Pompeo teases potential 2024 run, wades into culture war during Kansas GOP speech

Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo teased his political future to Kansas Republicans in a keynote speech Saturday at the state party convention in Wichita.

In the 14 months since leaving office as the country’s top diplomat, Pompeo has courted donors and laid the groundwork for a potential 2024 White House bid. On Saturday, he emphasized his strong rapport with former president Donald Trump while coyly hinting at his own presidential aspirations.

“I was in Iowa yesterday. That’s not a coincidence either,” Pompeo told several hundred audience members at the Hyatt Regency.

The former congressman and CIA director, who joked that he’s now unemployed, has visited Iowa three times since Trump left office at the beginning of 2021.

“This fight for our families, this fight for our conservative values, is real and it is worthy. I don’t know what I’ll be doing in 2023 or 2024. I can’t tell you that,” Pompeo said.

He said Trump affectionately refers to him as “my Mike.” But job security in the Trump administration was never to be taken for granted, he said.

“I dutifully checked my Twitter account every morning to make sure I still had a place to go to work,” Pompeo said. “You all laugh. Five secretaries of defense, four national security advisers and me — survivor.”

But he struck a more somber tone when he turned to the state of the country under President Joe Biden.

“There’s very serious work to do,” Pompeo said. “This nation has walked down a path that leads us in a direction where it’s no longer the case that everybody understands that the thing that you do is you work. The thing that you do is love our nation. The thing that you do is you defend its history and all that comes alongside that.”

Pompeo waded further into the culture war to decry The 1619 Project and other efforts to reframe conventional U.S. historical narratives around the realities and consequences of slavery.

“If we spend a little more time doing that — being inspired by those who came before us and our founders — if we read a little more of the Bible and a lot less of The 1619 Project, then America would be a heck of a lot better place,” Pompeo said to loud applause.

He also made his views on gender identity clear.

“We know here in Kansas, too, that there are only two genders. We should speak the truth about these things,” Pompeo said to more applause.

The former secretary of state did not explicitly invoke Russia or Ukraine, only going as far as to blame Biden for emboldening bad actors on the world stage.

“It does look like we’re back to the foreign policy where the president goes around the world apologizing and bad guys decide they can invade sovereign countries with almost no cost to them,” Pompeo said.

In a Fox News column last month, he wrote that “President Biden has been weak toward Putin, unstable and unclear — he doesn’t understand what is at stake in the fight against Russia and doesn’t know that it takes strength to defend America and keep us out of war.”

Pompeo, who also called the Russian president “very savvy” and “very shrewd” in a February interview, has provided few specifics about how he would like to see the U.S. respond differently to the conflict.

He told audience members Saturday that electing Republicans is the best way forward, at home and abroad.

“We are the party that has the opportunity to be the salvation that this nation and this world needs,” Pompeo said.

This story was originally published March 12, 2022 at 11:14 PM.