Secretary of State Mike Pompeo headed back to Iowa Friday bearing a new human rights report that could advance him down the road to become a 2024 presidential contender.
“Our approach to government draws on that beautiful teaching from the first chapter of Genesis, that all human beings are made in the image of God,” he told the Family Leadership Summit in Des Moines. “Right now, 4 out of 5 people around the world don’t enjoy religious freedom, and we’re fighting tooth and nail to change that.”
Pompeo has dismissed speculation that he is keeping any presidential fires burning, but this visit marks his second trip to Iowa since taking over as the nation’s top diplomat. Pompeo has defended such an unusual itinerary as a legitimate act of public diplomacy, but his pilgrimage Friday is a traditional one for Republican presidential aspirants seeking the blessing of the state’s Christian conservatives.
“He’s largely unknown to Iowans,” said Steve Deace, an Iowa-based radio show host and Republican campaign operative. “I don’t think it’s too early at all for him to get out here and establish a presence.”
The appearance also helps with the shadow primary for support from prominent local conservatives, such as Family Leader chief executive Bob Vander Plaats. Pompeo “wants Bob for 2024,” a Republican campaign consultant close to the administration said, noting Vander Plaats’s support for recent victors of the Iowa Republican caucuses. “Bob is the kingmaker of Iowa.”
Pompeo maintains that such trips are a legitimate exercise in public diplomacy, affording an opportunity to tout the State Department’s work while rallying domestic support for U.S. foreign policy priorities. He has conducted public events in Kansas, Texas, and Florida in recent years.
“I’ve made it one of my missions to travel all over America to highlight the great work that we’re doing,” Pompeo said Friday at the Family Leader Summit. “We’ve executed a foreign policy that American families in Des Moines and Dubuque and in Davenport can believe in. It’s a pro-national security foreign policy focused on America. It’s a pro-religious freedom foreign policy. And it’s a 100% pro-life foreign policy.”
Local leaders and national observers struggle to recall previous secretaries of state traveling to such an important presidential battleground while in office, and Pompeo knows that any national politician who visits Iowa will bring presidential speculation with him.
“It’s not just the audience there that’s going to hear him — this is going to be heard more broadly among evangelicals,” the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins said.
Pompeo may be seeking to claim the mantle of GOP leadership after President Trump leaves office. Pompeo has maintained a very close relationship with Trump, buoyed by frequent meetings — during his tenure as CIA director, he would often give Trump the daily intelligence briefing — and a knack for shaping the president’s often-unformed foreign policy without seeming to contradict Trump.
“His support of the president, his loyalty to the president, and his courage on how he’s taken on China in his defense of international religious freedom, those are the things that resonate,” Perkins said.
He hit those themes in his speech Friday, by declaring that “God is indeed a God of truth” and using that axiom as an anchor for his denunciations of the Chinese Communist Party. “We’re telling the truth every day of where the coronavirus came from and the communists’ cover-up of that virus.”
Pompeo has used displays of loyalty to maintain influence with Trump, according to numerous observers. Some of those decisions, however, such as his public participation in the signing of a peace deal with the Taliban, might leave him vulnerable to attacks from prospective Republican presidential rivals.
“That’s a great case in point of Pompeo making the political calculation of remaining secretary of state, remaining in Trump’s good graces, in the face of probably what he personally would think” about the deal, according to a former White House official. The official noted Pompeo was “caught in a photo with a Taliban leader, which can easily be used against him later.”
On the other hand, Pompeo may also have figured out how to translate his foreign policy work into a domestic political platform that could resonate with the evangelical voters, who he has the best chance of consolidating into a base for 2024.
“This does show the connection between the domestic and foreign,” Perkins said.
