cable so he can call into Fox and Friends and bloviate about what a Dear Leader he is.  That’s all that matters to him, and he knows the base will eat it up.