Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo unleashed in an exclusive Breitbart News interview a blistering critique of what he views as President Joe Biden’s failed leadership of the United States, whereby the president has caused myriad domestic and international crises that threaten American leadership in the world and ordinary American families.
From the Middle-East to Russia, and from China to the U.S. border with Mexico, across the board internationally Pompeo says the Biden administration has harmed the United States and Americans are feeling the costs of these overseas crises right now. What’s more, Pompeo says Biden-created domestic crises with the U.S. economy–inflation on the rise, jobs concerns, and an unclear plan on how to fully reopen the United States complete with mixed messaging on public health measures and energy policy–are demonstrating failed leadership from President Biden just over a hundred days into his administration.
“We have seen this, you just went through at least a partial list of the last hundred something days and how fast it has turned,” Pompeo told Breitbart News. “On the international stage, it is very clear the Biden administration’s inability to demonstrate resolve—resolve delivers deterrence—has broken down some of the things that the Trump administration had established. You now see $6 gas or $5 gas, you can point to problems in the Middle-East that we didn’t have for four years and problems with the pipeline where we’ve now paid ransom money to a bad actor that they think came from Russia but they say didn’t have any Russian connection. This matters to the American people. If you get Middle-Eastern policy wrong, you end up with precisely what you’re seeing in our energy markets today. You close the pipeline, like the Keystone XL pipeline, and you have another pipeline sabotaged and hacked into and then you have rockets being fired from Gaza by an Iranian proxy and it shouldn’t surprise the average American it costs more money to get gasoline if you can even get it.”
Specifically, with regard to the instability in Israel where Hamas terrorists have been firing thousands of rockets and missiles into Tel Aviv, Jerusalem, and elsewhere–the worst hostilities between Palestinians and Israelis in nearly a decade–Pompeo puts the blame first with the Hamas terrorists but also with their Iranian backers and the Biden administration’s weak Iran policy.
“The first interest is this has to be hung on the terrorists themselves, the Palestinian Islamic jihadists and Hamas,” Pompeo said. “That’s absolutely the case. The second interest, the money, the military, and economic power that the terrorists have to launch these now thousands of missiles comes from the Islamic Republic of Iran. But make no mistake about it: The Biden administration is sitting even yet today in Vienna negotiating with the very regime that is underwriting terror against America’s ally Israel. How crazy is that to say ‘we’re going to make a deal with you where you can have billions of dollars and you can now have the money that you need to buy replacement missiles and replacement rockets for those that are being flown in from Gaza into Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.’ You should note, too, Hezbollah is watching as well. The Shia militias in Iraq that are underwritten by the Iranians are watching as well. If you can attack Israel, why not the American embassy in Baghdad? If you can attack from the west why not from the north—from Hezbollah—attack Israel? If the administration doesn’t make clear that the Iranians will pay a price for this terror, then you’re going to green light their willingness to do so. Real costs—real costs—need to be imposed on the Iranian regime for these attacks coming out of Gaza. If not, the Iranians will feel like they are free to move about the cabin and that will end badly—and it will end badly for the United States of America, too, not only in higher energy prices, but by ultimately if this really comes off the rails, incredible demands for young American men and women to go and fight in these far-off places. We said we weren’t going to let that happen. We didn’t and we established real deterrents against these adversaries.”
The Biden administration’s energy policies—from shutting down the Keystone XL pipeline, to banning oil drilling and natural gas exploration on federal lands, to the administration’s mishandling of the Colonial Pipeline hack—have caused real pains for Americans nationwide, too, Pompeo said.
“I was in North Dakota last week with a big gathering of folks who were producing American energy in the Bakken basin, in the Williston basin; these are real Americans busting their tail to produce real American energy that is affordable,” Pompeo said. “They talked about their families, their jobs, their churches, and the fact they had a pipeline shutdown and they have a Green New Deal that is going to regulate their ability to do this in a way that will make prohibitively expensive the work that they do and thereby threatening their jobs and their livelihoods. This matters to real Americans. You mentioned the ban in getting American energy off federal lands—a significant amount of this energy comes from federal lands. By the way, when it is done, it is done in a way that is environmentally friendly and clean. This is enormously costly. Certainly, for those workers and those who are the suppliers to those workers but also to every one of us who has to drive a car, who has to heat and cool our home, and uses electricity for ordinary purposes. Manufacturers in the United States of America who are operating in a highly energy-intensive environment, so the cost to produce manufactured goods in America goes up. But most of this has domestic, real ramifications for Americans.”
Pompeo said that while the negative domestic implications of the Biden energy policies are clear, there are also major national security concerns with what the president is doing. The former secretary of state said specifically the Chinese Communist Party loves what Biden is doing to undermine American energy interests.
