POLITICO NIGHTLY: Pompeo’s case for Trump (and Pompeo 2024)

 

BY RENUKA RAYASAM With help from Myah Ward RNC’S NIGHT 2 — First lady Melania Trump and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo address the GOP convention tonight. Live video, chats with POLITICO reporters, and all the latest news and analysis can be found at POLITICO’s RNC hub: politico.com/rnc. Pregame begins with a live edition of Four Square at 8 p.m. ET. BEYOND THE WATER'S EDGE — Pompeo is scheduled to deliver his pre-recorded remarks at the Republican National Convention tonight from a Jerusalem rooftop. It’s not just the setting that’s unusual. No sitting secretary of State in memory has delivered a speech at a political convention. Pompeo, along with the rest of the Trump administration, has also used the pandemic as a way to ratchet up rhetoric against China. Your host Slack chatted with foreign policy reporter Nahal Toosi, a National Magazine Award finalist for a 2018 story on Rohingya Muslims, today about how this isn’t the first time Pompeo has broken with tradition, how to define President Donald Trump’s foreign policy doctrine and the lasting impact of the Trump administration on U.S. standing globally. This conversation has been edited. Tell me what you know about what Pompeo will say tonight. My understanding is that he will tout some of the Trump administration’s foreign policy moves, including shifting the U.S. embassy in Israel to Jerusalem from Tel Aviv and its tough stance toward China. How would you summarize Trump’s foreign policy doctrine? Perhaps the best word is “contradictory.” Or perhaps another way to put it is that the Trump administration has a foreign policy with multiple personalities. What it comes down to is this: President Donald Trump and his aides push a very strident (some call it bullying) foreign policy that Trump says puts America’s needs first, but which America’s allies say has meant the U.S. is increasingly alone. The approach is heavy on punishment. The administration loves using tools like sanctions and tariffs, even against allies. To top that off, the administration — to be frank, it’s usually just Trump — often changes its mind or makes moves that undermine its own goals. For instance, the administration has pushed a campaign promoting global religious freedom. But it has also pursued a highly restrictive immigration agenda. That has meant that people fleeing religious persecution overseas are finding that America will no longer let them in. Have there been accomplishments? The Trump administration took over the military campaign against the Islamic State, amped it up a bit, and succeeded in taking back the terrorist group’s physical territory. It killed the group’s leader, Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi. Recently, it oversaw the United Arab Emirates and Israel’s decision to move toward normalizing diplomatic relations. It also has managed to help convince a growing number of people in Washington and countries worldwide that the Chinese Communist Party is a threat to the world. What will be the lasting impact of the Trump/Pompeo approach to foreign policy — even if Joe Biden wins in November? The fact that so many Americans voted for someone like Trump, a man who openly praises dictators, really surprised many people overseas. So my guess is that even if Biden wins, other countries — even U.S. allies — won’t necessarily have the same sort of trust in the American political system that they once did. They will hedge their bets, finding new allies or seeking a middle ground between the U.S. and a rising China, because they can’t be certain that another figure like Trump won’t be elected again. How has Pompeo been different from his predecessors? Perhaps above all, Pompeo has been much more partisan and political. He’s very obvious about it, too. He’s willing to cooperate with Republican lawmakers seeking information, while ignoring Democrats who request documents and other data. He devotes an exceptional amount of his media time to conservative outlets instead of mainstream ones. He’s really breaking norms by talking to the Republican National Convention this week. Modern secretaries of State have avoided such gatherings because of the idea that when it comes to foreign policy, America’s chief diplomat needs to represent the whole country, not just one party. But Pompeo clearly plans to run for office in the future, possibly the presidency, and he’s apparently decided that it’s worth ignoring some of these traditions. Welcome to POLITICO Nightly: Coronavirus Special Edition. Frog and Toad tentatively go outside after months of self-quarantine, courtesy of McSweeney’s. Reach out rrayasam@politico.com or on Twitter at @renurayasam. JOIN ME WEDNESDAY: Join your Nightly host for a one-on-one interview with Gov. Tate Reeves (R-Miss.) at 2:15 p.m. ET, followed by a reporter briefing with Education reporter Mackenzie Mays. Register here: politicostatesmississippi.splashthat.com/ FIRST IN NIGHTLY HAIL MARY — Arkansas’ Salt Bowl won’t have a Dairy Queen-sponsored tailgate festival. The hot dog giveaway and pregame luncheon are canceled, too. But this weekend’s annual kickoff between top state high school football teams will have something professional leagues have prohibited so far during the pandemic: thousands of fans in the stands. As many as 12,000 mask-wearing spectators may