We’re going to be hearing a lot more about Mike Pompeo’s new book and it’s actually promising to be an interesting sideshow. Trump isn’t going to be happy about it, so it’s not all bad. From the Triad:
Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, is coming out with a memoir to promote his 2024 presidential candidacy. In it, he writes that in early 2020, President Trump tried to quash Pompeo’s criticism of China. Here’s Pompeo’s account, according to an early peek at the book, as reported by Shelby Talcott and David Weigel in Semafor:
Donald Trump told former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo to “shut the hell up for a while” about China at the start of the COVID-19 outbreak in order to avoid angering the country’s leader, according to a memoir that Pompeo will publish next week.
In “Never Give An Inch,” Pompeo recounts a March 26 call between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, one day after the secretary of state said that China had “repeatedly delayed” sharing information about the virus and engaged in a “disinformation campaign.”
According to Pompeo, who listened in to the call, Xi told Trump that his cabinet member was jeopardizing the “phase one” trade deal that the principals had just agreed to. . . . [A] few days later, in the Oval Office, Trump told Pompeo that he was “putting us all at risk” by angering Xi, in part because the United States still needed protective health equipment from China.
This isn’t the first time the trade deal has come up in reporting about Trump, Xi, and COVID. Here’s the rest of the early 2020 sequence, as I previously outlined it in Slate:
John Bolton, Trump’s former national security adviser, directly witnessed Trump asking Xi for help in getting reelected through a trade deal that included Chinese purchases of American crops. Trump signed the deal on Jan. 15. On Feb. 10, three days after his call with Xi, Trump boasted at a campaign rally that the trade deal would “defeat so many of our opponents.” In the early months of the virus crisis, Trump referred constantly to the deal and hailed China as a benefactor.
In the Slate article, I traced Trump’s behavior during those weeks: He adopted Xi’s talking points on COVID, defended Xi’s efforts to suppress bad news about the virus, and tried to copy some of Xi’s suppression tactics in the United States. Pompeo’s story backs up that analysis. Xi threatened the trade deal, and Trump responded by telling Pompeo to shut up.
Later, Trump pretended to be tough on China. He blamed it for the virus and accused Xi of covering up the emerging crisis, when in fact Trump was in on the coverup. Now the GOP is refashioning itself as the anti-China party, with a whole House committee dedicated to confronting Beijing.
Pompeo’s story is a reminder that the GOP’s actual foreign policy—as practiced by Trump for four years, with the complicity of Republicans in Congress—wasn’t about defending freedom or standing up to China. It was about sucking up to China in pursuit of money. To get that money, Trump played down the threat of COVID and silenced U.S. officials who spoke out about the virus and the coverup.
And it wasn’t just China. All over the world, Trump reduced every relationship to money:
He said he wouldn’t defend NATO countries if they didn’t pay more dues.
He portrayed Western Europe as an economic competitor, not an ally.
To protect lucrative arms deals with Saudi Arabia, he refused to accept U.S. intelligence that implicated Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince, in the murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
He agreed to leave troops in Syria only after advisers persuaded him that by doing so he could extract revenue from Syrian oil.
Trump’s focus on money was a huge reason why Vladimir Putin helped Trump win the 2016 election. As the CIA noted in its assessment of that operation, Putin “had many positive experiences working with Western political leaders whose business interests made them more disposed to deal with Russia.”
So let’s not pretend that today’s Republican “leaders” are committed to defending freedom or standing tall against tyrants. Many of them were happy to look the other way when a Republican president abandoned those values. And given the same incentives, they’ll do it again.
Trump isn’t really educated, doesn’t listen to anyone and doesn’t read so he applied his understanding of everything as crude economic determinism and applied it to America’s foreign policy. He often sounded like the boy who didn’t read the book giving a book report when he talked about it.
Recall how he was received by other leaders: