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Trump rejects Pompeo, Haley for Cabinet
The announcement indicates the extent to which loyalty will factor into the workings of the second Trump administration.
Are We In Trouble Yet?
The announcement indicates the extent to which loyalty will factor into the workings of the second Trump administration.
President-elect Donald Trump announced Saturday he will not ask his former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.N. ambassador Nikki Haley to join his cabinet, icing out two former cabinet members whose loyalties to him wavered.
In a Truth Social post Saturday, the former president wrote that he would not be inviting Haley or Pompeo to join the Trump administration. He added: “I very much enjoyed and appreciated working with them previously, and would like to thank them for their service to our Country. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN.”
The announcement indicates the extent to which loyalty will factor into the workings of the second Trump administration. Haley ran against Trump for president in 2024 and did not campaign with him even though she offered. Pompeo, who also served as Trump’s CIA director, flirted with a presidential bid of his own in 2024, but opted against challenging Trump for the Republican nomination. Both also endorsed Trump later in the cycle than other former Trump administration officials.
It is unclear if Haley was angling for a position within the second Trump administration. But two people familiar with the deliberations told POLITICO that Pompeo, who campaigned for Trump, was making a concerted effort to be named to the position of defense secretary. Both were granted anonymity to discuss the sensitive deliberations.
The two people added that Pompeo’s bid to become the nation’s defense chief ran into heated opposition from close allies of the former president, including his son, Donald Trump Jr., and far-right commentator and former Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Trump’s post came a half hour after POLITICO asked the transition team to comment on a story being prepared about Pompeo’s bid being blocked by Trump Jr. and Carlson.
“There is a desire to not have people with presidential ambitions” use Trump cabinet posts as a launch pad, said one of the two people, a former senior Trump administration official. “He got burned by Mike previously, and by Haley, and his foreign policy views are not aligned with the president.”
Pompeo, a West Point grad and former House member, had long been among a handful of names publicly circulating as a possible defense secretary in a second Trump administration. That field had already winnowed down this week when Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), an Army veteran and vocal defense hawk, took his name out of consideration for an administration job.
A pair of House lawmakers, though, are in the mix. Rep. Michael Waltz (R-Fla.) – a former Green Beret and near constant cable news presence in defense of Trump – is seen as a favorite for the top Pentagon job. Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), who chairs the House Armed Services Committee, is also a dark horse candidate to be Trump’s defense chief.
“Ambassador Haley was proud to work with President Trump as she defended America at the United Nations. She wishes him, and all who serve, great success in moving us forward to a stronger, safer America over the next four years,” said Haley spokesperson Chaney Denton.
A spokesperson for Pompeo did not immediately respond to requests for comment. Carlson and a spokesperson for Trump Jr. also did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
"Understanding voters’ decisions is not the same thing as justifying them. I strongly disagree with the decision so many of my friends and neighbors made. Our experience teaches us that we can count on Trump to be performative, but we cannot count on him to perform. There was a reason voters tossed him out of office once before.
But now he’s back, and soon enough the MAGA true believers will realize that their ideological dreams will quickly die if they can’t deliver the peace and prosperity they promised. We read too much cultural significance into any given election. Every party and every movement can be one business cycle from defeat."
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1. They impeached him, knowing they did not have the votes in the Senate to get a conviction, but did it anyway to destroy his name and his legacy in history.
2. They put him through a federal investigation built on lies that he had colluded with Vladimir Putin, our nation’s arch-enemy.
3. They said he would take us into World War III, beginning with North Korea.
4. They impeached him again, knowing again they did not have the votes in the Senate to get a conviction, but did it anyway to more completely destroy his name and to poison his legacy in history.
5. They accused him of fomenting an insurrection akin to the Bolshevik revolution.
6. They intimidated people who support him — more than half the country — by calling them “deplorables” and firing them from jobs, or denying their applications for work, if they admitted they support him.
7. They arrested and imprisoned many of his closest advisors, often bringing FBI SWAT teams and CNN camera crews in the middle of the night to watch as they handcuffed people like Roger Stone, Peter Navarro, and so many others and forced them to do the “perp walk” to shame his supporters.
8. They put him on trial before a hostile Obama judge and a hostile Manhattan jury, alleging defamation and imposed unheard-of damages awards against him in the millions of dollars.
9. They put him on trial before a hostile Obama judge and a hostile Manhattan jury, alleging business fraud in obtaining loans from banks that he repaid with interest and who had no complaints about his borrowing that money. The judge was hostile to his witnesses. The District Attorney made clear he was out to get him.
10. They prosecuted him for taking documents to his home, just as Joe Biden did. Biden was not prosecuted; he was. (Remember Hillary's emails?) Then they tried to force the judge, his appointee, to recuse and publicly shamed her as being in “over her head.”
11. They prosecuted him for inciting insurrection against the United States.
12. All the prosecutions were timed to take place — a four-ring courtroom circus from New York to Florida to Washington — during the year he would be campaigning for the presidency. He actually had to miss campaigning time to be in court and even faced the threat of being locked up during his party’s national convention.
13. He was slimed non-stop for eight years by the mainstream media — ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, CNN, MSNBC, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. They “fact-checked” him as they never fact-check anyone else, often reporting incorrect findings. They lent credence and ran non-stop op-eds calling him a fascist, a Nazi, a Hitler.
14. After he defeated his opponent, fair and square, in a presidential debate, his opponent had been so badly beaten that the opposing party did the unprecedented, and they forced their duly nominated candidate to abdicate. In the Eleventh Hour, they foisted on him a new candidate who had not received a single vote from anyone in the world in any contest for a presidential candidacy, and they coronated her by acclaim at a convention keynoted by Ocasio.