stream into War Memorial Stadium in Little Rock on Saturday night for a high-profile event where Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson is scheduled to flip the pregame coin toss. One organizer has a custom face mask featuring both schools’ logos for Hutchinson to wear. The matchup — which promoters say will be the state’s largest outdoor event since the pandemic began — is a survival test for fall sports, as Trump and other Republicans cheer for football to play on, Juan Perez Jr. writes. If fans carry the coronavirus throughout communities struggling to quell the virus’ spread, it could crush dwindling hopes for crowded sporting events in the U.S. this year. If the Salt Bowl and other football games don’t go down as super-spreader events, that success could give Trump and others searching for signs of normal times a major boost. “Everybody’s going to be watching,” said Shane Broadway, a Salt Bowl founder who notes the game drew upwards of 30,000 spectators before the pandemic. “We have the opportunity to kind of be the example to others on how to do this right.” Dana Dyer teaches seventh-grade algebra from her empty classroom at Walter Johnson Junior High School on the first day of distance learning for the Clark County School District in Las Vegas. | Getty Images AROUND THE NATION BACKPEDAL IN BISMARCK — Earlier this summer, North Dakota looked like a rare Covid-19 success story: a state that never issued a lockdown but nevertheless had a grip on the virus. Now it’s dark red on Covid Exit Strategy’s map , labeled as having “uncontrolled spread” with 254 new cases per million. With a population of just 760,000 people, North Dakota went from fewer than 2,500 cases three months ago to more than 10,000 cases today. Kirby Kruger, section chief for the division of disease control at the North Dakota Department of Health, told Nightly’s Myah Ward that some of the rise can be attributed to the state’s increased testing. But Kruger really blames the North Dakota summer. “We have like 10 months of winter and then a real short summer,” Kruger said. “And as the economy started to open up a little bit more, I think that people had a tendency to take advantage of the nice weather that we're having and there was a lot of activity going on.” The state was praised early on for its top-notch contact tracing program. North Dakota still has around 200 contact tracers, with the goal to increase to 300. Yet while many North Dakotans are cooperating with contact tracers, quarantine periods are voluntary in the state, and some people aren’t returning daily monitoring surveys or they’re ignoring isolation protocols because they say they don’t feel sick. Kruger said the biggest problem the state faces is with essential workers who have been in contact with a Covid carrier, but their employers want them back at work anyway. North Dakota’s Republican Gov. Doug Burgum has not issued a statewide mask mandate. Instead, the state’s health department launched the #MaskUpND campaign two weeks ago to encourage residents to wear face coverings and post their mask photos on social media. Even so, Kruger said, all North Dakotans aren’t doing what they’re “supposed to do,” and that cases could keep rising with school reopenings and college students heading back to campuses. As the North Dakota summer fades, and the U.S. braces itself for a potential resurgence in the fall and winter, Kruger said he doesn’t know if North Dakotans are prepared to return to a state of caution. “I think that people understand that it’s here and it’s not going away, but really just looking to try to get some normalcy back into their homes,” Kruger said. “This has been a long haul, and it’s not over with yet.”   PLUG IN WITH PLAYBOOK FOR AN INTERVIEW WITH MARK MEADOWS ON DAY THREE OF THE RNC, TOMORROW AT 9 a.m. EDT: Join POLITICO Playbook co-authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman for the latest “Plug In with Playbook,” episode featuring White House chief of staff Mark Meadows on the third day of the GOP Convention. Presented by Blue Cross Blue Shield Association. Watch it live here.     COVID-2020 STEPIEN SOUNDS OFF — Trump’s campaign manager appeared to break with his candidate today on the security of mail-in ballots, remarking that he is comfortable with the practice in places where it has already been implemented. “I think in the states in which mail-in voting has already occurred, it’s fine by me,” Bill Stepien said in an interview with POLITICO Playbook authors Anna Palmer and Jake Sherman. “They've shown in most instances that it works — it’s been proven over years.” Stepien also told Jake and Anna that voters should expect to see the president frequently traveling on the campaign trail. “You can do one of two things: You can hide out and count the days underground, or you can be aggressive like the president has been,” Stepien said FROM THE HEALTH DESK THE VACCINE TORTOISE — It might sound weird, but there actually is such a thing as “too soon” when it comes to a coronavirus vaccine. In the latest POLITICO Dispatch, health care reporter Sarah Owermohle explains why — and how the FDA’s decision to authorize emergency use for blood plasma gives a glimpse into a potential crisis of public confidence in a vaccine. Plus, University of Hong Kong researchers say they have found the first confirmed case of Covid reinfection. Listen to the latest