Mike Pompeo seems to think he’s going to be president of the United States. He’s lost a bunch of weight, hired a media training coach and is going around the country giving speeches and interviews. There’s no work on how Trump feels about all this but I can’t imagine that he’s happy about it.
He’s also ostentatiously fluffing Vladimir Putin:
Of all the former secretaries of state under Democratic and Republican presidents, only one is taking to cable news and social media during a moment of peril in Europe to praise Russian President Vladimir Putin and chastise the Biden administration. Mike Pompeo has lauded the Russian strongman over the past month as a “talented,” “savvy,” “capable statesman,” offering his praise during a slew of interviews after his political action committee spent $30,000 on improving his performance in media appearances.
“He is a very talented statesman. He has lots of gifts,” Pompeo told Fox News in January. “He was a KGB agent, for goodness sakes. He knows how to use power. We should respect that.”
[…]
A bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers have traveled to Ukraine in recent weeks to express a unified American voice of support, and are working on legislation that would provide President Joe Biden with new sanctions tools to punish Russia if it further invades the country.
Few other former secretaries of state have weighed in on the crisis, and those that have avoided politics. Condoleeza Rice, former secretary of state under President George W. Bush, called Putin “megalomaniacal” in a CNN interview over the weekend. There have been eight U.S. secretaries of state since Putin took power in 1999, including four under Republican presidents — Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Rex Tillerson and Pompeo — and four under Democratic presidents — Madeleine Albright, Hillary Clinton, John Kerry and the current secretary, Antony Blinken.
To the contrary, Pompeo has targeted Biden as exemplifying “enormous weakness,” leading “an America on its back, an America that apologizes.” He asserts that Biden’s withdrawal from Afghanistan and response to a ransomware hack of the Colonial pipeline last year contributed to Putin’s confidence. Putin is “very shrewd. Very capable,” Pompeo said in another recent interview with the Center for the National Interest. “I have enormous respect for him – I’ve been criticized for saying that.”
In the past, former President Donald Trump’s secretary of state has privately dismissed Ukraine as insignificant in U.S. domestic politics. After an interview with an NPR reporter in 2020, Pompeo, then still secretary, pulled the reporter aside to curse at her for her questions, and demanded she identify Ukraine on an unmarked map. “Do you think Americans care about Ukraine?” he asked her.
What a great diplomat. What an impressive statesman.
Apparently, someone pulled him aside yesterday and said maybe he needed to rethink his strategy:
” On Monday night, after Putin delivered a speech describing Ukraine as a Russian invention, Pompeo did assign blame for the current crisis to the Russians. “Vladimir Putin is the aggressor,” he wrote on Twitter. “The Ukrainians are the victims. We should never shy away from that.”
Big of him to acknowledge that.
No word from Trump on any of this. Which is a relief.