15. She then surrounded herself with bubble-headed celebrities with great singing voices and limited acumen: Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Cardi B. They threw in Oprah. RINO sore losers like Liz Cheney. They had Michelle Obama step up to tell Black women they should not let Black men tell them what to do or how to vote. They had Barack Obama lecture at Black men in condescension, telling them they had to vote for a Black woman because, as Black men, they knew darn well that, as Black men, they always require their Black women to bail them out and have their backs.
16. She refused to do a press conference or to speak extemporaneously in front of a fair press. Instead, she insisted that Tim Walz be at the table and sit alongside her for one interview. Then she showed up for three or four more interviews, questioned by pre-tested shills who were in the tank for her. She needed CBS to doctor an interview she gave them before they would air it.
17. TV talk shows on mainstream stations had her as a guest to cackle and spread the politics of joy. That is, she was not asked a serious question.
18. In brazen violation of federal communications law, NBC put her on “Saturday Night Live” before a nationwide audience to be a giggler and lovable sort three days before the election. They offered that to her, but not to him. They waited until the last weekend of the campaign so he would have no way to gain equal time.
19. They ran “polls” and “surveys” that continued to downplay his popularity and exaggerated hers. Into the night of the election, the entire country was given to understand the election would be a virtual tie, and it would be impossible to declare a victor perhaps for days or even a week.
Likewise, his party’s insurgent U.S. Senate candidates all were down in the polls against the incumbents they sought to unseat. On the other hand, these same “pollsters” licked their chops, predicting a retired football player finally would take down Ted Cruz in Texas and turn Texas purple from red, and an “Independent” (i.e., a Democrat who is an “independent” like Democrats Angus King and Bernie Sanders) would take down Deb Fischer in Nebraska in the tradition of Nebraska’s iconic George Norris, who bucked the tide. At the last minute, the main newspaper in Iowa shocked the political world by reporting their “final poll” giving Iowa to the Cackler by three points.
20. In the end, he won Iowa by 14 points (56-42). Cruz won Texas by 9 (53.4-44.3). Fischer won Nebraska by more than 7 (53.7-46.3). He won Georgia, North Carolina, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin by almost three points each. Instead of dragging down the GOP insurgents for U.S. Senate, he raised all or almost all to victories, flipping blue Senate seats red, such as Moreno over Sherrod Brown in Ohio. At this writing, several more GOP insurgents were leading late into the respective state counts.
21. They intimidated people who support him — more than half the country — by calling them “garbage” and firing them from jobs, or denying their applications for work, if they admitted they support him.
22. The polls backfired on them because, convinced by the erroneous polls that they were winning across the slate, they stuck with their disastrously losing strategy of: (i) no press conferences for her; (ii) don’t let her speak extemporaneously; (iii) don’t answer questions substantively but instead tell people that, as the child of two highly salaried professors, she grew up in the middle class, and she differs from the past four years because she will come with “fresh new ideas.”
Then, whenever asked “What exactly are those fresh new ideas?” respond: (i) He is a fascist and a Nazi, will take away all civil rights and will have the military arrest opponents and place them in concentration camps, and (ii) as the child of two highly salaried professors, she grew up in the middle class. Then cackle.
23. Had the “polls” not worked so hard to help her seem unstoppable, her strategists might have advised her to campaign differently. But the numbers convinced them to stay the course, just as Biden’s basement campaign worked in 2020. If it’s working, why change it? So ignore the border, inflation, and crime — and just keep telling them you bring fresh new ideas, grew up in the middle class, that men have a right to compete in female sports — and emphasize abortion. The polls are showing that’s what the voters care about, that’s why you’re leading: abortion. Bring home the Black women vote and pile it on, and the Black men will fall into line, followed by the Hispanics. They are in our pocket. Except they dont' and aren't.
24. He was shot once and almost assassinated, but for a miracle of G-d. Having survived the assassination attempt, he encountered a second assassination plot. Having survived two separate assassination efforts, she and her party egged on future assassin-lunatics by repeating, over and over again, that he is a Nazi, a Hitler, and therefore must be stopped for the survival of the country. Keep hammering it home: he is a fascist, a Nazi, a Hitler and will suspend the Constitution. And his supporters are garbage. That’s the ticket.
25. Ocasio and The Squad don’t want Josh Shapiro, governor of battleground state Pennsylvania, to be nominated for vice president because Shapiro, when a college undergraduate, once wrote an article in favor of Israel. He still is Jewish, hence still is a Zionist. Ocasio and The Squad will not stand for it, nor will Rashida Tlaib and her following in Dearborn, Michigan. So she picked Tim Walz, who all of America came to learn is a buffoon, from the blue state of Minnesota. In that way, she locked up Minnesota, which already was locked up, and lost Pennsylvania. But who needs Pennsylvania anyway when you have Ocasio keynoting your convention, The Squad guarding your back, and Coach Walz playing Madden football with Ocasio on Twitch?
26. On election night, when the media are calling the election for him and reporting that the Republicans have won a comfortable margin flipping the Senate, she would not concede.
27. It will be her job to certify the final official election results, certifying that he won and she lost. Let her loose with one more cackle as the moment of her disappearance from electoral politics arrives.
28. And, as to the concerted effort for eight years to destroy his name and poison his legacy for history, history now will record that (i) he is only the second president in American history to rebound from a reelection loss to regain the White House the next cycle, and (ii) he is the only person in American history to have been impeached (even once) — and then again — and still to be reelected to the White House by the American public, thus documenting that the people of America saw through both impeachments as the hoaxes they were.
Adapted by the writer for Arutz Sheva from a version of this article that first appeared here in The American Spectator.
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