A more conventional administration than Trump’s would have spoken out more forcefully against the suspected state-sanctioned slaughter of a journalist, but Washington’s relationship with Riyadh “has remained a bedrock principle of American foreign policy toward the region, and I don’t think it would have been fundamentally altered had someone else been president,” he said.

“We would have just dressed it up in a rhetorical flourish that Donald Trump dismisses as political correctness and therefore ignores,” Daalder noted.

What was witnessed in Saudi Arabia this week was a raw display of the president’s realist-nationalist agenda in action.

The lesson of the first year of Trump’s presidency “was that a lot of people in the administration”—figures such as former Secretary of State Rex Tillerson, former National-Security Adviser H. R. McMaster, and the former economic adviser Gary Cohn—“thought they could mold Trump into something different than what he was,” Daalder said. “And they failed.”

Pompeo, who became secretary of state in April, after earning Trump’s admiration as CIA director, “doesn’t have a hidden agenda,” said Mark Chenoweth, who served as Pompeo’s chief of staff in Congress from 2011 to 2013. “He’s not trying to accomplish something other than what the president has asked him to do. That just puts him in a really strong position to build trust with the president.”

What Trump is asking Mike Pompeo to do, however, is not necessarily what Mike Pompeo would do if left to his own devices.

While there’s considerable overlap in how the president and his secretary of state think about the world, the discontinuities are also notable.

Read: Mike Pompeo, counterpuncher

A businessman from Kansas who came to Congress in 2011 as part of the Tea Party movement, Pompeo initially endorsed Republican Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, who championed a far more mainstream, internationalist, Reagan-esque foreign policy than Trump did during his presidential campaign in 2016.

And while Trump has repeatedly advocated friendly relations with Russia and dismissed the threat posed by Vladimir Putin, Pompeo, who served as an Army tank commander along the East–West German border at the end of the Cold War, has a markedly different perspective.

When Barack Obama ridiculed Mitt Romney during the 2012 presidential campaign for describing Russia as America’s “No. 1 geopolitical foe,” Pompeo “fully agreed with” Romney, Chenoweth told me.

“This whole idea that Russia was somehow no longer a geopolitical foe was not something that Mike believed,” said Chenoweth, who is now the executive director and general counsel at the New Civil Liberties Alliance.

As a congressman, Pompeo accused Putin of “trying to make America look like a third-world country” with his interference in the 2016 election and argued that Obama’s sanctions weren’t a severe enough response to Russia’s forcible annexation of Ukrainian territory and attempted “reordering of Europe.”