Urbandale, Iowa — Potential 2024 presidential candidates are starting to test their messages with Iowa audiences. Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo addressed a crowd of Iowa Republicans early Friday morning.
(as said) “I see a lot of cameras in the back. They think there’s going to be some big announcement,” Pompeo said and the crowd laughed. “You know, we’re in Iowa and all, right? First-in-the-nation Primary. That’s the right thing.”
There’s no firm date yet for the 2024 Iowa Caucuses, but the Iowa G-O-P’s chairman says there’s no pushback from national Republican Party leaders about keeping the Iowa Caucuses as the lead-off event in the presidential nominating process. Pompeo was pressed by a man in the crowd to address the last presidential election and whether Trump should have left the White House.
(as said) “I did believe firmly that the president had a responsibility and an obligation that he lived up to fight this as far as he could and as hard as he could in every single material way and he did that,” Pompeo said. “He did his best to litigate.”
Pompeo emphasized his service in the Trump cabinet and sketched out his own electoral history for the crowd — as a Kansas congressman and even his race for a seat on the board of his homeowners’ association.
(as said) “I know that the work that people do all across rural parts of America and places like we are here today matters an awful lot to the very things that matter to me and to my faith and to my family and I wanted to make sure that you all know that we’re going to win,” Pompeo said, to applause. “In the end, there is not a doubt in my mind that our ideas are right, our values are correct.”
Pompeo served as CIA director, then as Secretary of State.
(as said) “I would get asked: ‘What keeps you up at night? What’s the greatest threat to the United States of America?’ And I always would answer that, even when I was secretary of state, I would say: ‘The greatest threats are, of course, that we get it wrong here at home.'”
Pompeo criticized the Biden Administration for what he described as its willy nilly approach to security at the country’s southern border. And Pompeo said the Trump Administration’s “America First” foreign policy was a fundamentally different approach that worked with Mexico, North Korea and Iran. Pompeo’s speech to the Westside Conservative Club in Urbandale was his only public event during his two-day trip here.