“But as a national security matter, this is also devastating,” Pompeo said. “The Chinese Communist Party would love nothing better than to have the United States of America stop exporting energy. This is an enormous wealth creation opportunity for the United States and if we deny ourselves the opportunity to do it on some theory of a Green New Deal, the Chinese Communist Party will just simply give us the golf clap. They’ll applaud. When we reentered the Paris Climate Accords, who cheered the most loudly? Xi Jinping. Xi Jinping cheered because he has no intention of reducing their carbon footprint. They pop out a new coal-fired power plant once a month. They are going to grow on the backs—the Chinese Communist Party is going to grow their economy on the backs of the American worker, and that is a devastating indictment of the Biden administration’s weak foreign policy and reckless disregard for the American economy.”
Generally speaking, Pompeo also said the Chinese Communist Party senses weakness from the Biden administration as evidenced by the first summit between his successor, current Secretary of State Tony Blinken, and Chinese officials in Alaska a couple months ago. Pompeo said the Chinese Communist Party officials took a “jab” at Blinken to see if his actions would match his rhetoric.
“We can all identify weak spots in our adversaries,” Pompeo said. “The Chinese Communist Party has heard the rhetoric from the Biden administration on China. Frankly, the language from Secretary Blinken has been pretty good. But like any fight, your plan—your strategy—only lasts until you get hit in the face at which point you got to make a decision. Are you prepared to fight or are you going to cower in the corner? I assure you, the Chinese Communist Party is going to come hit America in the face because they’re going to want to see if the Biden administration is prepared to respond. That initial meeting in Anchorage, Alaska, was the shot across the bow. It was the first—it wasn’t even a punch, it was a jab measuring, it was a jab from the Chinese Communist Party to see if President Biden is going to return to the weak foreign policy that doesn’t protect Americans, that doesn’t protect jobs, that Obama-Biden had for eight years.”
The weakness and lack of resolve from the Biden administration has also, Pompeo said, unleashed a wave of migrants surging across the United States’ southern border. Pompeo explained that Biden’s decision—for which there was no logic other than purely political undoing of Trump successes—to end “Remain in Mexico” and bring back “catch and release” on the southern border has created historic surges of migration from central America.
“Weakness begets war and strength deters. You could certainly say that on our border as well,” Pompeo said. “We have weak enforcement of our laws. We have an immigration system that is made up of laws. When you refuse to enforce them—or even worse, signal to people in El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala, that you are welcome here to come up and violate our laws and this is what you’re going to get, you’re going to get chaos. You’re going to get an enormous humanitarian crisis. You’re going to get a very real national security crisis. You’re going to see unprecedented levels of chemicals—fentanyl, drugs—coming across our border as well, destroying the lives and families of Americans all across our country.”
The Trump administration, on the other hand, was according to Pompeo committed to a vision of sovereignty along the border and protecting American workers first when it came to immigration policy. The Biden administration, he said, ripped that up for unknown reasons—the consequences of Biden’s policies have barely begun revealing themselves to American citizens.
“We in the Trump administration understood that President Trump’s commitment to ‘build the wall’ was about broadly defining American sovereignty to protect the American people and make sure American workers got jobs in the first instance, those well-paying jobs,” Pompeo said. “This administration undid that. I don’t know why they chose to undo that. It’s almost like it was a reckless indifference or an intention to just undo anything that Trump or Pompeo had done. We had negotiated—I had negotiated along with Pat Cipollone—we had negotiated with the Mexicans to deliver a policy to turn the magnet off. It was called ‘Remain in Mexico.’ That policy mattered. It told people: ‘Don’t travel through Mexico and put your life and the life of your children at risk because you’re not going to get to stay here in the United States unless you have a valid asylum claim.’ When we did that, everyone could see we were serious about enforcing the policy. It worked. It secured our southern border. Then the Biden administration came in and just ripped it up. There was a real sense that the Biden administration would be weak on the border and when he put Vice President Harris in charge of that, I think that we reinforced. That was the president saying ‘hey, it’s not my problem and I’m just going to hand it off to the Vice President.’ I think that the border crisis that the people of Texas and Arizona and California are feeling today and that we will all feel here in the United States before too long is a direct result of their refusal to simply stay the course and enforce the very same policy the Trump administration put in place.”
Pompeo also ripped Vice President Kamala Harris for failure to step up and do the job that Biden delegated to her—which was to solve the border crisis.
“I was asked the other day about how Vice President Harris said the other day something to the effect of ‘this is going to take real time for us to get this right,’ and my response was ‘you can do it in two seconds,” Pompeo said. “Simply restore the policies we had in place at noon on Jan. 20 and the magnet will be shut off just like that.’ Allow ICE and CBP to do their jobs, this won’t take long. We could get back to that place in a matter of days if not hours.”
When asked what he thinks of Harris refusing to go to the border—she has not for months and has no plans to do so—Pompeo said she is demonstrating a refusal to lead.
