We’re going to be hearing a lot more about Mike Pompeo’s new book and it’s actually promising to be an interesting sideshow. Trump isn’t going to be happy about it, so it’s not all bad. From the Triad: Mike Pompeo, the former secretary of state, is coming out with a memoir to promote his 2024 presidential candidacy. In it, he writes that in early 2020, President Trump tried to quash Pompeo’s criticism of China. Here’s Pompeo’s account, according to an early peek at the book, as reported by Shelby Talcott and David Weigel in Semafor: This isn’t the first time the trade deal has come up in reporting about Trump, Xi, and COVID. Here’s the rest of the early 2020 sequence, as I previously outlined it in Slate: In the Slate article, I traced Trump’s behavior during those weeks: He adopted Xi’s talking points on COVID, defended Xi’s efforts to suppress bad news about the virus, and tried to copy some of Xi’s suppression tactics in the United States. Pompeo’s story backs up that analysis. Xi threatened the trade deal, and Trump responded by telling Pompeo to shut up. Later, Trump pretended to be tough on China. He blamed it for the virus and accused Xi of covering up the emerging crisis, when in fact Trump was in on the coverup. Now the GOP is refashioning itself as the anti-China party, with a whole House committee dedicated to confronting Beijing. Pompeo’s story is a reminder that the GOP’s actual foreign policy—as practiced by Trump…