Pompey is running for President.
In that one passage he relates that he is willing to challenge China; Trump caved to Xi; and that Xi would hate to see Pompeo as President.
All of these things would be positives in a Presidential race.
Now, whether anyone believes him is the question.
I do believe him. I believe Trump never saw China as a existential threat until very late in his presidency, for most of it he only thought of them as a economic rival.
So he was willing to cut corners to get a good trade agreement out of them, because he only thought about besting them economically.
It wasn’t until he was knee deep in the Covid Virus that he realized that the CCP’s ultimate is global hegemony and sees the US as the primary obstacle to that goal, and all their actions are geared toward undermining the US to achieve their objective. That the economic sabotage they’ve done to the US is not just for money, but in service to a much more insidious goal.
I can totally see Trump, before finally he realized this, still act in a way that sought only to preserve his advantageous trade deals with China.