If Trump decides he wants to be president again, the Republican party will almost certainly hand the nomination to him in 2024, but if he doesn't it seems equally certain than former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will enter the GOP primary.
Most of what anyone needs to know about Pompeo can be observed in this exchange reported by Ronan Farrow at Vanity Fair.
Last year, in the early hours of October 27th, Philip Walton, an American citizen living and working as a farmer in southern Niger, was kidnapped in front of his family by armed mercenaries. The militants demanded a million-dollar ransom from Walton’s family and threatened to sell the American to local extremist groups. As Walton’s captors smuggled him across the border into northern Nigeria, Navy seals planned a rescue operation. Several days later, as the seals stood ready to conduct the raid, then Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was on a government plane, flying back to the United States after travelling in Asia. A State Department staffer entered Pompeo’s cabin and updated the secretary on Walton’s case. The staffer outlined the steps that Pompeo would need to take to facilitate the exfiltration, including a call to the President of Niger.
To the surprise of his aides, Pompeo pushed back on the staffer’s requests. Pompeo grew visibly annoyed with the request that he make the phone calls, eventually replying, “When am I going to sleep?” The staffer told Pompeo that the American citizen being held was unlikely to be sleeping much.
This is just one anecdote, but former staffers who spoke to Vanity Fair say Pompeo was entirely preoccupied with his own personal ambitions to the exclusion if his actual duties.
To some extent we already know this. You may recall that Pompeo used State Department funds to host a series of lavish dinners for campaign donors, judges, corporations, and public officials who may support him in the next primary. He also achieved virtually nothing during his time as the secretary.
I hope Pompeo does run and I hope he wins the primary because I would enjoy seeing him humiliated in a blowout.
As Pompeo set out on a post-election international trip, last November, his refusal to acknowledge the balloting results cast a shadow over his diplomacy. E.U. officials declined to meet with him, prompting Pompeo to cancel some stops. As he visited Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, and Georgia, where the United States has encouraged electoral transparency, career Foreign Service officers wondered what moral authority their country still carried on the subject. After he learned that plans for a routine transition meeting with his successor, Blinken, had leaked to the press, Pompeo cancelled it.
No one wanted to meet that asshole once they were no longer obligated to.