As diplomatic fires burned in Venezuela, China, and Saudi Arabia last week, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was touring Iowa and lining up visits to Texas and Kansas, his home state. The spate of domestic travel, and the apparent focus on crucial battleground states, has not gone unnoticed in Foggy Bottom. Is Pompeo, a former congressman and Koch network favorite, laying roots for a 2024 run? Or, more ambitiously, is the Trump sycophant positioning himself to swoop up Donald Trump’s base for a 2020 bid, should the president get impeached or indicted?

Diplomats I spoke with were bewildered. One State Department official said they were “baffled somewhat” by Secretary Pompeo’s travel itinerary. Another lamented the timing. “So much going on around the world, and [he’s] traveling in the U.S.—weird,” they told me. “Pompeo clearly has political ambition beyond being such a pathetic Secretary of State,” said John Weaver, a longtime Republican political operative who serves as adviser to former Ohio governor John Kasich. “He was a backbench House member till he was plucked by Trump’s band of low travelers, so I’m sure he now has the taste of what success could be. Hard to see him play politically beyond the borders of Kansas though.” Rick Wilson, another longtime G.O.P. strategist, and, like Weaver, a Never Trumper, echoed the sentiment. “Like a number of other people in Trump’s orbit, he’s trying to look past the current moment, keep the Trump base thinking he’s a true believer, and set himself up for the future,” he said.

The State Department has provided a convenient purpose for each visit: the trip to Iowa was ostensibly to recruit “millions of Americans outside the Boston-D.C. corridor” to serve at State, and to give a series of speeches about American agriculture and exports. In Texas, Pompeo will attend an energy conference, and, in Kansas, the secretary is scheduled to address a global entrepreneurship summit. “The first client of the State Department is the American people,” State Department spokesperson Robert Palladino said in a statement to CNN. “The secretary believes it is important to speak directly to the American people to explain how the work of diplomats around the world contributes to their safety, security, and prosperity.” Pompeo himself flatly dismissed the notion that his itinerary has political motivations, calling the suggestion “ridiculous.”

Pompeo’s predecessors certainly visited various states during their tenures. A second former high-ranking State official told me that it has “been done in the past,” and offered that “other secretaries have tried to gear domestic trips to specific policy issues or trips,” or “have undertaken domestic travel in response to specific members of Congress who asked them to visit their State/district.” But official explanations have fallen flat in corners of the Harry S. Truman Building and among veterans of the State Department. As this person added, Pompeo’s “sudden surge of domestic travel to the heartland” seems “a bit off-key or jarring.” “He sent around an update about the trip and it was interesting but it still seemed a bit confusing in terms of a purpose,” the first State Department official said. “The comment about needing more F.S.O.s from the heartland: reaction was, ‘Right, because we don’t have enough white people,’ and, ‘He went to Harvard, so don’t act like he is some populist,’” said a former high-ranking State Department official who is still in touch with former colleagues. “Having failed at every bit of diplomacy that matters for our actual national security, makes sense to go spend time at 4-H in Iowa.”