The Washington Post’s editorial board tackles Trump administration Secretary of State Mike Pompeo’s book, Never Give an Inch in “Mike Pompeo’s revolting embrace of MBS after the Khashoggi murder,” published Wednesday. The editorial lays out how Pompeo, who aspires to run for president in 2024, embraces the sort of authoritarian foreign government Donald J. Trump cozied up to during his presidency. It quotes Pompeo’s book (which it never names by title) as describing Saudi Arabian Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) as “leading the greatest cultural reform in the kingdom’s history.”

Khashoggi’s WaPo columns pushed for a freer Arab world and a more open, tolerant Saudi Arabia, the op-ed says, before he was brutally tortured and then murdered by MBS’s strongmen at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul on October 2, 2018. Khashoggi’s body never was found.

The revolting embrace? Trump sent Pompeo to Saudi Arabia after his administration refused to impose penalties or sanctions. The ex-secretary of state “smeared” Khashoggi as an “activist” and not a journalist. 

“Hey Mike, go and have a good time,” Trump told Pompeo, according to the book. “Tell him he owes us.” 

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