Pompeo not likely to make waves
WASHINGTON — Last week, a particularly chaotic time at the White House, President Donald Trump told reporters that he liked conflict. He said he enjoyed hearing disparate views before making decisions.
But only to a point it seems. In Mike Pompeo, whom Trump nominated Tuesday to replace Rex Tillerson as secretary of state, the president gets someone more attuned to his erratic style and flamboyant personality, and someone who may more readily agree with him.
That could help Pompeo operate as the nation’s top diplomat since foreign governments are more likely to view him as speaking didetails, rectly for Trump when it comes to North Korea, Iran, trade disputes and other foreign policy dilemmas. Tillerson had credibility problems because he publicly disagreed with Trump on several major issues.
Pompeo is likely to hew closer to Trump’s views, although those can often be moving targets. He also has honed political skills that Tillerson lacked. Tillerson, a former Exxon Mobil CEO, took the job with no government experience.
Democrats expressed concern that Pompeo might be inclined to withhold information that challenges Trump’s world view.
As director of the Central Intelligence Agency, Pompeo most frequently gives Trump his morning intelligence briefing. Trump is notoriously uninterested in so Pompeo has shortened the material and reportedly avoids critical issues such as Russian interference in U.S. interests.
Tillerson was often seen as a moderating force who could calm some of Trump’s positions. “There’s a pattern and practice to dismiss anyone with whom this president has a policy difference, and that appears to be the case with Secretary Tillerson,” said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif. “I regret to say this, but it appears any number of things can put you on the wrong side of President Trump, who appears to have very little patience with anyone who has a different point of view.”
Publicly, however, Pompeo has not been shy about Russia meddling. He joined other top intelligence community officials in congressional testimony last month to warn that Moscow is mounting another campaign to intervene in upcoming U.S. elections.
A lawyer, Pompeo, 54, represented Kansas in the U.S. House of Representatives for six years through 2016, graduated from West Point in 1986 and was an army officer who served in the first Gulf War.
Pompeo is far more hawkish than Tillerson, and some experts said that could complicate already fraught dealings with countries like North Korea. But Daniel Russel, an assistant secretary of state in the Obama administration, said Pompeo’s position as head of the CIA might be a boost. “The job of ‘spy chief ’ is one they (North Koreans) fully understand and respect,” Russel said.