Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, accuses Nikki Haley of conspiring with Jared Kushner and Ivanka Trump to be named vice president, even while she was Donald Trump’s ambassador to the UN, in a new memoir that is rife with jabs at potential rivals in the 2024 Republican presidential primary.
Pompeo writes that Haley actually “played” Trump’s then-chief of staff, John Kelly. Instead of meeting the president alone, he was accompanied by Trump’s daughter and her husband, both senior advisers. Pompeo describes his rage at Haley for securing a personal Oval Office meeting with Trump without consulting him.
“As best Kelly could tell,” Pompeo writes, “they were presenting a possible ‘Haley for vice-president’ option. I can’t confirm this, but [Kelly] was certain he had been played and was unhappy about it. This visit did not reflect a team effort but undermined our work for America.”
Pompeo’s new book, Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love, which will be released next week, contains a juicy tidbit. The Guardian obtained a copy. The book also claims that Trump had the “nutty idea” that Pompeo could simultaneously serve as both secretary of state and secretary of defense, in addition to the Haley narrative being one of its most shocking passages.
However, the Haley article is very much in the tradition of the Washington journalism and tell-alls that Pompeo purports to despise. Additionally, it supports rumors that Trump did consider firing Mike Pence in favor of Haley, which he was forced to refute in 2019.
It will heighten the mystery surrounding rumors that Kushner’s family is gathering money for Haley in preparation for her 2024 run. Trump is still the sole declared candidate for the Republican nomination one year out from the primary. But the struggle for dominance is getting worse.
Pompeo joins Pence in publishing his campaign book, but he is published one month before Ron DeSantis, the Florida governor who is Trump’s only real polling foe.
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In his descriptions of Pence, a self-described fellow sincere Christian, and most of Trump himself, Pompeo is studiedly polite. In contrast to Pence, Pompeo refrains from openly criticizing his former boss in his memoir, So Help Me God. Additionally, Pompeo feels more at ease with the previous president’s frequently coarse language.
For example, Pompeo claims that Trump referred to John Bolton, his third national security adviser, as a “scumbag loser.” After being sacked, Bolton wrote his book, The Room Where It Happened. The book, which reported on the president’s private discussions and what Pompeo deems compassionate data, was a blockbuster despite Trump’s attempts to prevent publication.
Bolton has now put forward a bid for the White House of his own to stop Trump. Bolton receives salvos from Pompeo, who compares him to Edward Snowden, a contractor for the National Security Agency who revealed surveillance secrets to the public in 2013 but who “at least had the courtesy not to lie about his reason.”
Pompeo writes that Bolton “should be in jail for disclosing secret material.” Pompeo also expresses his desire to provide a witness account in Bolton’s eventual criminal prosecution. Pompeo criticizes Haley’s performance in the UN ambassadorship, which he calls “a post that is considerably less essential than people assume,” and her writings as she weighs a presidential run.
“She has described her role as going toe-to-toe with tyrants,” Pompeo writes. “If so, then why would she quit such an important job at such an important time?”
In October 2018, Haley resigned, or as Pompeo put it, “flat-out threw in the towel.” According to Pompeo, by leaving as governor of South Carolina, Haley “abandoned” Trump in the same way that she had “the great people of South Carolina.”
True to his title, Pompeo does not mince words when describing his achievements, first as the director of the CIA and later as the head of the State Department. However, the former soldier and congressman did divulge information about a private conversation in which, according to him, the president’s chief of staff stated that Trump wanted him to retain his position as secretary of state while adding secretary of defense to his portfolio.
Pompeo claims that on July 19, 2020, Mark Meadows, Trump’s former chief of staff, informed him that Mark Esper was “not going to make it” at the Pentagon for very long. This was in the middle of the turbulent summer of the coronavirus outbreak and demonstrations for racial justice.
Families can't afford groceries, moms can't find baby formula, crime's at an all-time high, and we still have near record inflation.
Those are the issues. No one cares about what a group of tone deaf suits are talking about in Davos. pic.twitter.com/a2MG3WVOwV
— Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaley) January 20, 2023
Pompeo says Meadows told him Trump wanted his secretary of state to “dual hat,” meaning to “take on leading the department of defense as an additional duty.”
Pompeo says he told Meadows that was “a nutty idea” as he had “plenty” to do at the state and “couldn’t possibly command defense at the same time.”
Pompeo claims that Trump did not ask him to perform two tasks just then. The author adds that the president was “reminded that Henry Kissinger had been both national security advisor and secretary of state” to Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford after Bolton resigned. “President Trump pitched the idea to me,” Pompeo writes. “I think he was half-kidding.”
When Trump reads Pompeo’s descriptions of such “nutty thoughts,” he might not be in the mood to joke. Instead, the former secretary of state writes that they immediately “faded, all for good.”
Final Thoughts
Nikki Haley schemed with Ivanka and Jared to try and become Vice President instead of Pence, Mike Pompeo claims in the new book. Please tell us what you think in the section below. Follow us only on Lee Daily for more news like this.
