Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo on Friday addressed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky‘s separate meetings with Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump, saying they were “very different.”
Speaking on Jesse Watters Primetime, Pompeo was asked how he saw the meetings between Zelensky and Harris and Zelensky and Trump.
“Very different meetings. In one case, he was meeting with a vice president who was in charge when tens of thousands of people of his — Zelensky’s — people in Ukraine were killed. And the other president had deterred Vladimir Putin for four years,” he said.
Pompeo then defended Trump’s record as president, saying the difference between Harris and Trump “couldn’t be more stark.”
“The United States of America stood strong, we were capable of deterring Vladimir Putin in spite of the fact that CNN and the Washington Post talked about President Trump as being a Russian puppet. … The outcome will be very different too. With President Trump in office, we will achieve these, we will get a good outcome for the Ukrainian people, and Vladimir Putin will again be deterred from the aggression we have seen these last 2 1/2, almost three years now,” he said.
Pompeo’s comments follow Zelensky’s visit to the United States which included meetings on Capitol Hill with members of both the House and Senate, at the White House with President Joe Biden and Harris, including a press conference with her instead of Biden, and at Trump Tower in New York City on Friday with Trump.
After meeting with Zelensky, Harris vowed that U.S. support for Ukraine would remain unwavering as part of a foreign policy strategy to maintain U.S. dominance on the world stage.
“Isolation is not insulation,” she said. “So then, the United States supports Ukraine, not out of charity but because it is in our strategic interest.”
Zelesnky’s relationship with Trump has been considerably frostier than his with the Biden administration, with Trump earlier this week at a rally in Pennsylvania calling him “the greatest salesman on Earth.”
Ahead of the meeting, Zelensky said he believes he and Trump share the view that the war between Russia and Ukraine needs to end.
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“I think we have common view that the war in Ukraine has to be stopped, and Putin can’t win, and Ukraine has to prevail,” he said. “And I want to discuss with you the details of our plan.”
Afterward, Trump called the meeting between him and Zelensky “great” and said that if he wins in November, he will “quickly” end the war.