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Focused Read, Excerpts in about 5 minutes
“Mike Pompeo, the Secretary of Trump"
How he became a heartland evangelical -- and the President’s most loyal soldier.
Or: Mike Pompeo, the sycophant of Trump
"In the winter of 2016, Donald Trump was roaring through the primaries, and Mike Pompeo was determined to stop him. Pompeo, a little-known congressman from Wichita, helped persuade Marco Rubio to make a late stand in Kansas.
Like many Republicans in Congress, Pompeo believed that Rubio had the national-security knowledge and the judgment to be President, and Trump did not. ...
On March 5th, Trump and Senator Ted Cruz, of Texas, arrived in Wichita for the caucus. Rubio left his closing argument to Pompeo, who told the crowd at the Century II arena,
“I’m going to speak to you from the heart about what I believe is the best path forward for America.” An Army veteran who finished first in his class at West Point, Pompeo cited Trump’s boast that if he ordered a soldier to commit a war crime the soldier would “go do it.”
As the audience booed, Pompeo warned that Trump...would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
American soldiers “don’t swear an allegiance to President Trump or any other President,” Pompeo declared. “They take an oath to defend our Constitution, as Kansans, as conservatives, as Republicans, as Americans.
Marco Rubio will never demean our soldiers by saying that he will order them to do things that are inconsistent with our Constitution.”
Listening backstage, Trump demanded to know the identity of the congressman trashing him.
A few minutes later, Pompeo concluded, “It’s time to turn down the lights on the circus.”
... Days later, Rubio’s campaign was over. In May, Trump secured the delegates needed for the nomination, and Pompeo reluctantly joined the rest of Kansas’s congressional delegation in endorsing him. ...
At that point, Pompeo had never met Trump.
Like many Republicans who called Trump a “kook,” a “cancer,” and a threat to democracy before ultimately supporting him, Pompeo disagreed with much of Trump’s platform.
He took issue in particular with Trump’s “America First” skepticism about the United States’ role in the world.
Pompeo was a conservative internationalist who had been shaped by his Cold War-era military service, and he remained a believer in American power as the guarantor of global stability.
Yet, after Trump won the Presidency, Pompeo sought
a post in his Administration and did not hesitate to serve as his C.I.A. director. In 2018, after Trump fired Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, by tweet, Pompeo happily replaced him as America’s top diplomat.
Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk,
now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people.
He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him.
... No matter what Trump has said or done, Pompeo has stood by him.
As a former senior White House official told me, “There will never be any daylight publicly between him and Trump.”
The former official said that, in private, too, Pompeo is “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.”
Even more bluntly, a former American ambassador told me, “He’s like a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
Pompeo’s transformation reflects the larger story of how the Republican Party went from disdaining Trump to embracing him with barely a murmur of dissent. ...
Thirty-one months into the Administration, the relationship between Trump and Pompeo, born in derision and remade in flattery, has proved to be surprisingly durable.
Trump often gushes about Pompeo, even as he has berated his hawkish national-security adviser, John Bolton, for taking similar positions. “I argue with everyone,” Trump told a reporter. “Except Pompeo.”
... Trump often touts Pompeo’s credentials as a top student at West Point and at Harvard Law School, but in six years as a member of Congress he never chaired a subcommittee or faced a genuinely competitive election, and he served just over a year at the C.I.A. He spent much of his career running a struggling Wichita aviation company.
... he has said that, as a teen-ager, he read Ayn Rand’s “The Fountainhead,” and became a staunch conservative.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The valedictorian of his public high school, he was nominated for West Point by his congressman, Bob Dornan, a fiery hard-right favorite of the defense industry.
“That should give you a good idea of where I am coming from politically if ‘B-1 Bob’ chose me for West Point,” Pompeo told the conservative magazine Human Events, in 2011.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The valedictorian of his public high school, he was nominated for West Point by his congressman, Bob Dornan, a fiery hard-right favorite of the defense industry.
“That should give you a good idea of where I am coming from politically if ‘B-1 Bob’ chose me for West Point,” Pompeo told the conservative magazine Human Events, in 2011.
Pompeo thrived at West Point, where he majored in engineering management. ... After marrying his college sweetheart, Leslie Libert, the weekend he graduated, Pompeo took a prestigious posting as a tank commander in the U.S. Army’s 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which patrolled the border between East and West in Germany.
Five years later, with the end of the Cold War, the border was gone and Pompeo left the military, having risen to the rank of captain. He went to Harvard Law School, where he was an editor of the Law Review, then moved to Washington, D.C., and joined the blue-chip firm Williams & Connolly.
In the late nineties, however, Pompeo radically changed his life.
He quit the law firm after two years and divorced his wife. ... He moved to Kansas, his late mother’s home state, where, in early 1997, he and “three of my best friends in the whole world” from West Point, as he put it recently, started a company, Thayer Aerospace. ... Pompeo became Thayer’s C.E.O.
While buying one of the companies for the new firm, he met Susan Justice Mostrous ... In 2000, he and Susan married and he adopted her son from her second marriage.
Pompeo became a deacon of Wichita’s Eastminster Church, an evangelical congregation that eventually quit the mainstream Presbyterian Church because of its support for gay clergy.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Over time, Pompeo got to know some of the city’s wealthiest benefactors, including David Murfin, one of the largest independent oil producers in Kansas, and Charles and David Koch, the billionaire Republican donors and skeptics of environmental regulation, whose company is headquartered in Wichita.
