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The Political Scene | The New Yorker
Mike Pompeo’s Circuitous Journey to Trump’s Cabinet
00:21:16
Mike Pompeo’s Circuitous Journey to Trump’s Cabinet
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:16]
B
This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and guests about politics. It's Thursday, August 22nd. I'm Eric Latch, writer and editor of the New Yorker's online news column, the current filling in for Dorothy Wickenden. Mike Pompeo is the last surviving member of President Trump's original national security team. Serving first as CIA director and then as secretary of state, Pompeo has gained the president's trust, along with a reputation as an unfailing Trump supporter. In an administration where scandals erupt daily, where people are fired by tweet, and where the generals have come and gone, Pompeo remains. This wasn't an outcome you would have predicted back in the 2016 presidential primaries when Pompeo, a supporter of Marco Rubio's candidacy, was an outspoken critic of Donald Trump. That march, on the day of the Kansas caucus, Pompeo delivered a speech to the members of his state's Republican Party. You know, Donald Trump the other day said that if he tells a soldier to commit a war crime, the soldier will just go do it, he said. They'll do as I tell them to do. We've spent seven and a half years with an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution. We don't need four more years of that. Susan Glasser joins me to discuss how Mike Pompeo became the top diplomat of Donald Trump's administration and how his transformation from critic to supporter of the president mirrors the larger story of the Republican Party in the Trump era. Susan, welcome.
- [02:46]
C
Thank you so much for having me.
- [02:48]
B
So you published an article this week in the New Yorker about Pompeo, and I want to get to what you discovered about the long arc of his career. But I want to start with an observation you make towards the end of the piece you write. In the end, Pompeo may be remembered as the most conservative, ideologically driven secretary of state ever to serve. What brought you to that conclusion?
- [03:11]
C
Well, look, this is, I think, in many ways a story about someone who never would have been secretary of state in any other administration. Pompeo, in less than a decade, essentially went from obscure Tea Party congressman to secretary of state with very little to no international experience, no large scale executive experience, and even a very, very short career in public life and politics. He was never so much as the chairman of a subcommittee in his short time on Capitol Hill. And so ideology and the combative politics of Capitol Hill in that period of time were really all that defined him in public life. And I think he's brought that to the State Department in a way that's very unusual.
- [03:58]
B
So, yeah, let's talk about that progression. As you start digging into Pompeo's biography, what are you expecting to find and what do you actually find? What's surprising you?
- [04:09]
C
Well, I really was surprised by many of the things I found, and in a way, it helped me to answer that first question I started out with, which was how does somebody flip flop so dramatically on an issue of seeming principle like Donald Trump? And in many ways, what I found was a biography of somebody who has reinvented himself and made stark pivots and shifts multiple times in his life already. And so perhaps that's one reason why he was comfortable making this kind of a sharp turn. His most dramatic metamorphosis is from Southern California Orange county boy with a liberal father to heartland evangelical in his political career. And I found that it was really hard to pin down the actual biography and resume and dates of Mike Pompeo's life in a way that made it clear, as I did more reporting, that that was consciously done on his part, that he wants to own and construct the narrative of his life rather than it just being well documented and out there as with so many of his predecessors.
- [05:14]
B
And so let's talk one specific segment of the story which you pay particular attention to, which is his time in the private sector running a company called Thayer Aerospace. And then what the story about that became sort of how he used that story in his transition to becoming a politician.
- [05:31]
C
Well, thank you for asking about that. One thing that is interesting and perhaps not surprising is how much attention is just focused on his sort of flip flopping from very anti Trump to pro Trump. To me, the heart of the piece in many ways is this short lived and not super successful business career of Mike Pompeo, who'd been a success early in life. Right. He was not only got to West Point, but he was number one in his class, an enormous achievement. He got to Harvard Law School and then he blew up his life in the late 1990s. Again fascinating for somebody on the fast track to the establishment. He got divorced, he left his blue chip law firm and he went to Kansas to start this company with three of his best friends.
- [06:16]
B
Do we know what it was that precipitated that decision?
