- Former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo spoke at CPAC on Friday.
- At one point, Pompeo said the Trump administration seems "pretty competent now."
- "I remember we were the barbarians, we were the rubes, we didn't know what we were doing," he joked.
Former US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, a potential 2024 GOP presidential candidate, argued that the Trump administration seems "pretty competent now" compared to President Joe Biden's White House tenure.
"I remember too. I remember we were the barbarians, we were the rubes, we didn't know what we were doing — pretty competent now," Pompeo said at CPAC, a conservative conference underway in Florida.
"I say that not in joy, but in sorrow," he continued. "Because America demands good leadership, and the world is depending upon it."
Several former Trump administration officials have gone on the record to describe how dysfunctional the White House was amid an unprecedented level of turnover in the modern era. Stephanie Grisham, the former top aide to first lady Melania Trump, described it as "a clown car on fire running at full speed into a warehouse full of fireworks."
Russia invaded Ukraine on February 24, but Pompeo did not cite his experience dealing with the non-NATO ally during his time running the State Department from 2018 to 2021.
Instead, he talked about Iran and the US drone assassination of Qasem Soleimani, a top Iranian military official in the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Pompeo also touted moving the US embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.
Pompeo also did not acknowledge his involvement in holding up military aid to Ukraine in exchange for the country putting legal pressure on the Biden family, the eventual grounds for then-President Donald Trump's first impeachment.
At the time of the infamous phone call between Pompeo, Trump, and Russian President Volodymyr Zelensky — where Trump repeatedly pressured Zelensky to investigate former Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter over the latter's employment on the board of the Ukrainian natural-gas company Burisma Holdings — Ukraine was already under serious threat from Russia.
Russia in 2014 invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, a peninsula on the Black Sea. Since that year, Russia has also supported rebels in a war against Ukrainian forces in the eastern Donbas region. These territories are still recognized as part of Ukraine by the international community. Prior to this week's invasion, Russia had denied having a military presence in the Donbas, despite solid evidence to the contrary.