Mark your calendars. Pompeo is running for president.

If this invitation to a West Point Academy Founder’s Day dinner for the area surrounding the nation’s capital doesn’t look like an official endorsement of West Point grad Mike Pompeo, class of 1986, I don’t know what does.

The West Point Association of Graduates, the organization giving the dinner where Pompeo will be the featured speaker, is part of the Academy in every way but having a federal charter. Its offices are on the Academy grounds. Any mail sent to the AOG, as it’s called, must be addressed to 698 Mills Road, West Point, New York 10996. West Point, of course, is officially an Army post, owned by the federal government — that’s taxpayers like you and me, folks — and staffed by members of the Army and civilian federal employees. The crest in the upper left corner of the invitation features the official Academy insignia, surrounded by “West Point Association of Graduates.” In its by-laws, the AOG states that its “purpose will now include service not only to the Academy, but also to its graduates (Article II, Sec 2.1).”

Sounds pretty official to me, don’t you think?

Founders Day, by the way, marks the day, March 16, 1802, when the Academy was founded by my ancestor, Thomas Jefferson, who signed into law the bill establishing the school at a spot on the Hudson River that had served as a key military defensive location during the Revolutionary War. It was his idea that the recently-born United States should have a federally-funded school to educate the Army officers who would lead the way in exploring and establishing the West, and the engineers who would build the roads and bridges to get there. From the Academy’s founding until 1985, there was only one major offered at West Point — engineering.

Speakers at Founders Day dinners are almost always West Point graduates. Even I was once invited to give the keynote address by the West Point Society of New Orleans at its annual Founders Day dinner.

But this is something different. Last week, Pompeo gave an address at the CPAC Conference in Baltimore, along with other presidential hopefuls such as Nikki Haley and yes, Donald Trump. Pompeo has been making the rounds of the talk shows dangling his potential presidential run like any other candidate. “Susan and I are thinking, praying, trying to figure out if this is the next place to go serve. We haven't gotten to that conclusion. We'll figure this out in the next handful of months,” Pompeo told “CBS Mornings” host Gayle King in January. On March 5, Pompeo went on Fox News “Sunday with Shannon Bream.” When asked by the host if he would do a better job with the nation’s economy than Trump did, Pompeo answered, “President Pompeo or any conservative president would do better on the issue than either President Trump, President Obama or President Bush.”

Sounds like he’s running to me. And now West Pointer Mike Pompeo appears to have the endorsement of the West Point Association of Graduates.