POLITICO Dispatch podcast ASK THE AUDIENCE Nightly asks you: What is your favorite memory from previous editions of the RNC or DNC? Send us your response on our form and we'll include select responses in Friday's edition. (Notable Fox News alumna, we got your entry.) NIGHTLY NUMBER 1,600 The number of New York City public schools. Teams of engineers and ventilation experts will inspect every city classroom over the next week to make sure they're safe to open during the coronavirus pandemic, Mayor Bill de Blasio said today. (h/t Erin Durkin) THE GLOBAL FIGHT UNO MAS — Spain is fighting back a second wave of coronavirus — with no consensus on the way forward. The spread of the virus has accelerated in Spain this summer, with 2,415 new cases diagnosed just today. The country now has Europe’s highest incidence of Covid-19, with more than 170 positives per 100,000 inhabitants in the last two weeks. Regions such as Catalonia have reported more than 1,000 cases per day for four days in a row, and the number of positives is surging in Madrid and the Basque Country. In contrast to March, however, cases have been largely limited to young people socializing after a long lockdown, Cristina Gallardo and Carlo Martuscelli write. That has kept deaths low as well. Nevertheless, Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez conceded during a press conference today that the evolution of the pandemic in Spain is “worrying.” “I’d like to convey a message of alert but also serenity,” he said. “Alert, because the evolution is not good, it is worrying in some parts of the country. But also of serenity because we are far from the situation in which we were in mid-March.” In another contrast from the spring, the Spanish government is now allowing the country’s 17 autonomous regions to respond to the local outbreaks on their own. Regional and national leaders hold regular meetings to coordinate their response, hashing out issues such as a recent ban on smoking outdoors if the two-meter social distancing rule can’t be guaranteed, and shutting nightlife venues such as clubs and cocktail bars. PARTING WORDS BLANK SPACE — A couple of years ago I spent some time looking at first lady portraits during a party at the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, Texas. Unlike presidential portraits — which, with rare exceptions, look more or less the same — the first lady portraits were strikingly different, showing off the personalities that the women who have occupied an ill-defined role wanted to put on display. You could immediately tell that Grace Coolidge wanted to be seen as stylish and modern, with her long red shift and a fluffy white dog at her side. That Eleanor Roosevelt wanted to show her active role, seated at her writing desk wearing her no-nonsense suit. Jackie Kennedy was aiming for avant garde elegance, with her off-center gaze and floor length, high collared dress. Hillary Clinton wore a pantsuit and included her book, It Takes A Village. I could not tell what Melania Trump was trying to convey with her portrait, staring straight into the camera, arms crossed, wearing a black Dolce and Gabbana suit, lips parted into what could be a smile. For four years Melania Trump has been a cipher in the East Wing of the White House, giving away as little as possible about her own life and leaving reporters scrambling for tidbits about “What does she really think?” Her forays into public life have provided few clues. She has mostly rejected the public role of a first lady and public speaking in general: We all now know that her 2016 RNC speech wasn’t even her own. She’s spoken little about her husband’s extra marital affairs. Her anti-cyber bullying campaign, Be Best, has been pretty generic. Her recent Rose Garden makeover has been called dull. She dresses like an impeccable model who has access to wealth and a very good stylist, but her clothing choices reveal little of her personality. Melania Trump couldn’t even explain her one attempt at trying to infuse her wardrobe with flair — that famous jacket. Melania’s speech tonight is expected to reveal more about her own personal story — her journey from Slovenia to the U.S. Aides say the speech will be “positive and uplifting” and “forward looking.” It will likely not answer any of the most pressing questions many have about Melania: What does she really think? She’s been straightforward about one thing: She didn’t sign up for a life in politics. But she’s not the first reluctant first lady. The wives — we have yet to see a husband — of past presidents have usually made some attempt to define the role on their terms, not renounce it entirely. It’s not just a job that’s about redecorating — it’s a powerful platform and one that Melania Trump has chosen to squander.   INTRODUCING POLITICO MINUTES: These unprecedented times demand an unconventional approach to political news coverage. POLITICO Minutes is a new, interactive content experience that delivers the top takeaways you need to know in an easy-to-digest, swipeable format straight to your inbox. Get a breakdown of what we've learned so far, why it matters and what to watch for going forward. Sign up for POLITICO Minutes, launching at the 2020 Conventions.     Did someone forward this email to you? Sign up here.   Follow us on Twitter Renuka Rayasam @renurayasam   FOLLOW US

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