- [06:19]
C
Well, that's the interesting question, isn't it? And that crisis period in his life, I think is one of the most important moments. He's never spoken publicly about it in a compelling way. As you and I both know, it's very unusual to abandon a promising legal career after working so hard to go to Harvard Law School after two years. He was only an associate at this law firm for two years generally. Right. The simplest explanations for things are the best explanations for things. He got divorced from his wife, his mother. She passed away at a young age in 1996 from cancer. So all these things are happening in his life at the same time. Is that a full scale explanation from him? No, it's not. But not only did things not seem to be working out in his life, but. But then he makes this risky move to start a company. And what I found out in reporting is that that didn't work out either. And he's gone to great lengths in many ways to cover that up, including lying to reporters and misrepresenting what happened over the next nine years as he started this company, Thera Aerospace. The Koch brothers are key actors in this story and not just because of their later political contributions to Mike Pompeii, which we knew about, but actually they were crucial to getting this business going. They're the big powers that be in Wichita. Their venture capital fund made essentially A key early investment in this firm in 1998. How did he meet the Kochs? What was the promise of this company? We don't really know. He's never addressed that. He's never been asked to address that. By 2003, they held a 20% stake in this company. By the time Mike Pompeo ran for Congress just a few years later, he was telling the Washington Post that they only had made 2% of the investment. Very misleading. The Koch's key officers from their venture capital fund had board seats. They were involved in the management of Thayer. Mike Pompeo calls himself a small businessman in Kansas. Why does he say that? Because the company didn't do well in the end. It was sold. He was, it appears, forced out in 2006, and then the company was sold in 2007 to a secretive private equity firm. I found out that specialized essentially in over leveraged and failing companies.
- [08:41]
B
So Pompeo seems to just leave this story behind. He makes connections in the political world of Wichita, Kansas, but the actual record of him running the company, he just discards it as he transitions to becoming a politician. And as I was reading your piece, I was thinking about another congressman, John Ratcliffe of Texas, who earlier this summer was briefly under consideration to become Trump's Director of National Intelligence and then withdrew in part because of reports that came out that he had exaggerated the record of his terrorism prosecutions during his time as U.S. attorney in Texas. And I guess the question I have for you is just, does it surprise you that people run for Congress and are able to run for Congress on puffed up records or records that kind of obscure? The story is that you know what's going on, what's going on here, that this stuff isn't getting caught until these guys are either in the highest levels of power or at the doorstep of the highest levels of power.
- [09:33]
C
Actually, that was what was breathtaking to me. I almost didn't even look into this part about the Kochs and their funding of his business. Why? Because I read that 2011 Washington Post article in which Pompeo and his aides claimed that they had only provided 2% of the funding. And beyond that, the Wichita Eagle, his local paper, never did any serious reporting on Pompeo in his six years in office as they their local congressman. He actually ran campaign ads in later years telling the people of Wichita that he was running for Congress because his businesses were a remarkable success. So it's, I think, a story about the failure of local journalism, and it's also the story very Much, of course, about the Trump administration. President Trump doesn't have this cadre of loyal Republicans who have worked with him for years, who are really pro Trump, especially when it comes to foreign policy and national security. The Republican establishment is deeply skeptical, skeptical of President Trump and continues to be a relative outpost of opposition at a time when the rest of the party has fallen in line with him. So he was dealing with a reduced pool of people, and he was appointing these people without any of the normal process and organization. The vetting was absent completely. In the case of Mike Pompeo, he apparently was appointed CIA director without ever filling out a vetting questionnaire, according to Devin Nunez.
- [10:58]
B
I want to read from your piece the way that you describe how Pompeo ends up in the CIA job. This is what you wrote the weekend after the election, 2016 election, Pompeo called a Kansas Republican who had worked for Trump and told them that he hoped to become either CIA director or Secretary of the Army. The two decided that he should work his ties to Mike Pence and to a West Point classmate, David Urban, who had run Trump's campaign in Pennsylvania. Urban was also hearing from Steve Bannon, Trump's ultra nationalist chief strategist, who called Urban to suggest that he urge, quote, the old man to name Pompeo to the CIA post. Urban did so is that really how it works? You call a guy, that guy calls a guy, and then your CIA director.
- [11:41]
C
It's only how it works in the Trump administration. There's really no other stories like this in previous recent White Houses that I'm familiar with. Again, it speaks to the. You cannot overstate the level of kind of chaos, disorganization and impulsivity that certainly were governing the Trump world in the immediate aftermath of that upset election victory.
