Breaking News from Pod Save America - Pete Hegseth WHINES Trump Media Coverage in UNHINGED Presser

Episode Date: March 19, 2026

Pete Hegseth melts down in a chaotic press conference defending Trump. Tommy Vietor and Jon Favreau break it down. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR: ZIP RECRUITER - http://ziprecruiter.com/CROOKED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We are now three weeks into Donald Trump's war with Iran. It is not going well. Thousands of people are dead. Gas prices are way up. The fighting has expanded to more places and riskier targets. And unfortunately, John, the war is still being run by a drunk former Fox News anchor in a skin tight suit who sounds like a homicidal Dr. Seuss. Let's watch. I stand here today speaking to you, the American people, not through filters, not through reporters, not through cable news spin. A dishonest and anti-Trump press will stop at nothing. We know this at this point, to downplay progress, amplify every cost, and call into question every step. Sadly, TDS is in their DNA. They want President Trump to fail. But you, the American people, know better. The world, the Middle East, our ungrateful allies in Europe,

even segments of our own press, should be saying one thing to President Trump. Thank you. Did the J.D. Vance meme? He did. He did. He literally did. That was, of course, Secretary of Defense, Pete, I have speaking at a briefing on Thursday.

Do you think all the people in Dubai getting drone-striked by the Iranians are thinking, thank you, Mr. Trump? Thank you. Thank you. The families of the fallen soldiers. Thank you, all the children who have been killed or displaced, families of them. Thank you. All of the people who are paying higher gas prices.

A lot of thank yous. Yeah. TDS to BDS. TDS and IBS. In my D-D-S. What do we do? What the fuck are we doing? It's written remarks.

It's so weird. Imagine writing it that as a speechwriter. It's just a fuck. It's his war hyacou thing. He loves war hikus. The irony here, too, is they've kicked out all the real reporters. So he goes on this rant about how like un-American these reporters are. Then it's like, Sir, One America News, Mike Lindell, My Pillow TV.

It's a farce. Ungrateful European allies. Just like taking shots at people for no good reason. No reason. And meanwhile, the chairman of the FCC is threatening to strip the licenses from real media who actually do good coverage of this. war. It is, it just, I mean, I know we've gotten used to it, but the Secretary of Defense talking about, like going out to a briefing in the middle of war and without even answering

a question proactively saying that any kind of criticism of the war is Trump derangement syndrome. Just crying about press coverage. Just a whiny little baby. By the way, we here at Pod Save America will proudly say, fuck you to Brendan Carr in all his efforts to stifle the media. That's why we would ask that you please subscribe to Pod Save America. here on YouTube. It helps us grow the show. And it also helps us displace the pro-war propaganda and crap for people like Ben Shapiro or Fox News that unfortunately dominates YouTube right now. So please subscribe to America. Or micropinus Mark Levin. Oh, my goodness. Okay. Hegseth was also asked about reports that the Trump administration is

going to request an additional $200 billion for the Iran war. That's $200 billion with a B. Here's Pete the Skeet's answer. Hopefully it's in an iambic pentameter or something, some sort. As far as $200 billion, I think that number could move, obviously. It takes money to kill bad guys. And I think we're also still dealing with the environment that Joe Biden created, which was depleting those stockholds and not sending them to our own military, but to Ukraine. Which is every time we reach back and look at any sort of a challenge we have, it goes back to, well, send it to Ukraine.

ultimately we think this should be these these munitions are better spent in our own interests at this point and this kind of funding bill is going to ensure that we're properly funded going for okay john members of congress they take a lot of tough votes i literally cannot think of an easier vote than saying no to that guy in donald trump for their 200 billion dollar request for more bombs to drop on iranian schools when you could spend that money on literally anything else speaking of which I'm going to give you a few quick examples of what you could spend what $200 million billion could buy. You could restore Obamacare subsidies for 22 million people for six years.

Six years. $200 billion could eliminate all medical debt in America. Every person's medical debt. Seems like a better use of money. Community college could be free for two decades for people in this country. Free community college for two decades. 1.3 million affordable housing units. food stamps for 42 million Americans for two years and school lunches, free school lunches for

every kid in America for five years. Or like two and a half F-35s? Yeah. They could, yeah, instead of feeding kids here, we could kill kids over in the Middle East. It seems like a good idea. Which is what we've been doing. And like, look, when you when you lay out the opportunity cost here, this is so obvious, but also in case that's not enough, like there's been a lot of polling. Blue Rose Research did a bunch of polling on the Iran War. The thing that most concerned voters was Trump spending a billion dollars a day on the Iran war while cutting Medicaid food assistance and education funding. Sixty-six percent of voters. I think 60 percent of Trump voters was like, yeah, that sounds like a bad idea. I mean, you just mentioned the Medicaid thing. They cut a hundred

billion dollars from Medicaid in Trump's bill last year. So double that. You could reverse the Medicaid cuts and then expand Medicaid by all the people that you cut Medicaid for from last one. Nate Silver tracks Trump's polling average. This week, he reached a new net love. at 15.3 points underwater. UGov has a poll out on Thursday today. They found 24% of Trump 2024 voters disapprove of the Warner-on. 17% of Republicans disapprove. Total approval was only 36%.