In 1998, the Kochs’ venture-capital fund made a key early investment in Thayer.
Within a few years, Pompeo was a trustee of the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy, which also has ties to the Kochs, and he was an early recruit for the Kochs’ national political organization, Americans for Prosperity.
(Emphasis is mine.)
In 2010, amid the Tea Party backlash to President Obama, Pompeo made another career switch, running for an open Congress seat in the state’s Fourth District.
The establishment climber from California had become a heartland evangelical.
Pompeo ran a nasty race against the Democrat, an Indian-American state legislator named Raj Goyle, who, unlike Pompeo, had grown up in Wichita.
Pompeo’s campaign tweeted praise for an article calling Goyle a “turban topper,” and a supporter bought billboards urging residents to “vote american—vote pompeo.”
In the heavily Republican district in a heavily Republican year, he won easily.
“Pompeo’s singular ability is in navigating power,” Goyle told me. “On that I give him massive respect, the way he mapped Wichita power, the way he mapped D.C. power, the way he mapped Trump.”
The narrative of Pompeo’s transformation has been rewritten over the years, or never told at all.
Most notably, the Kochs were far more significant backers of his business than he has publicly acknowledged.
In 2011, the Washington Post reported that, according to Pompeo and his aides, the investment by the Kochs’ venture-capital fund “amounted to less than 2 percent” of Thayer’s total.
Their statement was highly misleading. Corporate documents for 2003 filed with the Kansas secretary of state but not previously reported show that the Kochs’ fund had a nearly twenty-per-cent interest in Thayer.
The Kochs were also involved in the firm’s management.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Both the president and the chief financial officer of the Kochs’ venture fund sat, at various times, on Thayer’s board of directors, and in 2000 the fund helped secure loans of up to four million dollars for the firm to buy property.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The Kochs’ extensive involvement was not a secret: their fund announced on its Web site that it was part of Thayer’s “equity sponsor group,” adding that it had given Pompeo’s firm wide-ranging support, including “acquisition capital, strategic input at the board level, and guidance in environmental risk issues.”
The environmental risk turned out to be significant. Air Capitol Plating, an aircraft-parts processing company that Thayer took over in 1999, had for years been the subject of environmental complaints because of its use of the toxic chemical trichloroethylene, or TCE, dangerous traces of which had leaked into the local groundwater.
(Emphasis is mine.)
In 2000, Thayer entered into a legal consent order with Kansas authorities, in which it admitted to the pollution and agreed to clean it up.
To address the problem, Thayer had brought in another Koch-backed firm, Cherokee, which specialized in “risk management services” for firms “that face environmental challenges.” A new entity, Cherokee Thayer, assumed liability for the cleanup, although it appears that little if any cleanup was carried out.
Instead, the company and the authorities spent years arguing over the extent of the contamination and what to do about it. Meanwhile, the firm continued to pollute, failed to file required reports in 2003, 2004, and 2005, and was fined more than a hundred thousand dollars by the Environmental Protection Agency.
In 2005, the state found high levels of TCE in nearby residential wells, resulting in a “threat to human health,” and the E.P.A. named it a High Priority Violator.
According to the State of Kansas, this month, twenty years after Thayer purchased A.C.P., a permeable barrier will finally be installed to insure that no additional TCE flows from the site into the water supply.
(Emphasis is mine.)
In speeches, Pompeo often describes Thayer as a “small” company and himself as a “small businessman.” He has reminisced about Thayer as “a small, dirty, smelly, beautiful machine shop.”
In fact...the Kochs and other wealthy backers had invested ninety million dollars in the firm. Despite that funding, Thayer struggled financially when Pompeo ran it—another aspect of his past that Pompeo has publicly sought to revise.
(Emphasis is mine.)
During his first run for Congress, in 2010, one of his Republican-primary rivals, a local millionaire named Wink Hartman, claimed that Pompeo was “forced out” of Thayer after having mismanaged the company into financial trouble...Pompeo denied the accusation, saying that he left Thayer on “excellent terms,” while acknowledging some difficulties, which he blamed on a downturn in the aviation industry after the 9/11 attacks.
But the company’s problems began before 9/11 and continued well beyond.
In 1999, the Thayer subsidiary Air Capitol Plating started going downhill. ...
By April of 2006, Pompeo was no longer leading the company.
... Pompeo, however, soon landed with one of his Wichita contacts, David Murfin, the Kansas oil tycoon.
Murfin named Pompeo president of Sentry International, an oil-services firm that manufactured parts in China and elsewhere and sold them in the U.S.
One Sentry joint venture was with a subsidiary of the Chinese national oil firm Sinopec, although Pompeo later told the Senate that he had no business ties to foreign government-owned entities.
Like the Kochs, Murfin was a major player in Kansas Republican politics. Kelly Arnold, at that time the Sedgwick County G.O.P. chairman, told me that Murfin was “a key person for anybody running for office.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
In January, 2007, Pompeo ran for the chairmanship of the Kansas Republican Party, against Tim Huelskamp, a future congressman, and Kris Kobach, a firebrand who represented the Party’s anti-immigrant right wing.
“Pompeo’s pitch to the Party was: I’m going to run this thing like a business,” Dan Assure, who helped Pompeo in that race, told me. “To the rest of the world this may sound crazy, given how much Pompeo has catered to the ultra-conservatives once he became elected, but, in Kansas terms, Pompeo is just straight-up what would be considered a moderate.”
