As a parade of current and former diplomats have testified before Congress in the House impeachment inquiry, Mike Pompeo has largely treated the spectacle on Capitol Hill as a solar eclipse, refusing to look directly at it. Two days after Bill Taylor, the acting ambassador to Ukraine, told investigators under oath that he sent a cable to the secretary of state outlining his concerns about a quid pro quo involving military aid to Kiev, Pompeo was galavanting around his home state of Kansas for the fourth time this year to talk about “workforce development” with Ivanka Trump and certainly, he insisted, not laying the groundwork for a Senate bid in the Midwestern state.

Despite Pompeo’s protestations that he would not engage with the “noise” in Washington, a reference to the inquiry quickly engulfing him, diplomats saw it as an inevitability that he would eventually have to address the shadow diplomacy campaign Rudy Giuliani was running on his watch. And they certainly were not ignoring it. “I think his sycophancy is on collision course with his ambition,” a former State Department official told me Wednesday afternoon. “I guess we have to wait to see which one is stronger.”

Hours later, back-to-back interviews with two of the president’s favorite outlets, Fox News and the New York Post, laid bare Pompeo’s decision to toe the Trump line. Rather than defending the procession of diplomats who have appeared under subpoena before the House, Pompeo picked a different tack entirely and dipped his toe into the right wing fever swamp by floating a fresh conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden and the Obama administration’s policy toward Ukraine. “There is all this breathless discussion about this administration’s Ukraine policy,” Pompeo told the Post. “This is the administration that actually provided defensive weapons systems [to Ukraine]. I could not tell you why the Obama administration chose not to [arm Ukraine]. Was it because of Hunter Biden? I don’t know!” Without evidence, he echoed the same theory to Fox News’ Martha MacCallum, suggesting a strategy, not just a slipup. “And it begins,” a former ambassador texted me as Pompeo’s remarks began to circulate among diplomats Wednesday night.

That Pompeo chose to don a tinfoil hat as opposed to defending his subordinates is hardly shocking. He is a Benghazi mouth breather, after all. And the writing was really on the wall when the secretary largely turned a blind eye to the Giuliani-led smear campaign against former ambassador to Ukraine Masha Yovanovitch, which Pompeo’s deputy John Sullivan confirmed under oath in a Senate confirmation on Wednesday. But beyond that, as a cockroach of the Trump administration, Pompeo’s fate is undeniably intertwined with Trump’s. His political ambition—widely believed to extend to the Oval Office—hinges on his relationship with Trump, and more acutely, the Trump base. “He’s made the Faustian bargain and understands the terms: As long as Trump’s in charge, the only thing that matters is hewing to the Trump view,” a former senior U.S. official told me. “This ‘America’s back, standing tall, and we’ve restored respect for America since Obama left’ is utter bullshit and Pompeo has to know this.”

When Pompeo replaced Rex Tillerson as America’s top diplomat, he was welcomed by a beleaguered diplomatic corps and immediately insulated with a benefit of the doubt. “Morale was certainly boosted when he started at the State Department compared to his predecessor of course, Rex Tillerson. And it seemed like people were generally under the belief that he was doing a good job of working both the side of the president and managing the president, but also working the internal dynamics of the State Department,” a former Trump administration official told me. “In a complex environment, people thought that he was doing a decent job.”