Mike Pompeo has failed to defend State Department officials from political attacks from the president and his allies, and he has been cravenly ducking that responsibility in the hopes of remaining on the president’s good side. His cowardice has been rewarded by earning Trump’s anger anyway:

The impeachment inquiry has created the first rift between President Donald Trump and the Cabinet member who has been his closest ally, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, according to four current and former senior administration officials. Trump has fumed for weeks that Pompeo is responsible for hiring State Department officials whose congressional testimony threatens to bring down his presidency, the officials said. The president confronted Pompeo about the officials — and what he believed was a lackluster effort by the secretary of state to block their testimony — during lunch at the White House on Oct. 29, those familiar with the matter said. Inside the White House, the view was that Trump “just felt like, ‘rein your people in,’” a senior administration official said.

Pompeo is probably the most sycophantic yes-man that Trump still has around him, so it is remarkable that the president thinks that Pompeo hasn’t been quite servile enough. The Secretary of State tried to stop department officials from testifying. He had the gall to pretend that this had something to do with “protecting” them. Some resigned instead and others chose to testify anyway despite Pompeo’s obvious attempt to stonewall the inquiry. No one has done more to cultivate and suck up to the president than Pompeo, but even that hasn’t won him a reprieve from the president’s displeasure. Trump’s habit of blaming everyone but himself when things go wrong will always win out in the end.

Secretary Pompeo has put on a clinic in how not to serve the public. He has prioritized his relationship with the president to the detriment of his department, his professional responsibilities, and whatever remains of his integrity. He has lied constantly to Congress and the public about important policy issues. Each time he has had a choice between doing the self-serving thing and the right one, he has chosen the former. He calculated that his political ambitions would be served best by staying as close to the president as possible, but in the end he has earned a reputation for cravenness and opportunism that will dog him for years to come. Pompeo thought he could propel himself to higher office by running his department into the ground on behalf of Trump, and now it seems more likely that he wrecked the State Department and his reputation for nothing.

When Pompeo was nominated to be Secretary of State, I said that he was not qualified for the job and shouldn’t be confirmed. As bad as his predecessor was, I thought it was possible that Pompeo might prove to be even worse, but I had no idea how much worse things would get. Those of us who warned that Pompeo would make a bad Secretary of State were right, but we underestimated just how terrible he would be at this job.