“Never Give an Inch: Fighting for the America I Love” is not like most books by nakedly ambitious people preparing to run for president. It’s more interesting and more vicious. It’s a master class in the performative anger poisoning American politics.
Mike Pompeo is a smart man — first in his class at West Point, Harvard Law Review — with a sharp tongue. In March 2016, as a four-term tea party congressman from Kansas, he warned that Donald Trump, if elected, would be “an authoritarian president who ignored our Constitution.” He reports Trump’s delayed reaction to this damning statement: “Mike, you were a mean son of a bitch that day.” He takes it as a compliment.
Pompeo is the only person ever to have run both the Central Intelligence Agency and the State Department — and, as he writes, “the only member of the president’s core national-security team who made it through four years without resigning or getting fired.” How did he do it? He trusted in God, worked hard, kneecapped his enemies and kissed the president’s ring. Pompeo professes to love the ways in which Trump wielded power, and that love burns with a hard, gemlike flame throughout these pages. There’s no zealot like a convert.
But love is not the guiding light of “Never Give an Inch.” Hatred animates this book. It’s got more venom than a quiver of cobras.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/2023/01/24/pompeo-trump-attack-memoir-review/
If you can get past the firewall (try the incognito window in Chrome), the comments are pretty blistering too.
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