Think America cannot get more divided than under Donald Trump? Think again. The leading contenders to take the Republican nomination include Mike Pompeo, the diehard Trump loyalist.
What would America look like if a Republican won the election in 2024? And it wasn't Trump? Leading Republican contenders to take up the former president's mantle are strongly pro-life, against gay marriage, apocalyptic in their belief in an existential battle with China and in no mood to compromise on anything. Nobody moderate has a prayer.
Among them is Mike Pompeo, one of just five cabinet-level appointees who managed to strap themselves in for the entire rollercoaster Trump presidency. Like fellow pretenders to the world's most powerful job Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor, and Mike Pence, the former vice-president, Pompeo's political views are underpinned by a deeply felt Christian faith and range from robust to downright alarming to American liberals.
His CV is impeccable: after graduating from the West Point military academy and pursuing a career as a tank commander, he's been a businessman, congressman, America's top spy and its top diplomat.
He has also managed the difficult trick for a senior American conservative of respecting the 2020 election result – in the end – while staying on Trump's good side.
Well, perhaps until now. The 58-year-old is making it plain that he is prepared to take on his old boss in the battle for the next Republican nomination.
This is a risky position to take in MAGA (Make America Great Again) world, where loyalty to Trump is valued above all else. The 76-year-old former president expects all acolytes to leave the field clear for him. "If I ran, I can't imagine they'd want to run. Some out of loyalty would have had a hard time running," said Trump recently, when the names of Pompeo, Pence and DeSantis were put to him. "I think that most of those people, and almost every name you mentioned, is there because of me."
Don Jr, Trump's eldest son, joined the public pressurising, saying Pompeo "is a smart enough guy to probably know he shouldn't or wouldn't run against Donald Trump".
But the warning shots suggest growing nervousness in the Trump camp. Upsetting the former president carries the risk of excommunication and being counted out of the reckoning for running mate, for which Pence's act of disloyalty in certifying the 2020 election result has created a vacancy. However, as the revelations mount of Trump's machinations to overturn his defeat and stoke the invasion of the US Capitol on January 6 last year, most of the Republican contenders for 2024 appear to be calculating that it is better to run on their own terms than as the wingman of a doomed Trump campaign.
Pompeo is clearly testing the water for his own presidential run. He attracted attention when he re-emerged into the spotlight by exhibiting Nigel Lawson-style weight loss, put by Pompeo himself at more than 6st over 6 months. "I stopped eating carbs to a large extent, and I tried to eat smaller portions," he told Fox News, adding that he works out most days in a home gym. (Some observers were more than a little sceptical that surgical or other drastic measures were not involved.)
Slimmed-down Pompeo has been popping up at Republican events in the early primary states of Iowa and New Hampshire and he launched a digital advert in South Carolina defending religious freedom, a favourite topic. Like all wannabe US presidents he has written a book, due out in November, full of reflections and observations, but perhaps not about his weight loss regime, called Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love.
However, it is one thing to keep yourself in front of the public and donors in case Trump decides to call it a day, and quite another to go up against him. When I ask him whether he would continue with his presidential adventure if Trump does confirm he will seek a second term, Pompeo says his decision does not depend on the former president.
"Oh, goodness, we'll make that decision after November, sometime this year," he replies, on a recent UK visit that included an appearance at the Policy Exchange think tank.
"I say 'we', Susan [his wife of 22 years] and me, we'll make this decision wholly independent of who else decides to get in the race or who doesn't. And if we conclude it's the right place for us to be and we think that this is the right time for us to go serve, we'll go at it and we'll go make the case as best we can. And then we'll see what the good people of Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina think."
At this point it is important to point out that name-checking Susan, his second wife, is not simply a husbandly pleasantry for Pompeo. Kansas native Susan, 57, whose Secret Service code name is "Shocker" after the athletic teams at Wichita State University, where she was homecoming queen, is said to be more ambitious for Mike Pompeo than Mike Pompeo himself, and was the driving force behind his initial campaign for Congress in 2010.
Pompeo met her while negotiating a business loan from the bank where she worked. After they married in 2000, Pompeo jokingly once said, "It's true: she took my money. Twice." He adopted Susan's son, Nick, from her previous marriage. Susan's close interest in her husband's career controversially extended to an office at Langley, the CIA's Virginia HQ, on the seventh floor where Pompeo had his director's suite. She also drew criticism for asking State Department staff to fetch dry cleaning, make restaurant reservations and walk the family's two dogs. Susan once told a journalist, "We decided we would do this together. We set out to do this like we would do any venture. I loved the campaigning part of it, much more than Mike did."