Coming into the state G.O.P. convention, Pompeo believed that he “had the race sewn up,” Rasure said, but Kobach flipped a bloc of votes, and won.
Rasure stayed in touch with Pompeo, and persuaded him to become the first investor in his new alternative-energy start up, Sunflower Wind, which planned to make wind turbines.
Pompeo, who personally invested as much as a hundred thousand dollars, served on the board and was a key adviser to the young C.E.O., who considered his advice invaluable. “I would never bet against Pompeo,” Rasure told me. But the firm went bust after one of its turbine blades cracked, and everyone involved lost money.
... By 2010, Wichita’s U.S. representative, Todd Tiahrt, had decided to run for the Senate. In the crowded Republican primary to succeed him, Pompeo was again backed by the city’s business élite. Murfin became his campaign co-chairman. Pompeo won the primary with thirty-nine per cent of the vote.
Soon after arriving on Capitol Hill, in 2011, he was the subject of articles in both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, in which he was portrayed...as the new “congressman from Koch.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
That Post article is where Pompeo and his aides misrepresented the Kochs’ investment in Thayer as an almost negligible two per cent. Pompeo would never again be directly challenged about Thayer. When he ran for reëlection in 2014, he aired a campaign ad touting his “remarkable success” leading the company.
His positions evolved along with the story of his past.
(Emphasis is mine.)
When Pompeo got to Congress, he argued that wind power was an expensive boondoggle and campaigned to end a production tax credit for wind technology, even though, not long before, he had personally invested in Sunflower Wind.
By the time Pompeo joined the Trump Administration, he had written Sunflower out of his history, omitting from his Senate confirmation questionnaire his position as a member of its board.
In Washington, Pompeo found a way onto the House Energy and Commerce Committee, the critical panel for the business interests of his Kansas patrons.
He appointed a former Koch lawyer as his chief of staff and acquired a reputation as a fierce defender of the Kochs.
“Stop Harassing the Koch Brothers” was the title of an op-ed that he wrote in 2012, in which he dismissed attacks on them as “evidence of a truly Nixonian approach to politics.”
Two years later, he called the Kochs “great men.”
His loyalty was rewarded: according to the Center for Responsive Politics, in 2010, 2012, 2014, and 2016 he received more campaign funds from the Kochs’ network than any other candidate in the country.
(Emphasis is mine.)
But Pompeo hoped to make his mark in Congress on national security, and the Intelligence Committee was the panel that he most wanted to serve on.
(Emphasis is mine.)
He got there in part by aiding the committee’s chairman, Mike Rogers, who sought Pompeo’s help in quelling an incipient rebellion by his fellow Tea Party members over the renewal of the wide-ranging surveillance authorized in the U.S.A. Patriot Act after 9/11.
... Pompeo gained attention as one of the most partisan promoters of conspiracy theories about the killing of the U.S. Ambassador and three other Americans at a diplomatic post in Benghazi, Libya, in 2012.
(Emphasis is mine.)
“He was a Benghazi crazy,” a former senior intelligence official who dealt with Pompeo told me. Although his allegations were discredited, the investigation revealed that Clinton had deleted thirty thousand e-mails from a private server that she used while she was Secretary of State. Given that a subsequent F.B.I. investigation into Clinton’s e-mails hung over her 2016 campaign, the former official said of Pompeo, “at the end of the day, he succeeded beyond his wildest dreams.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran was another obsession. Pompeo befriended the Arkansas senator Tom Cotton, a younger fellow Harvard graduate and Army veteran, and they argued that not only would the deal fail to stop Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon; it was also an appeasement of the world’s worst sponsor of terrorism.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Pompeo’s pronouncements on Benghazi and on the Iran deal led to new media prominence on Fox News and other right-wing outlets, where he became one of the fiercest critics of Obama’s foreign policy.
He trafficked in outlandish theories and engaged in slashing personal attacks. On “Meet the Press,” Pompeo called Clinton’s role in Benghazi “worse, in some ways, than Watergate.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
But Pompeo grew restless in the House. ...
By the 2016 Republican National Convention, Pompeo had, at least in public, changed his mind about Trump. “I am excited for a commander in chief who fearlessly puts America out in front,” he told the Wichita Eagle while in Cleveland as Trump accepted the nomination.
He expressed even more excitement about Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, whom Pompeo considered a “friend and mentor” from their time together in Congress.
Pence, too, had strong ties to the Kochs, and Pompeo found a connection to Pence’s campaign in Marc Short, a veteran operative for the Kochs’ organization.
Although the Kochs had opposed Trump in the Republican primaries, Short signed on as an adviser to Pence and is now his chief of staff.
“Marc knows Mike well,” a Republican friend of Pompeo’s told me, and Short got Pompeo to help Pence with debate preparation that fall. When Trump won, Pence repaid the favor by recommending Pompeo.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The weekend after the election, Pompeo called a Kansas Republican who had worked for Trump and told him that he hoped to become either C.I.A. director or Secretary of the Army.
The two decided that he should work his ties to 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 ultranationalist chief strategist, who called Urban to suggest that he urge “the old man” to name Pompeo to the C.I.A. post. Urban did so.
On Wednesday, November 16th, Pompeo was summoned to Trump Tower for an interview with the President-elect...Two days later, Trump announced that Pompeo was his nominee for the C.I.A. job. Trump seemed to know little about him, and Representative Devin Nunes, a member of Trump’s transition team, later said that he didn’t think Pompeo had even filled out a vetting questionnaire.
