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The nation’s top diplomat ignoring my questions about what he is doing to restore US reputation and whether he regrets saying there will be a second Trump administration.— Patsy Widakuswara (@pwidakuswara)
The VOA journalists invited to Pompeo’s address might have expected an open discussion on how a mob of marauding pro-Trump hyenas were driven by the president’s evidence-free assertion of a rigged election to storm the Capitol.
But Widakuswara and others there heard no mention of the attack by Pompeo or Reilly. Instead, Pompeo suggested to the audience that they should spend more of their time spreading the message of American exceptionalism.
It’s one thing when politicians pull out the old chestnut about how America is the greatest country in the world. We’ve heard it from Republicans and Democrats, and from Trump and Biden, throughout their campaigns. But you’d think that a country’s top diplomat would leave comments like “this is the greatest nation in the history of the world and the greatest nation that civilisation has ever known” to the politicians, analysts and historians.
The chasm between Pack’s and Pompeo’s rhetoric about the dictatorial nature of the Chinese Communist Party, and their fealty to a US president accused of inciting the most startling terrorist attack on the US government since 9/11 is too vast to process.
And this shows the extent to which Pompeo has manufactured outrage in the form of constant anti-China proclamations to keep the press corps covering him too busy to point out how much the administration he defends acts like the regimes he condemns.
The significant difference between the circumstances that Zhang and Widakuswara find themselves in is that Zhang would have never had the opportunity to shout her questions out to the powers that be.
In not defending the integrity of the 2020 election against Trump’s baseless assertions, and not condemning the armed mob that made it to the doors of the House of Representatives and the Senate, Pompeo, Reilly and Pack showed whose side they are on.
Had Trump been given another four years, Pompeo and his ilk would have made certain that the VOA would sound a lot more like China Central Television. And Widakuswara would have been given a pink slip.
Robert Delaney is the Post’s North America bureau chief
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