Mike Pompeo unravels as Donald Trump tries to scapegoat him

| 9:09 am EDT October 26, 2019
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Donald Trump desperately needs a scapegoat, but he just can’t find one. He’s apparently decided that no matter how badly Rudy Giuliani and Mick Mulvaney keep screwing up, they know where too many of the bodies are buried – and they’re too vindictive – to be safely thrown under the bus. Trump periodically throws Mike Pence under the bus, but since he can’t actually fire the vice president in the middle of a term, that’s not going to work.

This has apparently left Donald Trump toying with the notion of Secretary of State Mike Pompeo as a scapegoat. After all, most of the witnesses who are destroying Trump in the House impeachment inquiry are from Pompeo’s State Department. And Pompeo seems just gullible and stupid enough to sit back and do nothing if Trump throws him under the bus. This past week we’ve seen Trump tweetf that he hopes he can trust Pompeo, and that Pompeo made a “mistake” by hiring Bill Taylor.

It’s certainly a mild form of scapegoating, but it appears to be just enough to push the hapless Pompeo into unraveling. During an interview, Pompeo was asked about Bill Taylor’s testimony, and he said this: “I have seen State Department officials engaged in behavior that is not appropriate — that wasn’t right, that didn’t reflect the highest values of the foreign service and American diplomacy around the world.”

What on earth is that supposed to mean? Mike Pompeo seems to be suggesting that some unnamed officials in the State Department have done something wrong in some way, but this is far too vague to be, well, anything. He’s just babbling. If Pompeo is trying to pick a scapegoatof his own, he’s apparently picked “unspecified underling to be named later.” That’s not going to work. Trump is only very mildly scapegoating Pompeo thus far, and yet the pressure is already causing Pompeo to unravel.