After the announcement, Jeff Roe, Ted Cruz’s former campaign manager, called Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and reminded him of Trump’s fury at Pompeo’s Kansas caucus speech.
As Tim Alberta recounts in his book, “American Carnage,” Kushner put the call on speaker, so that Trump could hear.
“No! That was him? We’ve got to take it back,” the President-elect roared.
“This is what I get for letting Pence pick everyone.” But the appointment stood.
Two weeks later, Pompeo was hanging out with Trump in Urban’s box at the Army-Navy football game.
...On January 23rd, Pompeo was confirmed, in a 66–32 vote.
By then, he had deleted his entire congressional Twitter account, including a plea to the President-elect, days before Trump named him C.I.A. director, to “make the undemocratic practice of executive orders a thing of the past.” Trump, of course, did no such thing.
... Pompeo seemed to relish the C.I.A. job. He told a friend that, while flying around the world to meetings on a U.S. government plane, he would read the agency’s secret histories of wars in places like Afghanistan and Central America.
Still, the former senior intelligence official said, “he wasn’t satisfied with being C.I.A. director. He wanted to be national-security adviser or Secretary of State.”
By the fall of 2017, Rex Tillerson was in trouble with the President ...
When Trump demanded an immediate withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal, Tillerson pushed for more time.
Most other advisers agreed with Tillerson, but Pompeo, a former senior official told me, twice sat in the White House Situation Room and supported leaving the Iran deal, sidelining his agency’s concerns about doing so.
... Another former senior intelligence official told me that Pompeo gave “strong brushback” to experts on the Iran desk at the C.I.A. after they concluded that Iran was complying with the terms of the deal—a sore point, since Trump was claiming that Iran was not doing so.
(Emphasis is mine.)
... At the White House, Pompeo waged what the former senior official saw as a “concerted campaign” to replace Tillerson...“He was making the case to Trump: You’ve got a whole lot of people around you who don’t agree with you. I’m your guy.”
... Several months later, in March, 2018, Tillerson was returning home from a trip to Africa when Trump fired him and announced Pompeo as his replacement. “We’re always on the same wavelength,” Trump said. “The relationship has been very good, and that’s what I need.”
In the spring of 2018, on his first day as Secretary of State, Pompeo invoked the bluster of the Second World War general George Patton, vowing that the U.S. would “get its swagger back.”
The reference to such an undiplomatic figure was odd, unless you knew that Patton is Trump’s most admired general and that the hagiographic movie about Patton’s life is one of his favorites.
Pompeo followed up with a social-media campaign that featured photos of himself and Patton, and a State Department logo with a new motto: the “Department of Swagger.”
Diplomats quickly surmised, as a former senior department official put it, that Pompeo’s opening pitch was to a “constituency of one.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
Managing Trump as Secretary of State, however, would prove harder for Pompeo than it had been.
As C.I.A. director, Pompeo spent many hours with the President, and he could punt difficult questions by saying that it was not his role to offer policy advice.
Now he would often be away travelling, while Bolton, the new national-security adviser and a veteran bureaucratic infighter, had daily Trump time.
The State Department was also in disarray from Tillerson’s tenure. Waves of experienced Foreign Service officers quit or were forced out, as Tillerson insisted on an extensive reorganization plan, instituted a hiring freeze, and accepted crippling budget cuts.
The White House also blocked State from hiring any of the hundred and forty-nine G.O.P. national-security officials who signed “Never Trump” letters during the campaign.
With State in crisis, Pompeo reached out to some veteran diplomats...promoted a career Foreign Service official to serve as the department’s No. 3, lifted Tillerson’s hiring freeze,
and consulted all the living former Secretaries of State, including Hillary Clinton, who took his call even though he had savaged her over Benghazi.
(Emphasis is mine.)
The gestures helped smooth his Senate confirmation. ...
Pompeo used his standing with the President as a selling point for a department in need of White House clout and a semblance of stability.
“The department appreciates the fact that they have a Secretary who the President trusts,” Fred Fleitz, who served as Bolton’s chief of staff at the National Security Council, told me.
Democrats noticed, too. “Morale is better at the State Department. It’s still at a historic low watermark, but people feel better,” Chris Murphy, a Connecticut senator who has vehemently opposed Pompeo on issues such as U.S. military support for Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, told me.
“There are some silver linings to Pompeo’s time at State that even critics like me can’t ignore.”
Yet Trump’s impulsive style created constant complications for Pompeo...
In Washington, though, Pompeo has managed to maintain Trump’s confidence while remaining on speaking terms with a foreign-policy establishment that is deeply unsettled by the President.
“He’s in a sense become the real adult in the room,” Ian Bremmer, the founder of the geopolitical advisory firm the Eurasia Group, told me. “It is less the case than he would like, but vastly more the case than anyone else.”
Pompeo’s Republican friend told me, “He’s not an enabler of Trump. He does a lot to try to manage him.”
Others believe that Pompeo is merely posturing. He is a politician who knows his audience; he wants to give the impression that “he generally agrees but he’s working with this wild man,” another former senior State Department official, who has met with Pompeo privately, told me.
“He always has this sheepish ‘I know,’ but won’t show his hand.” He suggests, without being specific, the former official added, that he’s got “his finger in the dike.”
