Former president Donald Trump nixed plans to host Taliban officials at Camp David for talks on withdrawing US forces from Afghanistan after one of his advisers questioned whether his daughter and adviser Ivanka Trump would need to wear the head-to-toe garment which women under Taliban rule must don before leaving their homes.
The question of whether Ms Trump would be forced to wear a burqa to meet with the Taliban was posed sarcastically to the then-president by intelligence briefer Beth Sanner, according to a new book by New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman.
In Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America, Ms Haberman writes that Mr Trump became enamoured of bringing Taliban negotiators to Camp David to host a signing ceremony for an agreement that would see US forces withdraw from a decades-long war in Afghanistan.
The agreement, which was ultimately scrapped and replaced by another that was later implemented by the Biden administration, was negotiated largely by Mr Trump’s Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo, over the objections of other Trump advisers. But the then-president wanted to use Camp David for the signing ceremony because of the historic relevance of the venue.
Ms Haberman recalls that Mr Trump “did not seem concerned that his would-be guests had given harbor to the mastermind of a terrorist assault on United States soil that killed more than three thousand people, including a strike on the Pentagon, or about the fact that the proposed September date fell around the anniversary of the attacks”.
But she adds that Mr Trump reacted more to Ms Sanner’s criticism than any other adviser.
“’Is Ivanka going to wear a burka?’ she asked sarcastically,” Ms Haberman wrote.
She added that Mr Trump’s advisers were “horrified” by how seriously he took her query.
