Nearly three years into the administration, Pompeo effectively is the last man standing, having outlasted and vanquished all rivals for Trump’s ear on foreign policy, the president’s tireless, give-no-quarter chief crusader, a political pugilist in a role normally reserved for thoughtful diplomacy, a happy warrior Trump dispatched to tongue-lash European allies over China and Huawei, to scold Iran over its nuclear ambitions, to glad-hand with North Korea, to boost Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu, to reassure Saudi Arabia that its relationship with the Trump administration would remain copacetic, despite the government’s alleged killing of US resident and journalist Jamal Khashoggi, and to clean up with Denmark in the wake of Trump’s aborted effort to purchase Greenland.

Pompeo learned along the way that there was only one way to survive under Trump: to be as enthusiastic about Trump as Trump himself. Or, as Pompeo summed up his daily job to me in one of our conversations, “you go execute and you do it with all the energy and heart and passion and integrity you can muster.” Anything less, after all, and one might face the ignominious end of his predecessor, Rex Tillerson—who was reportedly sitting on the toilet when he got a call informing him he was about to be fired by presidential tweet. As one former senior intelligence leader said when I mentioned Pompeo, shaking his head: “He’s made his deal with the devil.”

The deal he’d made, after all, was clear. Pompeo was a man in a hurry, standing uniquely astride the three critical strands of the modern GOP: the Kansas Koch brothers who have funded much of the party’s next generation; evangelical Christians, a group that has remained fiercely loyal to Trump; and Trump’s red-hat-wearing, red-meat-loving MAGA “America First” nationalist base. Before the Ukraine scandal engulfed Washington, it appeared that his loyal service to Trump had left Pompeo, perhaps better than anyone, in first position for the shadow primary to succeed Donald Trump in 2024 as heir apparent.

But when the details of the whistle-blower complaint emerged—that Trump, working with Giuliani, had been trying to pressure Ukraine to drum up dirt on the Bidens and also to chase a widely debunked conspiracy theory that Ukrainians, not Russians, hacked the 2016 election—Pompeo’s role in the controversy has grown with nearly every passing day.

After an initially ambiguous statement, the secretary of state finally admitted that he’d listened in real time to the now infamous July 25 telephone call between Trump and Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky, where the US president leaned on Zelensky to help Giuliani and Attorney General Bill Barr smear Hunter Biden. He’d heard, in real time, Trump utter the phrase “I would like you to do us a favor, though,” the smoking-gun utterance that caused such consternation inside the White House, intelligence community, and Justice Department as word spread of Trump’s conversation and tipped House Democrats over the edge to begin a formal impeachment inquiry.

Damning text messages exchanged by two State Department officials added fuel to the controversy, as did the congressional hearing about the State Department’s rushed recall of ambassador Marie Yovanovitch. Pompeo’s decision not to speak out on behalf of those caught up in the scandal and not to defend the integrity of career foreign service officers was reported to have ultimately triggered the resignation this month of Michael McKinley, a State Department lifer whose appointment to Pompeo’s inner circle last year was initially seen inside the department’s Foggy Bottom headquarters as a hopeful sign.

Add in the fact that nearly all of Trump’s foreign policy goals that Pompeo has championed appear unfulfilled—from Iran, North Korea, and China to the unfolding debacle in Syria that Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence were dispatched last week to calm—and the growing calls from the intelligentsia in Washington for Pompeo to resign, and it’s hard not to imagine that by the time he sat down to face Amons that Pompeo was wondering whether the implicit deal he’d made with Trump would lead him to the White House—or, like nearly all others who have served this president, his eventual embarrassing ouster?