When it comes to personnel, Pompeo has sent the right signals to the G.O.P. establishment by hiring a few Republican opponents of the President. He tapped Elliott Abrams, who wrote an anti-Trump op-ed in 2016, to be his special envoy to Venezuela. (Trump blocked Tillerson’s attempt to hire Abrams.) He asked Jim Jeffrey, George W. Bush’s deputy national-security adviser, to serve as the special envoy for Syria, even though he signed a Never Trump letter. This spring, Pompeo appointed the Fox News contributor Morgan Ortagus to be his spokesperson, although she, like Pompeo, had publicly opposed Trump in 2016, prompting the conservative magazine The National Interest to observe that “Mike Pompeo’s house has become a hall of Never Trump.”
... “It’s fairly clear he has a deal with the President where if there’s no confirmation hearing, where people can talk about the 2016 race, then he can hire whoever he wants,” a senior Administration official told me.
Fifteen months after Pompeo took over the State Department, the question is not whether he has stayed in Trump’s good favor but to what ends Pompeo is using the relationship.
... Pompeo’s own ideological agenda is also becoming clearer, as indicated by recent controversies over orders to U.S. diplomatic missions not to fly the gay-pride flag;
the creation of a new State Department commission stocked with conservatives to review human-rights policy based on “natural” rights;
and comments by the Secretary that were skeptical of climate change at an international climate-change conference.
In the end, Pompeo may be remembered as the most conservative, ideologically driven Secretary of State ever to serve.
He is certainly no sentimentalist about the world, and, while he does not share Trump’s affinity for dictators like Putin and Kim Jong Un, he has remained notably silent on human-rights abuses in places such as North Korea.
In Saudi Arabia, he smiled during a photo op with the Crown Prince soon after the gruesome killing of the dissident columnist Jamal Khashoggi, and angered many members of Congress, including some in his own Party, by appearing to dismiss concerns about it.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Pompeo and his advisers had thought that the episode would be a repeat of China’s 1989 massacre of protesters in Tiananmen Square: a controversy that produced outrage in Congress but then passed. Instead, Pompeo was “struck and frustrated by how it hasn’t blown over,” the Republican friend told me.
... Pompeo’s wife, Susan, who travels frequently with him and whose unusual requests are now being investigated by congressional Democrats after a whistle-blower complained that the couple was inappropriately using government resources and treating Pompeo’s security detail as “UberEats with guns,” CNN reported
At times, Pompeo’s concern for his political image can seem to shape policy decisions.
Last September, he ordered the closure of the U.S. consulate in the Iraqi city of Basra, despite objections from some State Department officials. “He did not want Basra to be his Benghazi,” a former senior U.S. official who discussed the decision with Pompeo said. Another former senior U.S. official, with experience in Iraq, told me, “Absolutely, it was an overreaction. He wears Benghazi around his neck.”
In a recent speech at the Claremont Institute, in California, Pompeo outlined his version of the Trump doctrine, claiming that “realism” “restraint,” and “respect” guided the President’s approach to the world. It was his most ambitious explanation yet of the Administration’s foreign policy, asserting that renewed nationalism is necessary as the U.S. faces a new era of great-power competition with China and Russia. It sounded plausible, Republican, and entirely unlike the President.
“The problem with the speech is that it doesn’t reflect Trump’s foreign policy,” said Brett McGurk, a former State Department official who oversaw the anti-Islamic State coalition, until he quit in protest over Trump’s decision to pull out of Syria.
“It’s not based on realism. It’s not based on restraint. It’s based on declaring grand objectives, few of which the Administration is willing or able to meet.”
... In recent months, Pompeo has repeatedly tangled with members of Congress and journalists who ask about the President’s policies and his inflammatory statements.
Such questions, he has said, are “silly,” “bizarre,” “ticky-tack,” “insulting and ridiculous and frankly ludicrous.”
Yet none of the people I spoke with thought Pompeo harbored any illusions about the President.
In private, Pompeo’s gripes sometimes echo those expressed by fired predecessors, among them H. R. McMaster, Trump’s second national-security adviser.
One of the former senior officials told me that he had heard identical complaints from Pompeo and McMaster: “ ‘We put together carefully crafted policies on things and the President blows it up with a tweet, and I have to go in and put Humpty Dumpty back together.’ ”
... The risks of getting publicly out of synch with Trump, however, have gone up for Pompeo this summer, as tensions with Iran rise.
The President, a self-styled grand global deal maker, has said that his goal after withdrawing from the nuclear deal is to bring Iran back to the negotiating table for a better deal.
Pompeo, an Iran hawk far longer than he has been a Trump supporter, has been driving the Administration’s hard-line “maximum pressure” strategy. The possibility of a real divide with Trump emerged in June, after Iran shot down a U.S. drone.
Pompeo and his internal rival Bolton, a longtime advocate of Iranian “regime change,” initially backed a retaliatory military strike, and Trump agreed, only to reverse himself when planes were already in the air.
Even before that incident, Fred Fleitz, Bolton’s former chief of staff at the N.S.C., had told me that Bolton and Pompeo are closely aligned on Iran, at least. “He and John are on the same sheet of music,” Fleitz said.
Whatever their ideological convergence on Iran, relations between the two seem to have worsened in recent months, to the extent that the former White House official was told recently that they are “not even on speaking terms” and communicate largely through intermediaries.
... But for now it’s Bolton, not Pompeo, who appears to be the odd man out.
