Secretary of State Michael Pompeo chose his boss’s impeachment day to promote a very different kind of recognition for Donald Trump: giving the president the Nobel Peace Prize.
Pompeo’s tweet on Wednesday morning simply said: “cc: @NobelPrize” below a photo of Trump with Israeli and Arab leaders at the signing of a diplomatic agreement with the Jewish state in September.
It was part of what is now a two-week campaign by Pompeo on Twitter and in speeches and interviews to recount what he sees as the foreign policy successes of the Trump administration’s “America First” approach. He bragged about making America safer and “Leading from the front” without acknowledging the harsh reality of a nation rocked by about 4,000 deaths daily from the coronavirus and the January 6 rebellion by Trump supporters fired in action by the president.
Pompeo did not deny Trump’s false claims that he was stolen from re-election through electoral fraud, and the secretary condemned the troublemakers, but not Trump’s role in urging them to act.
“There is a dissonance between everything that the government is trying to say in terms of politics and the fact that the whole world is galvanized by this non-peaceful transfer of power,” he said. Richard Fontaine, executive director of the Center for New American Security. “You have had this historically traumatic experience for the country, and it is just the ‘silence’ of civilians at the top.”
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State Department officials did not respond to a request for comment.
As other government officials resigned or maintained an awkward silence, Pompeo, one of the oldest loyal to Trump’s office, gave no hint of distancing himself from the man who raised him from relative obscurity in Congress and whose followers he may need to boost your political future.
Pompeo has been widely considered to be planning a presidential run in 2024 – if Trump is unable or unwilling to return – or he could run for the Kansas government in 2022.
Pompeo’s cascade of tweets, sometimes exceeding 20 a day, started on January 1 with a promise: “In the next few days, I will present the defined mission, the big victories, personal stories and more”, Pompeo wrote in his account official. “Just me, Mike.”
Since then, Pompeo’s tweets have highlighted what he sees as his greatest achievements, from forging a tougher stance against China to the withdrawal of the World Health Organization. Posts on the social network that banned Trump also offer a window to Pompeo as a combative guerrilla with roots in the Tea Party, as he often targets contemptuous and coups against his Democratic enemies.
On Wednesday, Pompeo ridiculed former Secretary of State John Kerry – the choice of President-elect Joe Biden as envoy to climate change – for saying at an event in 2016 that peace is unattainable in the Arab world without first making peace with the Palestinians. The government praised the Abraham Accords, a set of normalization agreements between Israel and the Arab nations as proof of how wrong Kerry was.
“Remember that ‘Middle East’ expert?”, Pompeo wrote in a tweet above a video clip of Kerry at the event. “He said it couldn’t happen. We did it. “
Boasting of ‘arrogance’
Working to shape his legacy, Pompeo bragged about taking Sudan off the list of state sponsors of terrorism and its travels to countries that its predecessors had not visited, such as Suriname. He also revived his theme of bringing “arrogance” back to the State Department.
The top US diplomat projected an air of calm amid concerns about the government’s ability to deal with a chaos crisis that hit the White House after 6 January. On Tuesday, he canceled a trip to Belgium and ruled out all other trips abroad by senior state officials, in part to stay close to home in case a national security crisis erupted.
Pompeo, who initially served as Trump’s CIA director, is in a unique position: apart from the Trump family, there is no senior administration official who has managed to stay within the president’s inner circle for so long.
Pompeo acknowledged in a recent interview that the approach was central to the way he worked. Citing the advice of former Secretary of State James Baker, he said that a close relationship with the president “is absolutely essential to his success”.
“When you travel the world and meet with leaders or when you talk to them on the phone, they need to know that you have a relationship with the president which means that you are actually speaking on his behalf,” said Pompeo in “The David Rubenstein Show: Peer-to-Peer Conversations ”on Bloomberg Television.
While there are risks, Pompeo may also be calculating that he can continue to treat his work with Trump as an asset, not a liability.
“Even if someone says, ‘Yes, you were an accomplice,'” he said Liz Mair, a Republican strategist and president of Mair Strategies LLC, is easy to argue that “when you’re called to serve, especially by someone who doesn’t know what you’re doing, you’re negligent if you don’t do it. Then you start talking about all the conservative victories and the things that people like to hear. “
Pompeo even started encouraging his followers to switch to his personal account, as he is about to lose his high position – and his official name on Twitter.
“America is a land of many freedoms – it is what makes us the best country in the world,” he tweeted Fifth. “Even after leaving office, I will continue to do everything I can to guarantee these freedoms. Follow me @mikepompeo and join me. “
(Updates with an additional tweet in the final paragraph)