The New Yorker has published a profile of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo this week and it features some very unflattering quotes about him from former colleagues.
The piece discusses how Pompeo has gone from being a Trump critic during the 2016 presidential election to being one of his most loyal defenders. One former White House official tells the publication that “there will never be any daylight publicly between [Pompeo] and Trump” and described the secretary of state as “among the most sycophantic and obsequious people around Trump.”
One former American ambassador, meanwhile, went even further and described Pompeo as “a heat-seeking missile for Trump’s ass.”
During the 2016 campaign, Pompeo warned that Trump would be “an authoritarian President who ignored our Constitution.” Three years later, the report says, Pompeo has rationalized his past reservations about the president by believing that God may have chosen him to enact His will.
“Pompeo, an evangelical Christian who keeps an open Bible on his desk, now says it’s possible that God raised up Trump as a modern Queen Esther, the Biblical figure who convinced the King of Persia to spare the Jewish people,” the New Yorker reports. “He defines his own job as serving the President, whatever the President asks of him.”