... Pompeo celebrated his first anniversary as Trump’s Secretary of State, hardly an assured accomplishment in the President’s ever-changing Cabinet. Pompeo marked the occasion with an unusual all-hands pep rally in the lobby of the State Department, “Uptown Funk” blaring as he entered.
The Secretary, referencing his own pledge, a year earlier, to stress “swagger,” now redefined the department’s job even more explicitly as serving Trump—“the premier agency delivering on behalf of the President of the United States.”
(Emphasis is mine.)
The capstone of the event was the unveiling of a banner, hanging two stories high, containing a new “professional ethos” statement that Pompeo read out loud to the diplomats, requiring their “unfailing professionalism,” “uncompromising personal and professional integrity,” and “unstinting respect.”
The ethos was Pompeo’s personal project, overseen by Ulrich Brechbuhl, his friend since West Point and a co-founder of Thayer Aerospace, who is now serving as his State Department counsellor.
The ethos was Pompeo’s personal project, overseen by Ulrich Brechbuhl, his friend since West Point and a co-founder of Thayer Aerospace, who is now serving as his State Department counsellor.
The oath stirred controversy about why it was needed, given that diplomats already swear an oath to the Constitution.
(Emphasis is mine.)
... Another of the former senior officials attributed the oath to Pompeo’s concern that “he had to show the President [State] is adding value to what the President is trying to accomplish.” That, too, seemed to be the goal of the new departmental motto that Pompeo had adopted: “One team, one mission.”
The word “mission” was the tell.
Pompeo in public often refers to the “mission set” he’s been assigned by Trump, presenting himself as a mere executor of the President’s commands.
“He’s very focused on whatever the mission is. He’s a West Point guy: Trump wants a deal, so I’ll get a deal,” another of the former officials said.
The official noted that Pompeo uses the language of “an Army captain, a guy who went to West Point and got out before he became a general.”
This behavior is the reason that Pompeo has succeeded in becoming the lone survivor of Trump’s original national-security team.
At the start of his Administration, the President had bragged about “my generals.”
But, now that he has pushed out the actual generals who served as his chief of staff, his national-security adviser, and his Defense Secretary,
it seems clear that Trump was uncomfortable with such leaders, and rejected their habits of command and independent thinking.
He wanted a Mike Pompeo, not a Jim Mattis, a captain trained to follow orders, not a general used to giving them.
The pep rally gave Pompeo an opportunity to show the President that his troops were loyal, too.
There were no references to Iran or North Korea or America’s global role, only the vow to serve Trump as his “premier agency,” and the promise of fealty.
This, in the end, may be Mike Pompeo’s real mission set.
Just as he rewrote his business troubles into a success story, he has reinvented himself as the ultimate soldier for Trump. "... "
(Emphasis is mine.)
Courtesy of "The New Yorker"
Focused Thought in 30 seconds
Focused Action in 30 seconds
You can retweet Wolfson's Tweet here
Focused Point of Interest in about 30 minutes
(While the United States of America is being dismantled, my words)
"Ikea and the Queen of Sweden are designing homes for people with dementia
As Sweden's population ages, the country faces a challenge: how can it maintain support for its citizens without breaking the bank?
Furniture giant Ikea has one idea.
The company is launching a new style of home for dementia patients through BoKlok, a joint venture with Swedish construction company Skanska that makes sustainable and affordable housing.
For the past three decades, the group has built more than 11,000 modular homes throughout Sweden, Finland and Norway using the Ikea model: strip out costs by producing large quantities of parts off-site. Lower income customers only pay what they can afford.
Now, with some modifications, the company thinks it can help people who struggle with memory loss to live at home — saving the government money it would otherwise spend on care. It's built the first customized homes just outside Stockholm.
Design tweaks include taking mirrors out of bathrooms and fitting kitchen appliances with old-fashioned knobs, rather than digital controls.
The developments also emphasize spending time outdoors, and will include "therapeutic" gardens and clubhouses for socializing. That could make it more appealing for a partner to move there, too.
"To take care of elderly people, that cost is exploding," BoKlok CEO Jonas Spangenberg told CNN Business. "It's much cheaper for society and the public to give them service back home."
'A growing problem'
... By 2040, nearly one in four Swedes will be 65 years or older by 2040, in part because of the baby boom following World War II.
In a country like Sweden, where life expectancy is very high and most care for the elderly is government funded, that means a strain on spending and resources looms. One concern is the supply of affordable yet comfortable accommodations.
"We see a growing problem ... that [people] are ending up in institutions where they do not want to end up," Spangenberg said.
He continued: "If we can crack the code where you can continue to live at a home or an apartment that is more suitable for you, even with various syndromes, we believe we could do a ... good thing for society."
That's the driving idea behind the company's SilviaBo project. Its namesake, Queen Silvia of Sweden — whose mother suffered from Alzheimer's — has been a partner from the beginning. ...
The Ikea model
... "BoKlok was designed the IKEA way: large volumes, low prices," according to a Skanska blog post from 2011. "Industrialized production and large volumes — in other words, repetition — cut prices and save time in planning."
The venture also controls its entire supply chain, including land acquisition, factory production, on-site construction, sales and marketing. This helps reduce costs.
SilviaBo homes have some key differences from traditional BoKlok builds, though the homes will operate under BoKlok's "Left to Live" payment model, where residents are charged only what they can afford after taxes and living expenses.
"It's still the same floor layout, but you need to understand how people with dementia react in certain situations," Spangenberg said.