Pompeo was born in Orange, California, and inherited his surname from great-grandparents who had emigrated from Abruzzo in Italy. In 1986, he graduated first in his class of 973 junior officers at West Point having spent his senior year as a commander in charge of 120 other cadets. Alongside his scholarly achievement, he received the General Robert E Wood award for distinguished cadet and the General Winfield S Scott Memorial Award for highest achievement in engineering management, his field of study. It was also here that Pompeo joined a Bible study group and became a devoted Christian.
In a speech to a "God and Country Rally" at Summit Church in Wichita, Kansas, in 2015, shortly after a US Supreme Court ruling backed the right to gay marriage, which he opposes, Pompeo vowed to "continue to fight these battles. It is a never-ending struggle ... until the Rapture". It was a rare glimpse into his deepest beliefs, a reference to an evangelical theory that living and resurrected believers will "be caught up together in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air" at the end of the world.
In 2019, on a visit to Jerusalem while US secretary of state, he was asked by the Christian Broadcasting Network whether Trump had been "raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?" Pompeo replied, "As a Christian, I certainly believe that's possible … I am confident that the Lord is at work here."
Pompeo served five years in the 7th Cavalry Regiment, including a deployment in Germany during the closing years of the Cold War. He was a tank commander at US Army Garrison Bavaria, one of America's largest overseas bases, where he became aware of the Iron Curtain dividing Europe and gained insights into Nato. He believes, like the former president, that Europeans should pay more towards military defence, but would never emulate Trump in calling the alliance "obsolete".
Asked whether he wants America to pull back from Nato, or would threaten to leave as Trump did at a bad-tempered meeting in Brussels in July 2018, Pompeo says, "No, I don't think so at all. Our presence, alone, is important. So we should continue to be part of this important coalition that has been the most effective deterrent in modern times. We should definitely be there. But I do hope our continued presence doesn't provide the backstop that causes others to think that they need not put their own kids in harm's way."
After leaving the army, Pompeo earned a degree from Harvard Law School. He moved to Wichita in Kansas, which has become his home state, to run an aerospace company. It was partly funded by Koch Industries, the Kansas-based conglomerate active in lobbying against environmental and other government regulations that was later the largest donor to Pompeo's congressional campaigns. First elected as a fiscally conservative "Tea Party" Republican, he came to Trump's attention in 2015 during the congressional inquiry into the killing of four Americans in Benghazi, including the ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens. Pompeo stood out during the evidence session with Hillary Clinton for his aggressive questioning of the secretary of state.
This, along with a fervent opposition to the international Iran nuclear deal championed by President Obama, helped Pompeo get the nod as Trump's first director of the CIA. Pompeo seized the chance to deliver the president's daily security brief in person and became one of the most skilled Trump-whisperers in the administration. When Trump ran out of patience with his first secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, in March 2018, he turned to his CIA director, saying: "With Mike Pompeo, we have a very similar thought process. I think it's going to go very well."
Trump pulled the US out of the Iran deal and met North Korean leader Kim Jong-un for the first time in Singapore. Pompeo's first mission for Trump was clandestine trips to Pyongyang in April and May, the first before he was even confirmed at State, to set up the historic talks, meeting Kim on both occasions.
His baptism of fire continued in July with Trump's Helsinki summit with President Putin, when Pompeo failed to convince the president that he should accompany him for the main face-to-face talks. It ended in disaster when Trump sided with Putin against his own security services in a calamitous press conference, but Pompeo maintained public loyalty to his mercurial boss. He was rewarded in August 2020 with the Abraham Accords that saw key Arab nations including the UAE, Sudan and Morocco recognise Israel. The security and strength of Israel is central to Pompeo, some say because of its role in evangelical end-times belief, but certainly because of its importance in opposing Iran.
Pompeo stuck very publicly by Trump in the early days after the media declared Biden the 2020 winner, when the results finally became clear in the key swing state of Pennsylvania on November 7, a Saturday. The following Tuesday he was asked at a State Department briefing if officials were preparing to talk to the Biden transition team and whether delays could put at risk a "smooth transition" of power.
Pompeo cast his eyes down and drew a weary breath, then looked up and answered, "There will be a smooth transition to a second Trump administration." At which point he cracked a smile, although it was not clear whether this was intended to signal a joke. In any case, it was widely taken as an indication that cabinet loyalists were backing Trump's resistance to the will of the people. Pompeo went on, "We're ready. The world is watching what's taking place. We're gonna count all the votes … There's a process, the constitution lays it out pretty clearly."
What we now know about the dynamics of Trump's fraught final days suggests that Pompeo was a prominent cabinet secretary with future presidential ambitions attempting a highwire act. He could not afford to fall out with Trump, who he knew was determined to fight for his presidency at least until January 6, yet he was already trying to avoid the maniacal frenzy over non-existent fraud taking hold in the White House.