“My sense is she doesn’t want to own this crisis,” Pompeo said. “But that’s not how leaders lead. Leaders lead by accepting responsibility and fixing problems. The first step in that every time is to understand the problems and listening to those who are most directly impacted. The only way to do that is to get down there and hear from the people who are both working on the problem—our CBP officials and our ICE officials and the State Department people who are responsible for consular activity in the area as well. These are the people having to deal with this—and then there are the human beings who are affected by it as well, the ordinary citizens. So, yeah, if you don’t listen to them and understand it, I don’t understand how it is you get your head around it. I wish she would do that. But I would say one more thing. In the end, presidents are responsible. So you can’t delegate your responsibility. You can give authority to someone else to deal with it, but your responsibility sits in one place. It sits on the desk of the president of the United States and it’s his responsibility to address this crisis on our southern border.”
To top it all off, Pompeo said that the United States has serious economic woes brewing thanks to Biden’s policies. April’s jobs numbers came in much lower than expected, and inflation is on the rise, signaling concerns over the strengthening economy that Trump left Biden being squandered this early into the Biden administration. Biden’s unwillingness to admit enhanced unemployment benefits from the federal government—which were unprecedented before the pandemic—have added to businesses’ hardship in seeking employees. Pompeo also said “mixed messaging” from the Biden administration on public health measures is complicating reopening processes, and frustrating Americans coast-to-coast. Voters in Pennsylvania, for instance, just stripped Democrat Gov. Tom Wolf—a top Biden ally—of his emergency authorities at the ballot box this week, a sign of that growing unease with Democrats and Biden in particular.
“Let me add one more to this: The Biden administration’s mixed messaging when the science clearly indicates the country can reopen puts an incredible damper on travel where people aren’t going to see their family members and people aren’t headed back to movie theaters and restaurants all because you have the Biden administration wearing a mask in a room when it’s empty and signaling a very anti-science position with regard to this Wuhan virus,” Pompeo said. “Your point is well-taken with regard to this policy on unemployment. That which you subsidize you get more of. You subsidize people staying at home and not working, you give huge checks to people, the incentive system is skewed and people make rational decisions about whether they’re going to spend more time on leisure or more time at work. We need to go, and I hope every governor will go, and undo those unemployment policies that are denying businesses the opportunity to get back—both the opportunity to get back to work because it’s safe and people have been vaccinated and second require people to come back and no longer have the American taxpayer underwrite people staying at home when they are able-bodied and able to work.”
Pompeo advised Republicans in Congress, state legislatures nationwide, and governors around the country to fight as hard as they can against the Democrats and “never give an inch” on anything, period.
“Never give an inch,” Pompeo said when asked for his advice to Republicans. “This is a fight about the soul of America and what our nation is going to look like as it moves forward. You talked about a honeymoon of a hundred days. That makes no sense. I think the Trump administration got about a hundred hours. They came after us hard. This isn’t about being vindictive. This isn’t about being mean. This is about preserving our republic and protecting the United States from the liberal, progressive onslaught whether it’s as you mentioned the $6 trillion they intend to spend—that’s crazy money—you mentioned inflation which will undermine the poorest among us, people without means spend much more of their money on basics like food and energy and things that they need like buying paper and pencils and things they need for their kids to go to school. Inflation will gut their paychecks. The Republicans at every level—not just at the federal level in the Senate and the House, but state legislatures and governors across America—need to defend American workers. They need to support working class Americans all across this country. They need to get their states and their people back to work and back to school and when they do that we need to go fix our school system and make sure it is teaching the greatness of America not the idea that we were fundamentally racist when we were founded. It is untrue and to allow those kinds of ideas—the ideas at the center of critical race theory—into our schools undermines even further the ideas of hard work and family that we know have made this country so special.”
The good news, Pompeo said, is that the future is bright for the right. Republicans are five seats away from a U.S. House majority, and one seat away from a U.S. Senate majority. They also have a path right back into the White House in November 2024, especially if the left continues down the road Biden is taking the country. Pompeo is out campaigning with Republican candidates coast-to-coast in their quest to retake majorities in both chambers of Congress in the midterms, and said he believes conservative ideas will win the day in the end.
“I’m long on America. I believe that the conservative ideas I’ve been out fighting for for an awfully long time—it predates my time as a member of Congress, since I was a young soldier I don’t even want to tell you how long ago—our ideas are right,” Pompeo said. “They’re right for America. I think great swaths of the American people get it. I hear this all the time. They love the policies that we put forward from the four years we had the ability to push them. They truly do. They were things that gave them an opportunity. So, yes, I have been out campaigning for a bunch of candidates. I am going to keep doing that. We need to make sure that President Biden and their runway is as short as humanly possible so that conservatives get elected all across America. I am confident that is going to happen. This nation is not in decline. But we have to choose that. We have to execute that. We have to deliver that. So we need people who are fighting to never give an inch and who are acting in a way that will deliver good outcomes for ordinary Americans all across this country. I believe it will happen, we just need to all—those of us who are principled conservatives—do so in a way that is fearless and bold and articulate.”
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