For example, there are no mirrors or dark-colored floors in the bathroom, which could scare or confuse residents.
SilviaBo also plans to offer a version of its home for people who are around 65-years-old and newly retired, with small adjustments and the option to easily add certain accessibility functions.
The pitch, according to Spangenberg: "Make that clever move now, before it's too late."
Focused Monthly Inspiration
( #itsNovember2020Now )
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THE next Democratic Party 2020 Presidential Nomination Debate will be held September 12, 2019
And the best candidate for the 2020 Democratic Party presidential nomination is Kamala Harris, IMO...
You can find more information on Kamala Harris here
You can follow her on facebook here
You can follow her on Twitter here
You can follow her on Instagram here
→ Some Direct sources & resources for Democrats:
* ( My personal favored and most informative follows are also shared here, below, with the understanding that readers will always apply their own critical thinking to any information provided anywhere by anyone. #StrongerTogether does not share sources of information lightly but -- no one is perfect! -- so always #DistrustAndVerify -- even if it's me. I am using a "star" rating that is strictly based on my situational experience with the work of the media personality specifically in relation to issues of interest to me. )
Democratic Party Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, representative of The People at home & abroad while the President of the United States is MIA...
There is no better way to get your information than to #Go2TheSource
You can find the Speaker's website here
You can find the Speaker's Twitter feed here
You can find the Speaker's Facebook Page here
The Democratic Party Website
Also, NOT exactly a Democratic Party specific source under a GOP majority but a good place to hear and to watch speeches & hearings directly, i.e. #Go2TheSource C-SPAN
+
→ Some of my favorite, most active organizations:
(Full disclosure, I am a member!)
"Women are already the majority. Now Let's build a Supermajority.
Women are on the cusp of becoming the most powerful force in America. But to fundamentally transform this country, we need to work together. That’s where Supermajority comes in.
LET’S GET ORGANIZED
We’re building an inclusive, national membership of women who are connected, empowered, and taking action—from increasing their level of civic engagement and advocacy to voting in record numbers.
If we can build women’s collective power in this moment, we can lift up an agenda that addresses our needs and hold candidates and elected officials accountable. ... "
You can learn more here
"Meet the people behind the politicians.
A new podcast introducing you to the staffers and strategists that silently shape our politics from behind the scenes" here
You can email your two Senators and your Representative in Congress in one email here
"Postcards to Voters are friendly, handwritten reminders from volunteers to targeted voters giving Democrats a winning edge in close, key races coast to coast.
What started on March 11, 2017 with sharing 5 addresses apiece to 5 volunteers on Facebook...
Now, we consist of over 20,000+ volunteers in every state (including Alaska and Hawaii) who have written close to 3 million postcards to voters in over 100+ key, close elections."
You can find Postcards to Voters here
Town Hall Project empowers constituents across the country to have face-to-face conversations with their elected representatives. We are campaign veterans and first time volunteers. We come from a diversity of backgrounds and live across the country. We share progressive values and believe strongly in civic engagement. We research every district and state for public events with members of Congress. Then we share our findings to promote participation in the democratic process.
This movement is diverse, open source, and powered by citizens. We are proud to be a part of it.
You can find Town Hall Project here
"Born from conversations between Governor Howard Dean and Secretary Hillary Clinton in the aftermath of the 2016 election, Onward Together was established to lend support to leaders — particularly young leaders — kicking off projects and founding new organizations to fight for our shared progressive values." here
Organizing for America and the Democratic National Redistricting Committee have merged in "All On The Line":
"Barack Obama Throws All His Weight Behind ‘Issue Of Singular Importance’
The former president’s activist group Organizing for Action has folded into a fight to end gerrymandering."
On Thursday he announced that the progressive Organizing for Action group, which formed out of the pieces of Obama’s re-election campaign, would be folded into the National Democratic Redistricting Committee.
In a Medium post, Obama called gerrymandered maps “undemocratic” and “unrepresentative,” saying they have “too often stood in the way of change.”
... The merger will create a “joint force focused on this issue of singular importance,” Obama said, per The Atlantic. ... "
You can read more here
"Since #StandOnEveryCorner has grown, it’s become a stand by all of us to protect our democracy from corruption and treason...A stand not at your State Capitol, but in your own backyard. Not once every few months, but as often as you can here "
→ Fact checking organizations courtesy of the Society of Professional Journalists
in alphabetical order...
follows on Twitter include:
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ US Intelligence | Author | Navy Senior Chief | NBC/MSNBC
⭐⭐⭐ Federal Government Operations | Vanity Fair | Newsweek | MSNBC Contributor | Author
⭐⭐⭐⭐ Voting Rights/Voter Suppression | Author | Mother Jones
→ Some of my favorite, highly credible media -- at the moment:
→ Some of my favorite Talking Heads -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
Co-hosted program: Velshi & Ruhle on MSNBC
→ Some of my favorite media/panelists -- at the moment -- and their Twitter handles:
✅✅✅✅ Joan Walsh national affairs correspondent for The Nation; CNN political contributor
✅✅✅ Heidi Przybyla USA TODAY Senior Political Reporter
✅✅✅✅ Jennifer Rubin Conservative blogger at @ WashingtonPost's Right Turn,MSNBC contributor
✅✅✅ Natasha Bertrand Staff writer @ The Atlantic covering national security & the
Intel community. @ NBCNews/@ MSNBC contributor
→ Some of my favorite legal analysts in the context of Putin attacked America to install Trump investigations, primarily seen on MSNBC:
🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ Jill Wine-Banks
🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ Joyce White Vance
🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ Barbara McQuade
🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ Maya Wiley
🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ 🗒️ Ken Dilanian
→ Some of my favorite Democrat Party Leaders to follow on Twitter, not in elected office but proving knowledge & experience are positives & not negatives are:
Former First Lady Michelle Obama
Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton
Former Labor Secretary/Today's DNC Chair Tom Perez
Note: I rarely get involved in primary races -- outside of those in my own area and unless there is a glaring reason that can not be ignored, I support Democratic Party nominees in general elections. I don't support bashing Democrats and I don't confuse tactical disagreements with bashing.
