Susan Glasser at the New Yorker also takes a look at the GOP field and her observation about Pompeo is especially tart:
Most, like the former Vice-President, take the route of simply avoiding unpleasant facts from the Trump years that do not fit with the story they want to tell. Which pretty much sums up the state of Republican discourse headed into the 2024 election cycle. At least Pence admits that January 6th happened, and that it was wrong.
In the latest example of the genre, Pompeo’s new memoir, “Never Give an Inch,” published this week, manages more or less to skip the catastrophic ending to the Trump Presidency, aside from offhand references to January 6th as “the mayhem at the Capitol” that “the Left wants to exploit for political advantage.” This is known, in my household, as “pulling a Kayleigh”—a feat of political contortion Peter and I have named in honor of Kayleigh McEnany, the Trump press secretary who managed to publish an entire 2021 memoir, “For Such a Time as This: My Faith Journey Through the White House and Beyond,” that never so much as mentions the insurrection at the Capitol. (In testimony to the House select committee investigating January 6th, the former White House official Sarah Matthews, McEnany’s deputy, said that McEnany was among several White House officials who urged Trump to call his supporters off their violent rampage but that Trump resisted the idea of including any mention of the word “peace.”)
Even more than McEnany, Pompeo was an internal skeptic of Trump’s campaign to overturn the 2020 results and deeply concerned about the former President’s volatile post-election behavior. According to reporting for our book, Pompeo rushed to the home of the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Mark Milley, when Trump fired Pompeo’s former West Point classmate, Mark Esper, as his Secretary of Defense after the election and warned that “the crazies” were in charge in the White House and the Pentagon. They also initiated regular 8 a.m. “land the plane” phone calls with Milley and White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, hoping to get the country to a peaceful transition to the Biden Presidency. And he privately made it clear that he was opposed to Trump’s “rigged election” campaign. “He was totally against it,” a senior State Department official told us.
Pompeo’s memoir mentions none of this, which perhaps should not be a surprise from an official who a Trump adviser once told me was among the most slavish suckups in a White House full of suckups or, as a former Ambassador put it, “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.” Others emerged from the Trump Administration claiming to have always been worried about his erratic behavior and to have tried to protect the country from it; Pompeo stands out as one who had some of the right instincts behind the scenes but now finds it untenable to publicly admit.
Most of the attention to the Pompeo book so far has, understandably, been focussed on his reprehensible criticism of the late Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi dissident and Washington Post columnist murdered on the apparent orders of the Saudi crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman. “He didn’t deserve to die,” Pompeo writes, “but we need to be clear about who he was,” lecturing the media that Khashoggi was not really a journalist but more of an activist. It’s hard to imagine any professional editor—or any advance reader who actually liked Pompeo—agreeing to print such a sentence.
Throughout the book, Pompeo presents himself as a tough-minded realist who relished being the instrument of Trump’s fights, whether with the liberal media or the “evil” leftists at the State Department. Whatever you think of Pompeo’s politics, one inescapable conclusion from his score-settling book is that he was quite possibly the least diplomatic person ever appointed to be America’s chief diplomat.
Reading the book was also a reminder to me of yet another reason that Trump may again benefit from this group of former officials who have not had the chutzpah to challenge him: their blinding hatred of one another. Pompeo, while taking much care to avoid offending the former President by admitting publicly all the ways he disagreed with him privately, drips with disdain for many of his former colleagues. Haley was a quitter, he writes, and she and Bolton were “NOT TEAM PLAYERS.” Pompeo also quotes Trump as calling Bolton a “scumbag loser” and accuses him of “treason” for publishing his own score-settling 2020 memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”
Trump loved this sort of gladiatorial battling among his advisers. It was how he ran his business for decades, how he ran his White House, and what he would do again if given another four years in power. Trump and his imitators, like Pompeo, hurl insults because they think that it makes them look strong. But the truth is that it makes them look very, very small. The image that I am left with from Pompeo’s vicious, misleading memoir is of a wannabe tough guy, one who envisions himself a possible President of the United States while admitting to the nickname that Donald Trump gave him: “My Mike.” These self-styled strongmen are so remarkably weak.
The competition for asshole of the century is going to be something else …