That is way under Trump's approval rating, usually. Not popular. Also, by the way, this, like you see what he did there. He's like, Trump rebuilt the military in his first term. Thank God. But then Biden depleted it. So now we need more. By the way, Biden, his total spending on Ukraine was $180 billion.

They're requesting $200 billion. Yeah. And they've already spent how much? A billion a day. And by the way, that's their first request. Right. Right? Like, we have no idea.

And this is after the Pentagon's budget went up by quite a bit. Yeah, the $2,000, the $226 budget is like a trillion dollars. And they just got more supplemental funding. It is insane what we're spending over there. Before we get to the next section, I want to read to you from a Trump truth social post from Wednesday night. A second for that? Sure, too.

So he says, Israel violently lashed out at a major facility known as South Pars, Gasfield, in Iran. By violently lashed out, he means they bombed it. They didn't do like, they didn't like post a tweet that was really angry. Like he would. It wasn't like an all caps truth social. Gassy ass field. It was bombs.

Yeah, it continues. The United States knew nothing about this particular attack. Barack reviewed over Daxios immediately repeated that that was, he tweeted that was a lie. The U.S. not only knew about the strike, but approved it in advance. Of course. He continues, Trump continues. Unfortunately, Iran did not know this or any of the pertinent facts pertaining to the South Pars attack in unjustifiably unfairly attacked a portion of Qatar's LNG gas facility.

The CEO of Qatar energies today said that that attack did $20 billion worth of damage and wiped out 17% of their capacity for three to five years. I mean, that is the energy prices on Europe and everywhere else is going to be insane. By the way, all these European countries we asked to stop buying Russian oil and gas with the guitar and now they're blowing that up. Trump goes on to say that Israel won't hit that gas field again unless Iran attacks Qatar, in which case the U.S. will, quote, massively blow up the entirety of the South Pars gas field and an amount of strength and power that Iran has never seen or witnessed before.

Now, this is the world's largest natural gas field. Qatar and Iran share it. It is a giant geological structure underground. You can't just, like, bomb a piece of it. Well, I mean, I have never seen someone so concisely summarize the faulty attitude around the ladder of escalation before. Then in one tweet, it was like, Trump tweeted this, right? Because he said it's so horrible that this gas field happened. And like now that's because he's worried about the energy prices.

We can't do that. And if you do that again, we'll make it even worse. Yeah. We'll bomb it all. We will make it even worse than the problem that you just created that I'm mad about. Yeah, and then today Iran bombed Israel's hypha oil refinery, which is the largest in Israel. It supplies about half of Israel's gasoline and diesel. We don't know the extent of the damage right now, but they don't seem deterred, as you just noted there.

No, they've been hitting the Saudis, too. I mean, they're just like, this is what, of course this is Iran's play now. Yeah. They are just going to fight as hard as they can because their whole, it's about regime survival for them, and they are going to tell the world that they can make it hurt for everyone and that they, the war will end when they decide it ends. Pod Save America Breaking News is brought to you by ZipRecruiter. What's the latest trend in hiring?

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Four to five employers who post on ZipRecruiter get a quality candidate within the first day. And now you can try it for free at ZipRecruiter.com slash crooked. That's ziprecruiter.com slash crooked. Meet your match on ZipRecruiter. So the other huge Iran news this week was the resignation of this top Trump official named Joe Kent. So Joe Kent was the head of the National Counterterrorism Center, NCTC. It's a very senior important job. You have access to all the most sensitive intelligence the U.S. The U.S. has about threats to the U.S.

Kent resigned on Tuesday. Rhodes and I, Ben Rhodes and I went deep on the Sun Ponce of the world if you want more detail. But last night, Kent did a two-hour interview with Tucker Carlson. That was fascinating. Now, let's just stay at the top. We know that Tucker and Kent are like flawed and complicated messengers here. both pin way too much of the blame for the war on Israel as opposed to Donald Trump. Kent in particular included some things in his resignation letter that are just nuts like blaming Israel for the Iraq war.

Pretty sure that was a Bush-Shaney joint. But I think the thing to remember is until two days ago, this guy had access to the crown jewels of U.S. intelligence, right? So he is well briefed. So I think we should listen to those comments. So here's Tucker asking about whether Iran was on the cusp of getting a nuclear weapon. And remember, Trump said a couple days ago or a couple weeks ago that Iran was two weeks away from getting a nuke. Let's watch. Was Iran on the verge of getting a nuclear weapon? No, they weren't, you know, three weeks ago when this started, and they weren't in June either.

