Secretary of State Mike Pompeo is the rare cabinet officer who has maintained a kinship with President Trump over time. For a boss prone to outbursts and who gets tired of staffers about as frequently as he drinks Diet Coke, staying close to the president is no small feat. It’s clear Pompeo still has Trump’s confidence.
But does the secretary of state have the confidence of his own staff?
As the impeachment investigation heats up, more and more stories have appeared in the press painting Pompeo as a partisan actor more concerned about staying on Trump’s good side than standing up for the people at the State Department he is supposed to be leading. There is an emerging divide between career diplomats on one side and the senior State Department leadership team on the other, with the rank and file reportedly grilling Pompeo’s deputies about the lack of transparency and the secretary’s unwillingness to defend former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch from a Rudy Giuliani-orchestrated smear campaign. State Department employees are reaching out to Congress on their own initiative, registering their worries about leadership and policy issues directly to lawmakers.
All of this comes on top of the already-frosty relationship between Pompeo and Congress, which after all is responsible for authorizing the State Department’s operations and appropriating its budget. Democrats lost patience with the secretary a long time ago. Frigid ties with Congress are nothing new of course, but Pompeo’s penchant to be a political attack dog for the Trump administration is not exactly helping matters.
Of course, Pompeo is hardly the first politician to hold the top diplomat position.
Thomas Jefferson, William Jennings Bryant, Hillary Clinton, and John Kerry were all politicians who ran for office, indeed, all four ran for president at one point in their political careers. What differentiates Pompeo from this group, however, is his jaded partisanship. He has never really made the transition from a Tea Party congressman representing deep-red Kansas to an ostensibly nonpartisan secretary of state representing the country at large.
The first position understandably involved taking a hammer to the Democratic opposition and blasting Clinton at every opportunity. Yet, the second requires a focus on the U.S. national interest, building relationships across the political aisle in order to ensure the State Department’s prerogatives are protected, and traveling the world in what can seem like constant crisis management. This is a transition Pompeo has not made.
Watching the secretary of state give interviews to local television and radio stations in Kansas, you’d think he’s still in his congressional suite on Capitol Hill, preparing to go to battle against every Democrat on the planet. It seems like he mentions former President Barack Obama as often as he mentions Iran. If the secretary is on thin ice, it’s not because of his role in the impeachment inquiry, but rather because of his inability or unwillingness to leave politics at the door before he enters the building and rides the elevator to his 7th floor State Department office.
Sure, it sounds naive: a cabinet officer can never forget about politics completely. If you’re a permanent resident of Washington, D.C., politics comes with the territory, particularly if you’re running a division of the federal bureaucracy. Yet as the Kansas City Star wrote in a scathing editorial, it’s about time Pompeo made a decision. If he wants to remain a political animal, he can resign from his post and run for the Senate — but if he wants to be a diplomat, it’s about time he acted like one.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
