Mike Pompeo, Trump's Former Secretary of State, Decides Not to Challenge Ex-Boss for President in 2024
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Pompeo long teased a 2024 presidential run before ultimately deciding to step back as a handful of better-known Republicans look to battle Donald Trump for the Republican nomination
Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo will not run for president in 2024, after publicly entertaining the idea over the past several months.
"It is simplest, and most accurate, to say that this decision is personal," Pompeo wrote in a lengthy statement about his decision on Friday. "At each stage of my public service ... I've been blessed to have the opportunity to advance America in a way that fit the time and the moment. This is not that time or that moment for me to seek elected office again."
The news is significant, but not entirely unexpected. Though Pompeo had been making many moves indicative that he was considering a run — including releasing a memoir of his time in the Trump administration and assembling teams in Iowa, New Hampshire and South Carolina — he struggled to garner widespread support.
Related:Who Will Run for President in 2024? Rumored Republican and Democratic Candidates
Pompeo acknowledged his interest in running for president back in September 2022, saying during a fundraising event in Chicago, "We are doing the things one would do to get ready," Politico reports.
The former congressman from Kansas joined President Donald Trump's administration in 2017, serving as director of the Central Intelligence Agency from 2017 to 2018 and running the State Department from 2018 to 2021.
Prior to that, Pompeo was an Army officer after graduating first in his class at West Point and going on to attend Harvard Law School, where he served as an editor of the Harvard Law Review.
If he had gone through with a presidential campaign, Pompeo would've pitted himself directly against former boss Trump, who announced his own candidacy in November. "Unlike others, if I go down an escalator, no one will notice," Pompeo once joked, referring to Trump's famous ride down the Trump Tower escalator in 2015. That hard truth — that most voters aren't paying attention to Pompeo — likely weighed into the onetime cabinet member's decision to sit 2024 out.
Pompeo's absence from the campaign trail will help consolidate the Republican primary, giving Trump's GOP opponents a greater chance of defeating him.
Related:Nikki Haley, Ex-Governor and Diplomat, Launches 2024 Presidential Run
While in office, Pompeo weathered some scandal, including reportedly using government state trips to meet with Republican donors, and directing state officials to perform household tasks like washing dishes and walking his dog (a move that Trump openly endorsed while president).
Since leaving the White House, Pompeo has made headlines for, among other things, calling Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi an "activist" in his White House memoir.
Khashoggi — an open critic of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — died in 2018 after entering the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 and never being seen again.
In his book, Pompeo wrote that the journalist "didn't deserve to die, but we need to be clear about who he was — and too many in the media were not."
Elsewhere in his book, Pompeo wrote that the Trump administration "delivered a peaceful transition on January 6, 2021, exactly as our Constitution requires," which some critics said was dismissive of the attempted insurrection that day by a group of violent Trump supporters.
Pompeo has, since leaving the White House, offered a handful of vague criticisms of his former boss, writing on Twitter just one day after Trump announced his 2024 run that the country needs "more seriousness, less noise, and leaders who are looking forward, not staring in the rearview mirror claiming victimhood."
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Pompeo made headlines last year after he revealed he lost 90 lbs. in six months in an interview with The New York Post, explaining how he set up a home gym in his basement with dumbbells and an elliptical.
"I started exercising, not every day, but nearly every day, and eating right and the weight just started to come off," he told the Post. "I tried to get down there five, six times a week and stay at it for a half-hour or so. And that was nothing scientific. There was no trainer, there was no dietician. It was just me."
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