I mean, the Iranians have had a religious ruling of fatwa against actually developing a nuclear weapon since 2004. That's been in place since 2004. That's available in the public sphere. But then also, we had no intelligence to indicate that that, that's actually. fought to what was being disobeyed or it was on the cusp of being lifted. So the Iranians' position when viewed from the lens of the region was actually fairly pragmatic. They were preventing themselves from developing a bomb, but they still wanted the ability. They wanted the ability to enrich. They wanted the ability to have some components so that they weren't completely

stripped of it. And we always assessed that they were either several months or a year, two years away from actually being able to develop a nuclear weapon. And that's not because the Iranians are stupid people. I think we can we can tell right now that the Iranians are anything but stupid. They had the ability, I think, that the brain power to actually develop one, or they could have simply traded a ton of oil with Pakistan or someone else to actually get a nuclear weapon. They were not doing that. We had no intelligence to indicate that they were. So not only does he say that this current war is based on a lie, but also that last June, the midnight hammer strikes were to. Yep. And good stuff. His former boss.

now former boss, Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, testified before the Senate yesterday and testified before the House today and could not, would not refute anything that Joe Kent said about Iran building a nuclear weapon. She went full Bill Clinton on him. Like, depending on what the definition of imminence is, you know, it's like only the president can determine when something is imminent. It's like, no, the president determines the policy response to threats. You tell him if they're X number of weeks or months away from getting a nuclear weapon.

And you might say it with degrees of confidence. You might have low confidence that you know the answer. But, like, you, of course you're telling us if something's imminentance. Yeah. And Kent goes on to talk about, you know, how the Israelis were briefing the U.S. and Trump and giving them intelligence and saying, no, no, no, they're much closer, much closer. And it's like, yes, I'm sure they were or I could see that happening. But also, like, I mean, you've heard all these arguments before from neocons in this country, even some Democrats, right? stretching as far back as when Obama did the nuclear deal.

Yeah. Right? Like that's, they're always a couple weeks away. Yes. Yeah, I was always said the Iranians are on the cusp of getting a nuclear weapon. We'll talk more about this Israel piece again because it's interesting but complicated. So Trump presses him on this question again. Like, was there any intelligence of an imminent threat from Iran like you were just saying from Tulsi Gabbard?

Like, was Iran about to get a nuke? Were they about to launch conventional airstrikes or missile attacks on U.S. troops in the region? Because remember, that was basically what Marco Rubio said just days after before try to walk it back because it sounded like he was blaming the Israelis. here's that exchange. So imminent threat, you're saying that there was no intelligence that you saw with the highest level clearance, obviously involved in this conversation, that showed an imminent threat from Iran to the United States. No, unless we took certain actions, unless we came after them in a way that they thought threatened

the regime, then we basically knew what they were going to do. Well, okay. Right, of course. Right. But like any country. So if you attack any country and we know that they're going to have a reaction. We faced an imminent threat once we attack you. Yeah, exactly.

But there was no intelligence that said, hey, on whatever day it was, March 1st, the Iranians are going to launch this big sneak attack. They're going to do some kind of a 9-11, Pearl Harbor, et cetera. They're going to attack one of our bases. There was none of that intelligence. And just to be clear, there was no intelligence that showed an imminent threat. There was no intelligence that showed there on the cusp of building a nuclear weapon. There was no intelligence, indeed, that showed they were trying to build a nuclear weapon.

And nobody you know. said, I've seen it, but you haven't. It exists, but you just haven't seen it. Did you ever hear anybody say there is Intel that shows this? I did not. No. These lies, like, they're more egregious than even the Iraq war lies. They, well, I mean, they're not even trying to lie in a really effective way or a believable way here. Yeah. But it's sort of, I mean, it's great that Kent said that, and I think that's a useful data point. But, you know, Tucker lays this out at the beginning with him, too. like all this stuff was out there publicly. Like we all heard what Rubio said.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And remember what folks, what Rubio said was, well, we knew the Israelis were going to strike, which means the Iranians will respond and attack our troops. So we had to preempt that and blow up all their military assets. They wouldn't kill Americans. And he just sort of like leaves out the part where you could say to the Israelis, what if

you didn't strike? Right. And the idea that we couldn't persuade the Israelis not to strike seems. fanciful. Yes, I think we provide them a lot of support, which Kent goes through in this interview, that I think enables their very aggressive military operations. And if we pulled back on some of that, they would not have the capacity to be as reckless. Now, this is where it gets complicated. So, like, again, he says something interesting, which is that U.S. intelligence didn't reflect a nuclear threat or an imminent threat of them an attack, but he believes that the Israelis

were passing their own intelligence along to Trump through unofficial channels in that, Israel pushed narratives through friendly media in think tanks that changed the debate in the U.S. and hardened the negotiating line from one where that Trump had some like wiggle room to one where the U.S. was telling Iran, our red line is zero enrichment. And honestly, that rang very true to me because that's something I watched happen in real time. Like you could have gotten like a JCPOA but tougher deal that allowed Iran some sort of face saving enrichment capacity with verification and inspections. and all the things you would need, but they went to zero enrichment, which to me was just like a way to ensure you never got a deal.

