Trump loved it.
Just like when he was a shill for the Kochs, Pompeo is more than willing to take any position -- regardless of how badly it may hurt America or risk war or environmental destruction -- that's being pushed by his new billionaire overlord.
One imagines Pompeo as a loyal dog, constantly eager to please his master.
On its surface, this seems like an indictment of Pompeo himself, but it's really not. It's an indictment of the entire political system in the United States, as it has been re-invented by a "conservative" Supreme Court that created a brand-new legal structure around the notion that "corporations are persons" and using money to buy politicians is First Amendment-protected "free speech."
No legislature or president had ever advocated those radical, anti-democratic positions, and neither had any American political party other than the Libertarians. The 1974 campaign finance reforms after the Nixon scandals, struck down by SCOTUS in 1976 with the Buckley case, were scrupulously bipartisan.
But Lewis Powell reached out to the oligarchs who often hired his legal services, and in 1971 his infamous "Powell Memo" charted how corporations and billionaires should take over virtually all the institutions of America, from Congress and the courts to our schools and local governments.
Later that year, Richard Nixon put Powell on the Supreme Court, where he dutifully made the Buckley case happen in 1976, throwing open the door to corruption of our political system by American oligarchs. Citizens United, in 2010, took it even further, allowing foreign governments and non-U.S. oligarchs to take a simple step through a U.S. corporation (like, for example, the NRA) to, themselves, own American politicians.
In a breathtaking power seizure not authorized by the Constitution, the Supreme Court singlehandedly created an entire new body of law, and thus began the process of turning America from a representative democracy into an oligarchy.
And now, predictably, we have a billionaire oligarch as president, multiple billionaire oligarchs in his Cabinet, and the billionaire oligarch Kochs committing hundreds of millions of dollars to oligarch-friendly Republicans in every election cycle.
In an oligarchic nation, there is one singular skill for political success: one must willingly, ably, and enthusiastically suck up to the rich and powerful, subordinating one's ethics, reason, and even humanity.
This is a tragedy for both the USA and for democracies all over the world that emulate us.
Oligarchy (and its companion, strong-man pseudo-populism) is spreading rapidly, subsuming former liberal democracies like Turkey, the Philippines, and Hungary while nibbling away at other democratic countries. China is holding oligarchy up as the new model for the world.
We must reverse these disastrous Supreme Court decisions with a Constitutional Amendment, explicitly stating that corporations are not people and that money is not speech; otherwise, our rapid march to total oligarchy will continue to gather speed and power.
And suck-up politicians like Pompeo will continue to rise to the top, eager and willing to do the bidding of whichever oligarch will give them the most money, prestige and power.
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