What’s the deal with Mike Pompeo?

| 4:00 pm EDT October 10, 2021
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At no point has Mike Pompeo ever been a viable candidate for any elected office. He’s not particularly well known, nor is he particularly popular among those who are familiar with him. Yet the mainstream media has spent years trying to prop up his dead end career. What gives?

Open senate seat? The media insists Mike Pompeo is some kind of de fact frontrunner. Then he doesn’t even end up competing. 2024 presidential race? The media pushes Mike Pompeo as viable, even though he’s polling near zero.

It’s not just right wing media that does this. Mainstream media has been just as guilty, maybe even more guilty, of baselessly hyping Pompeo’s political prospects for years.

There are three explanations for this kind of thing:

1) The media thinks it can get ratings by pushing a controversial politician into the spotlight. But Pompeo will never drive ratings, because no one cares about him. So it’s not this.

2) Pompeo is someone who trades inside information to the media in exchange for puff pieces written about him. This is possible. This kind of thing goes on all the time in political journalism, and it’s often very thinly veiled.

3) Pompeo pays a PR firm a lot of money to plant these puff pieces. This is also possible. The media constantly harps on the fact that Pompeo finished first in his class at West Point. Not diminishing this kind of accomplishment in any way, but it’s not particularly relevant to the political landscape – yet the political media has always been hellbent on pushing this one detail about him. This is often a sign that there’s a publicist involved.

The bottom line is that we don’t know for sure why the mainstream media has spent years breathlessly hyping Mike Pompeo’s imaginary political viability. But we do know that there can’t possibly be an above board reason for it – and this kind of thing shouldn’t happen.