Again, though, it's like I know that people are, you know, maybe reluctant to buy this because it's like, well, we don't want to blame Israel and it's all blame Israel and there's all kinds of, you know, there's a lot of layered political issues with that, right? But neocons in this country did the same thing around Iraq, have been doing the same thing with Iran. Like, of course they push, you know, their idea. Like, we saw this in intelligence in the run up to the Iraq war. Yeah, they cherry picked intelligence. Like, it just happens to be Israeli intelligence doing it this time. But, like, there's all kinds of right-wing assholes in this country that have nothing to do with Israel who do the same kind of shit. So why wouldn't we believe that that's happened?

The Israeli government, Benjamin Dachna, who has wanted to go to war in Iran for 40 years. He said that, like, just recently. So, like, of course they're going to. It's beyond us that a government and an intel agencies within a government would push Intel that's favorable to a political objective. Yes, of course that's believable. It's happened here. Yes, it happens all the time. Yeah, I think where they cross the line is suggesting that Trump has no agency, right?

He's both a strong man. That is their huge weakness. And this like little poor subject who gets pushed and pulled and like battered by the forces of the world. It's like, no, he's the president of the United States. If he wants to go to war, he'll go to war. If he doesn't, he should say he fucking doesn't and be a man and own the decision. Now, the parts of that interview where my eyes rolled so hard is them just being like, and Trump is a, he's a smart, like there's no one smarter than him on stuff like that.

He can take a, he can take a data set and figure out the most important part. And it's so, and so because they can't get themselves to believe that Trump is a fucking gullible idiot who's easily persuaded, it's like, was he blackmailed? Yes. And you're like, okay. And that is where this whole thing goes off the. They basically suggest that the Israelis were trying to spy on Trump and maybe we're trying to threaten his life or his family's life. And it's like, okay, get out of here with that shit.

They get into like Charlie Kirk and blaming Israel for Charlie Kirk. I'm like, you guys are like destroying your own credibility here. Because they can't, because the truth is that Trump is a gullible fucking moron. Yes. But if they admit that, they'd have to admit that they have worked for and campaigned for a gullible fucking moron for the last however many years. Yes. Trump thought war was easy because the Midnight Hammer operation was discreet and no one got hurt. And then the Venezuela operation was miraculously, you know, a situation where no service members were killed either.

And so far it's going okay. We'll find out in the long term. Now, this is very different. And Iran is predictably turning into an unmitigated disaster in ways that were not only predictable, but predicted. Literally, like, there's a guy named Nate Swanson who is like an Iran director under, I think, Biden. and then Trump who got Laura Lumbered and like pushed out, you know, he was like, I wrote a piece four days before the operation that predicted all of these things and I used to work in the NSC. Like the idea that this was like, no one thought that they were going to attack the Gulf allies.

Everyone thought that. They said they were going to do that. It's also just like, like Trump could be persuaded by BB and the Israelis pushing, you know, false intelligence and persuading them that way or by watching a T-vode segment between Mark Levin and Sean Hannity. Either could get him. Or, yeah. Or a round of golf with Lindsey Graham. Right.

Lindsay tells him he's Reagan plus, plus, plus, plus, plus. Yeah, this is. We don't have to pull out the red string on this one, guys. Yeah, we don't need any red string. Should we call Trump? Yeah, let's call him. What are we going to call? What are we going to ask him?

I was going to ask him that Supreme Leader question. Okay, great. You have a good one, yeah, please. Awkward if he does take this call someday. I know, I know. I'm like nervous about it. Next time, I guess. He should record his own voicemail.

This is Don. Yeah, what would you say? You just got schlonged or whatever of those weird expressions. Thank you for your attention to this matter. Thank you for your attention to this voicemail. Please leave your message after the tone because he's an old school voicemail guy.

Thank you for your attention to this matter, DJT. Yeah, you know, yeah, leave a message on my machine. I'll get back to you. All right, I think that that's all I had. Anything else you want to yell about? No, that's all for now. Thank you for watching this POTSafe America episode on YouTube. Please subscribe and talk to you guys soon.

Thank you.