The rapture and the real world: Mike Pompeo blends beliefs and policy

On Monday, in a speech at the annual conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the pro-Israel group, Pompeo told an anecdote about Tibor Baranski, a Christian who saved 3,000 Jews in Hungary during World War II.

mike pompeo, mike pompeo israel, donald trump, benjamin netanyahu, us israel, us israel ties, world news — Secretary of State Mike Pompeo looks on as President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel met at the White House in Washington, March 25, 2019. No secretary of state in recent decades has been as open and fervent as Pompeo about discussing Christianity and foreign policy in the same breath. (Doug Mills/The New York Times)

By Edward Wong

When Secretary of State Mike Pompeo sat down for an interview with the Christian Broadcasting Network in a hotel in Jerusalem earlier this month, he made a remark that was perhaps the most revelatory of any in his nearly one year in office.

An evangelical Christian, Pompeo had just returned from tours of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built on the ground where Jesus is said to have been crucified and buried, and of tunnels beneath the Western Wall, by the holiest site in Judaism. The interviewer posed a question around a biblical tale about a queen who saved Jews from slaughter by a Persian official: Did Pompeo think President Donald Trump had been “raised for such a time as this, just like Queen Esther, to help save the Jewish people from the Iranian menace?”