- [12:08]
B
Let's just back up for a second to try to think about how Pompeo ends up here. There's two episodes from Pompeo's six years in the House that I think at least give a hint that there are ways that he and Trump will kind of end up syncing up, which is one is the Benghazi hearings and. And the other is Pompeo's opposition to the Iran nuclear deal. Those are places where he and Trump end up overlapping. Even if Pompeo, for a time is a holdout because of Trump's America first and kind of ally alienating approach to foreign policy.
- [12:40]
C
Yeah, absolutely. I do believe that without Benghazi and his opposition to the Iran deal, that Mike Pompeo would never be Secretary of State today. And in fact, Benghazi is. Is really, for me, at least, the only way I had really heard of Mike Pompeo before 2016. He was the most vehement promoter of the Benghazi conspiracy theories involving Hillary Clinton. And in fact, when they finally had the Select Committee, even the Republican leadership joined with Democrats in issuing a final report that cleared Hillary Clinton. There were only two Republican holdouts, two dissenters. That was Mike Pompeo and Jim Jordan of Ohio, and they issued their own dissenting report that essentially said that it was a conspiracy, that Hillary Clinton knew that this was a terrorist attack and covered it up specifically because of the 2012 presidential election. This is a discredited theory, but it's one that gave him endless hours of airtime in congressional hearings and on Fox News and on other outlets. And the other thing is the Iran nuclear deal. Pompeo joined forces with Tom Cotton, the Republican senator from Arkansas, and the two of them launched a real campaign against the Iran nuclear deal and against the very idea of talking with the Iranians, which they essentially deemed appeasement. And so you're right that that's where he has common cause with Trump. In fact, he's been an Iran hawk far longer than he's been a Trump supporter. However, we see now that Trump sees the goal of some of his diplomacy as creating the space for some grand deal that only he can negotiate, whether it's with the North Koreans or with the Iranians. I'm not sure that Mike Pompeo really shares that goal.
- [14:36]
B
And there are vast areas where Pompeo used to hold views that seem to be totally running in contrast or in conflict with the views that Trump expresses? How has Pompeo managed to both do well in an administration with a boss who is skeptical of people who don't share his views, and two, able to do his job or approach his job, given that the mandate is not one that he seems to have believed in before this.
- [15:07]
C
First of all, Pompeo, like many other Republican, more establishment types that I know in the foreign policy world, a lot of their defense of Trump's foreign policy essentially rests on the thin foundation of ignoring what the President himself says. In the first year of the administration, we often heard from people like this, well, just ignore the tweets. Of course, that's become much harder, and you don't hear that as much anymore. Why? Because President Trump has shocked these folks, I think, by showing that he's actually willing to, and, in fact, desirous of making policy with those tweets. If you Ignore the tweets. You're going to be missing out on a lot of key decision making. And Mike Pompeo himself has been caught out multiple times on this. For example, he was in Israel last year and he was asked repeatedly whether the administration had any plans to recognize the Israeli annexation of the Golan Heights. He said, there's no policy change at this time. I've got nothing for you. And hours later, Donald Trump tweeted that the United States had unilaterally decided to recognize the annexation of the Golan Heights. And again and again, there's such a long list of those things.
- [16:15]
B
And James Mattis, the former Defense secretary, he ends up resigning over one of these episodes where Trump announces that he wants to pull troops out of Syria. Mattis disagrees, feels undercut. The reporting that we get is that he leaves because of this disagreement. Pompeo stays. Why?
- [16:30]
C
Well, not only does Pompeo stay, but it's kind of an interesting case study of how they think they're managing Trump. So both Pompeo and John Bolton, the national security adviser who has become a real rival of Pompeo, they, like Mattis, didn't want Trump to pull out. But for months, actually, Trump had been talking about leaving Syria. And I think they thought they were managing him. I think they thought they were getting him to hold off on doing that. And in fact, they just gotten him to sign a piece of paper to with what appeared to be a long term commitment to keeping US Forces in Syria. So they were really sandbagged and undercut. But only Mattis resigned, as you said. And Bolton and Pompeo immediately launched, in effect, a campaign to lobby Trump and to manage him. Enlisting congressional allies, enlisting international allies such as the Israelis. And essentially, after months of confusion and circling around, we seem to have decided to leave troops there. But there's a lot of uncertainty. Nobody knows exactly what the decision is. But Pompeo combined this backstage lobbying of the president with publicly even more than Bolton, essentially saying that the sky is not blue and don't believe your lying eyes. And he said, oh, no, Donald Trump has not changed American policy in any way. And he's very combative with the media, especially on issues that involve Trump. And he's very willing essentially, to blithely ignore the facts in defending his boss.