Asked now whether he accepts Biden won the election, Pompeo avoids endorsement of the 2020 process but nevertheless puts himself at odds with Trump. "It was appropriate to litigate it as the president did. The vice-president then ultimately made the right decision to certify the election." It is another unmistakable sign. In MAGA eyes, backing Pence is not just heretical, it is tantamount to apostasy.
Pompeo quickly goes on to present a solidly Republican case for electoral reform without going down too many MAGA rabbit holes, adding, "I am worried we have lost the place where people are confident in the outcome of our elections. We had, you know, laws change – lots of absentee ballots. There are many things that cause people to have concerns and doubt about the transparency of the election. We still don't have voter ID – people are showing up and voting and we don't know exactly who they are in every case ... When you lose confidence in your elections, republics can fall."
What would a Pompeo presidency look like? Top of his foreign policy agenda would be China, about which he has consistently sounded alarm bells. "China has been at war with the United States for 25 years, mostly fought by commerce," he says. "It is pretty plain to me. When you step back and stare at the predation that has taken place across the world, certainly inside the United States, but in smaller countries in Africa … And then you see what's happening in the bigger markets where we have become so deeply dependent on them. And they have used that as an economic tool to achieve their ends across the world. It looks and feels very much like what we would have traditionally called war or conflict."
He says that the West must demand much more reciprocity from China, the same access for our companies, diplomats, students and journalists that we allow theirs.
Does he think a military war can be avoided? "It all depends on our response. We can't avoid it, if we continue to let them exercise their aggression. The Chinese, much like the Russians, understand one single thing – and that is power applied over time, with a level of consistency that they in fact use all across their tools, whether that's cyber, economics, political, diplomatic, actual military efforts … We have an obligation to confront them in every theatre of action that I just described."
Pompeo says he would also be much more aggressive in his approach to Russia and support for Ukraine. "If you believe that it matters, then it requires much more efforting than has been demonstrated so far," he says, using that American habit of making new verbs out of nouns.
"Think about this: the rouble is as high as it was the day that the current conflict began at the end of February. I had a friend come back from Moscow not too long ago and all was well there. I know sanctions take time, but they haven't begun to [make] a serious effort to impose real costs on Putin's economy and on the folks who are benefiting from that economy. I say the same thing with the military support for the warriors that are fighting in Ukraine – we have been slow and small and late because of this implicit fear of escalation."
As to fears of nuclear war, "There was a risk of that two years ago and five years ago, right, and [will be] five years from now. But if you look how escalatory he [Putin] has been already, it wasn't because he was threatened by Nato. There was no chance that there was a serious worry that Nato was going to invade western Russia, zero probability … We ought not to allow him to drive how we think about helping the Ukrainians."
Americans can expect sharp confrontation with China and Russia during a Pompeo presidency, it seems. While at home he regards the US Supreme Court ruling to overturn the constitutional right to abortion as welcome, it's nevertheless unfinished business.
"It should definitely be the people that decide. So legislators should absolutely sort this out," he says. "The court got the constitutional piece of this right. I pray states will make good decisions about protecting the unborn in a way that I know to be both consistent with science and my faith."
In an article for the American Center for Law and Justice, a conservative Christian-based think tank, Pompeo confirms that his long-term goal is a complete US ban on abortion. He writes, "I have been fighting for life my entire political career. I believe, without doubt, that life begins at conception and is sacred … While we would like to see abortion illegal nationwide, that likely won't happen in the near term. Instead, we should take a two-pronged approach: 1) restrict abortion as much as possible in each state, and 2) work to create a society that makes abortion obsolete." This would be achieved by resources for adoption and fostering.
Asked now if it is his belief that there should be no exceptions for rape and incest, he says, "Yes, it is. It's the case that every one of these is a child." Pompeo seems to play on Biden's own oft-repeated phrase, that he ran for president to "restore the soul of the nation" and restore a sense of normality after the chaotic Trump years, with a twist of his own: "The overturning of Roe [v Wade] need not induce national strife; rather, it can herald the rebuilding of our nation's soul, which rests on faith, family, fellowship and children. It falls to us now to accomplish this work."
These are not normal times in America, with an uneasy atmosphere gripping the nation over heightened levels of violence and polarisation in society. There is uncertainty over the intentions of Trump, who continues to dominate Republican politics but is consumed with grievances and score-settling over his election defeat. Pompeo offers an alternative if Republicans want to move on or Trump decides not to run again – but his brand of uncompromising conservatism may prove just as divisive as the former president's demagoguery.
Written by: David Charter
© The Times of London