→ PARTY Informational
(Full disclosure, I am a life-long, registered Democrat!)
"To Whom It May Concern: By authority of the Democratic National Committee, the National Convention of the Democratic Party is hereby scheduled to convene on July 13-16, 2020 in TBD at an hour to be announced, to select nominees for the offices of President and Vice President of the United States of America, to adopt and promulgate a platform and to take such other actions with respect to such other matters as the Convention may deem advisable. ... "
You can read more here
"PREAMBLE We, the Democrats of the United States of America, united in common purpose, hereby rededicate ourselves to the principles which have historically sustained our Party. Recognizing that the vitality of the Nation's political institutions has been the foundation of its enduring strength, we acknowledge that a political party which wishes to lead must listen to those it would lead, a party which asks for the people's trust must prove that it trusts the people and a party which hopes to call forth the best the Nation can achieve must embody the best of the Nation's heritage and traditions. What we seek for our Nation, we hope for all people: individual freedom in the framework of a just society, political freedom in the framework of meaningful participation by all citizens. Bound by the United States Constitution, aware that a party must be responsive to be worthy of responsibility, we pledge ourselves to open, honest endeavor and to the conduct of public affairs in a manner worthy of a society of free people. Under God, and for these ends and upon these principles, we do establish and adopt this Charter of the Democratic Party of the United States of America."
You can read more here
What is the CPD? The Commission on Presidential Debates (the “CPD”) is a private, nonpartisan 501(c)(3) organization. As a 501(c)(3) organization, it is eligible under federal law so serve as a debate sponsor. The CPD's primary mission is to ensure, for the benefit of the American electorate, that general election debates are held every four years between and among the leading candidates for the offices of President and Vice President of the United State. The CPD is an independent organization. It is not controlled by any political party or outside organization and it does not endorse, support, or oppose political candidates for parties. It receives no funding from the government or any political party, political actions committee or candidate. The CPD has sponsored general election presidential debates in every election since 1988. Although its plans for 2020 are in the developmental stage, it looks forward to bringing high quality, educational debates to the electorate in 2020 ...
You can read more here
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(Linked) "...is our 2016 platform...a declaration of how we plan to move America forward. Democrats believe that cooperation is better than conflict, unity is better than division, empowerment is better than resentment, and bridges are better than walls.
It’s a simple but powerful idea: We are stronger together."
Owned, Created and Curated by Gail Mountain, this blog is often gently edited and/or excerpted for quick reading, with occasional personal commentary in the form of the written word and/or in the form of emphasis noted. Network For #StrongerTogether ! is not affiliated with The Democratic Party in any capacity. This is an independent blog and the hope is you will, at a glance, learn more about the Party and you will, with a click or two, also take action on its behalf as it is provided!
( * Blogging since September of 2014. As a privately owned blog, I reserve the right to edit or remove inappropriate comments such as hate, vulgarity, threats of violence, racism, anti-Semitism, spam, advertising or personal/abusive attacks on other users.)
A long time Democratic Party activist, Gail Mountain is a former community organizer, journalist & personal planning coach with a focus on single moms working toward careers able to support them & their families, while working toward changing the systems that once served them through leadership training. She is a former Affordable Health Care for America Act advocate (2009!); a Hillary supporter who volunteered as a Grassroots Tweeter for Hillary, a Women's Outreach for Hillary member; an OFA Truth Team member; & a DNC Factivist member...currently a media influencer, digital activist/strategist, blogger and head of curation, editor and co-Founder of The People for Kamala Harris; an editor for Progress for Democrats on Facebook; a member of a closed group supporting Speaker Pelosi & her agenda, a member of Supermajority and a volunteer for Kamala Harris for the 2020 Democratic Party Nomination for President of the United States.
You can follow her Blog
at https://networkstrongertogether.blogspot.com & you can follow her on Twitter at GKMTNtwits
( find her on Twitter
*** My updated ebook is coming soon, life has gotten in the way but I'm going to say by September 1... :
"How to Influence Media in Real Time!"
What's in the book?:
( My updated ebook, "How to Influence Media in Real Time," will be ready soon. It will include updated examples of the conversations I have with some of my “media friends” and some updated indications that media can hear us! If you left a donation toward my effort to help Democrats win in 2020 in the first round, I will send you an updated copy as soon as it is ready. New donors who leaves a name and an email on my GoFundMe Page will get one as soon as it is ready to go! Thanking you in advance for your interest. I hope you will join me in helping media be the best they can be -- by being a media influencer, too, in your own way and at your own pace. I'll post here as soon as it's ready! )
*
See the League of Women Voters website:
Vote411 here
*
...for Networking for Democrats today!
g. (Unapologetic Democrat)
✊ Resisting "Fake News"
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