Pompeo Remains a Damaging Figure

The Economist: “For a man acknowledged to be highly intelligent, Mike Pompeo has a long history of talking nonsense. As a greenhorn House member, brought to Congress by the Tea Party wave of 2010, he made his name by pushing conspiracy theories about Hillary Clinton. He claimed, without evidence, that she was complicit in the murder of four Americans at an outpost in Benghazi, Libya, to a degree that was ‘worse, in some ways, than Watergate’. As Donald Trump’s secretary of state, he has encouraged a comparison, popular with Trump-loving evangelicals, between the irreligious president and the Jewish heroine Esther. His recent insistence that covid-19 probably emerged from a Chinese laboratory—a conclusion American spies appear not to share—was of this pattern.”

“The world has taken that into account. While Mr Pompeo has enraged the Chinese, hardly anyone else outside the Republican base seems to have taken his allegation all that seriously. The other half of America discounted it on the basis that Mr Pompeo said it. Officials in Australia, Germany and elsewhere similarly cast doubt on it. It is hard to think the words of any previous American chief diplomat, a role traditionally considered supra-partisan to a degree, have carried less weight.”

“Yet, in an administration of mediocrities, Mr Pompeo remains a substantial figure.”