One year after changing his lifestyle and losing nearly 100 pounds, two years after leaving the Trump administration, and one month after he released Never Give an Inch, his New York Times bestseller, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is contemplating whether he will run for the Republican nomination for president.
“We’re a couple months out from solving the equation,” Pompeo said in an interview with the Washington Examiner regarding his deliberations with his wife, Susan, about the near future. “We’re praying, trying to figure out if this is the place where we could have the most impact, and trying to get organized, get our thinking organized, so that when we make that decision, we can either present the case to the American people in a way that is who we are and how we would try to work for them.
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“Or we’ll decide not to run, and we’ll go find another way to try and be productive.”
Pompeo would be the second former Trump official to enter the race, along with former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley. Trump has also declared his candidacy, as has biotech entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy.
Pompeo said there is plenty of time for him or anyone else to join in, such as Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL), and that he isn’t moved by the media rush.
“The national media’s always out in front because it’s good headlines, good chyrons, good clicks, but there is plenty of time, and this is — of all the things in one’s life, this is one of the things you want to measure twice and cut once. You want to make sure you get the decision right,” he said.
Pompeo’s path to his decision began by making the decision to get healthy. In June 2021, six months after leaving a job that required a lot of travel and eating late at night at his desk, he stepped on the scale and hit a number he’d never seen before: 300.
The next day he woke up and told Susan that “today is the day,” and he’s never looked back.
Pompeo said his new trim look gets him as many comments as anything he’s done in his long life of service that began at West Point. “People bring it up all the time. I cannot tell you how many folks who have said, ‘I saw what you did. My wife told me I have to do it, too.’ Or, ‘My sister saw that you did it, and she encouraged me to be better.’ Or ‘I saw it, and I decided I was going to do it, too,’” he said.
Those around him make sure he stays on track. “If we’re out someplace eating or something and I reach for the bread basket, you can see people going, ‘careful!’ Which is lovely because they’re looking out for me. They know that it was something that I really wanted to do and needed to do, and they’re trying to help,” he said.
Born in California, the former businessman adopted his mother’s home state of Kansas over 20 years ago. An Army veteran who graduated first in his class at West Point, Pompeo ran for Congress at the beginning of the Tea Party movement and had served three terms when he was plucked by Trump to serve as the director of the CIA.
His book Never Give an Inch details his suffer-no-fools approach as Trump’s top diplomat and is delivered in bursts of sharp-edged humor.
Pompeo said that when he wrote the book, he decided he was going to tell it as he saw it, warts and all: “It wasn’t about creating a legacy. It wasn’t about claiming victory. It was just about, hey, this was kind of this world I occupied for four years and these two massive opportunities and burdens, and this was the prism that we brought to solve each of these problems that, in most cases, have been around for decades and how can you either fix them or manage them in a way that delivers for the people you are responsible for.”
The book is not strictly a policy book or a book about foreign policy theory and strategy but “a description of the pragmatist’s, practitioner’s view of being in these two roles, interacting with real human beings to try to deliver a set of outcomes for my boss, the president, and the American people.”
Some of his former administration peers were none too pleased with his frankness, including Haley and former Trump national security adviser John Bolton.
Pompeo shrugs, “Well, no one’s challenged that what I said wasn’t true, and I still stand by everything I wrote,” he said, including a passage that claimed that Haley, as U.N. ambassador, had tried to replace Vice President Mike Pence on Trump’s reelection ticket.
Haley pushed back on that in an interview with Fox News, saying, "It’s really sad when you’re having to go out there and put lies and gossip to sell a book."
Pompeo’s criticism of Bolton is scathing, accusing him of leaking classified material in Bolton’s own memoir, The Room Where it Happened.
Bolton said in January of this year he was leaning toward a run for president as well but thus far hasn’t made the leap.
Last year, Pompeo put together an operation he used to help campaign for Republican candidates in last fall’s midterm elections — it also would help form the infrastructure of a presidential campaign, if he runs.
As a young lieutenant, Pompeo noticed the lack of correlation between soldiers’ talent and their rate of promotion — evidence, Pompeo would soon learn, of a wider problem with government institutions, not merely the military.
“You could watch the disconnect between merit and policy played out through a bureaucratic prism, but you can’t come to appreciate it until you are responsible for that bureaucracy,” he said.
That vantage point came first as CIA director until the spring of 2018 and then as secretary of state, when he said he could understand what these key federal bureaucracies looked like from the very top on down. And then his other realization: Just as merit and promotion had been so disconnected, there was the incongruity of his limited range to make changes because the culture of those bureaucracies had become so entrenched. “Your capacity to move the rock, to change the inertial direction of these enormous agencies that have truly become disconnected from their mission set, is really appalling and presents a lot of risk on its own because that inertia doesn’t reflect what either the country needs or the president’s directing,” he said.
“When they’re unmoored from, ‘Hey, the president said X and the secretary said to do X,’ and now all of a sudden the machine won’t or can’t or just is too big to do X, you know that there’s this real risk that you’re going to end up in a bad place either intentionally or unintentionally as a result of this,” he explained.
What Trump called the “deep state,” Pompeo called, in the case of the State Department at least, “radically left of America and the democratic tradition of our republic. It’s mind-boggling.”
He recalled a moment in a meeting one day when he was “sitting around with 10 or 12 of my medium senior people, not the deputy, but very senior folks, and I said, ‘How many of you’ve ever been on a manufacturing floor?’ Nobody raised their hand. Maybe they didn’t think I was serious. ‘No, seriously. How many of you’ve ever actually been out where there was a company making something?’”
But the lack of hands in the air was accurate: None had had that experience.
“The people who serve the people in this country are so disconnected culturally from the people they serve. They don’t know anyone that grew up in western Pennsylvania or south-central Kansas or anywhere in between,” he said.
“I could have gone through a list of things that are pretty commonplace in massive parts of America that people in high levels of government would either have no knowledge of or have disdain for.
“That’s not good.”
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Pompeo has visited the early primary states of Iowa, New Hampshire, and South Carolina, discussing his life story, which spans from his time managing a Baskin-Robbins to helping negotiate the Abraham Accords — the joint peace deal signed between the state of Israel, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, and the United States.
Asked one more time about the possibility of a presidential candidacy, he only said, “There is still plenty of time.”
Salena Zito is a national political reporter for the Washington Examiner.