- [17:58]
B
At the beginning of Trump's term, Trump made a big deal about his generals, the decorated senior military men who he installed around him. They're all gone. Pompeo was a star at West Point, but he left the army as a captain. And there are people who you talk to for your piece who suggest that the difference in mindset between a general and a captain is important in understanding our current Secretary of State. I'm wondering if you can just unpack that idea and what it means for you.
- [18:30]
C
One of the things that people who are watching him as Secretary of State all the time notice right away is his unusual use of the words mission set commander's intent. These are not words I've ever heard used by a Secretary of State. They're military words deployed in an unmilitary context, in a diplomatic. And they seem to be aimed at that famous audience of one. They seem to be aimed at reassuring the President that he is a mere executor of the president's policies, that he's been given a mission, whether that mission is to negotiate a deal with North Korea, or that mission is to work with the Saudis to undermine Iranian influence in the Middle East. And so he portrays himself as a mere executor of. Of ideas rather than a policy maker in a way that perhaps makes it easier for him also to disagree. Remember, it's not that a captain can't be influential with a general in shaping orders, but, A, his duty is to fall in line and salute. B, his responsibility is not at the strategic level.
- [19:39]
B
I want to end with something else that I think stands out about Pompeo, makes him different. There are some senior officials who we've seen who sign on with the Trump campaign. James Mattis, we've discussed. Rex Tillerson, Pompeo's predecessor, who don't necessarily seem to have obvious desires or plans for future political careers after their time in the Trump administration. Pompeo seems to have his eyes sort of on a much longer political track. And I'm wondering how you think he sees his own future.
- [20:13]
C
Well, look, that, of course, is the question. I think it's a key thing to understand that Pompeo, unlike many of those other secretaries of State, started this thing as a politician and essentially remains a politician while in office. In some ways, the comparison might be to his old nemesis, Hillary Clinton, who was the only other really overt politician in recent years. So Pompeo was a politician. Everyone I've spoken with, his friends, they are clear that he is very, very ambitious, that he might like to run for president one day. He was recently asked this by David Rubenstein in an interview a couple weeks ago. He did not disavow any interest in running for presidency one day. He was much less encouraging of speculation about running for Kansas Senate in 2020, which has really been in the last few months fueled by Mitch McConnell, the Senate trying to recruit him to run for this open Senate seat. According to my reporting, he was interested in running for Senate. Now he says he's not running for Senate next year, but the rumors continue. And what I was told by Republican sources in Kansas is that, look, he obviously loves being Secretary of State. He's not going to give that up unless he's forced to. But we all know that things can change on a dimension with Donald Trump. And if you're in Donald Trump's cabinet, you want to have an exit ramp at the ready. Well, that Kansas Senate race might be his exit ramp.
- [21:45]
B
Susan, thank you so much.
- [21:47]
C
Thank you.
- [21:51]
B
Susan Glasser is a staff writer at the New Yorker, where she writes a weekly column on life in Trump's Washington and is the co author of Kremlin, Vladimir Putin's Russia, and the End of Revolution. This has been the political scene. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on newyorker.com feel free to rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program was produced by Alex barron for new yorker.com with assistance from Kylie Warner. I'm Eric Latch, filling in for Dorothy Wickenden.
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C
I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.
- [22:35]
B
I'm Michael Colori, Wired's Director of Consumer Tech and Culture.
- [22:38]
C
And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is all about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. At Wired, we're constantly reporting on how technology is changing every aspect of our lives. So each week on the show, we get together to talk about one of the biggest stories in tech, right?
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B
So whether we're talking about privacy, AI, social media, or a major tech figure, we will always explain the Silicon Valley forces behind these stories and how they affect you.
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C
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