Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump FALLS APART as Surprise Update ROCKS White House

Episode Date: March 20, 2026

Trump FALLS APART as Surprise Update ROCKS White House Go to https://surfshark.com/rank or use code RANK at checkout to get 4 extra months of Surfshark VPN! After brutal hearings from Tulsi Gabbard and Markwayne Mullin, Trump hits a new low in the polls. Tommy Vietor and Brian Tyler Cohen  @briantylercohen  break down a disastrous week for Trump and Republicans. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, Brian, the Iran war is a total disaster. We have 13 U.S. service members dead, over 200 are wounded, many severely. Over 1,000 Iranian civilians have been killed. Gas prices are set to hit $4 per gallon next week, and the war is costing taxpayers about a billion dollars per day. Other than that, it's going great. So that's like the backdrop, right, for these reports that the Trump administration is going to request $200 billion with a B in funding from Congress for the war.

President Trump was asked about this today during his bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of Japan. This was his response. The war is almost over. Why is the Pentagon going to ask Congress for an additional $200 billion? Well, we're asking for a lot of reasons beyond even what we're talking about in Iran. This is a very volatile world. And the military equipment, the power of some of this weaponry is unthinkable. don't even want to know about it. Oh, you could end this thing in two seconds if you wanted to, but we are being very judicious. So that was incoherent. Either way, I'm a broken record

on this, Brian, but I think it's hard to think of something more politically unpopular than spending $200 billion on bombs while Trump is stripping away health care from millions of Americans, tens of millions of Americans. Yeah, I mean, look, he's stripped Medicaid away from 17 million Americans, food assistance away from million Americans, cut ACA subsidies for 24 million Americans. And this is on the back of running an entire campaign where he even acknowledges himself that the reason that he won was because prices were too high. And since then, prices have gone up. He's launched a trade war that sent the cost of all consumer goods even higher. Utility bills are 10 to 15 percent higher than they used to be. And all the while, the administration claims

it has no money to do to fix any of those problems, but apparently blank check when it comes to dropping bombs in the Middle East, which would be bad enough unto itself, but even more egregious given the fact that this guy ran an entire ass campaign on the fact that he would never engage in another forever war in the Middle East. Yeah, by the way, blaming Biden is interesting because Trump's position is like, I rebuilt the military and thank God I did, but then Biden did all these bad things because he helped Ukraine. Biden gave Ukraine $186 billion. The request they're doing after a couple weeks of war is $200 billion. Yeah. How long are we going to be there? Are we going to be there for six months now. Is this the first request? Is it one of many? Like, there are zero answered

questions about the war. Also, there's no strategy. We don't know the end game. He won't tell anybody when it's going to end. He was asked by Fox News, when would you end the war? And he said, when I feel it in my bones? Yeah. Isn't that how you end wars, the same way that old people know that a storm is coming? Know that there's going to be rain. Oh, my hip's acting up. I mean, honestly, that tracks for him. But the crazy thing is, Rubin Gallego tweeted that the outlay for the Iraq war for one year of the Iraq war was $140 billion. So the fact that the Pentagon is asking for $200 billion suggests that this isn't, you know, a quick war. It's not going to last a couple of weeks as has been floating around the zeitgeist a little bit. They're requesting enough money for this thing

to last well into a year. Yeah. And Pete Hexeth was asked about the $200 billion price tag too. He said, obviously it takes money to kill bad guys. Thank you, Pete. That was very smart. And then he said, I think that number could move. So I think we should interpret this as a shifting target and it could go up. You don't think that they want that number to go down, that they anticipate that number only to be half of what they're asking for right here? From the same party that was initially asking for a trillion dollars from the Pentagon for their budget, now wants $1.5 trillion. You don't think that they're going to shift that number down. It's another relevant data point.

The Pentagon budget for 2026 was about a trillion dollars. I feel like they had to get some money. Which is like $200 billion more than it had ever been before. That's massive. Before. You know, the interesting thing is like right now this is happening at the same time that the shutdown means that TSA workers aren't getting paid. Democrats have introduced a standalone bill to pay these TSA agents.

Of course, Republicans don't want to do it because they want to use this leverage and the pain that Americans are feeling to say we have to pass full funding for the entirety of DHS. But, you know, the interesting part of that, I checked the full year budget for 2025. The full year outlay for TSA is like $11.8 billion. So in just what we've spent in the last few weeks. And like seven days of bombing. Yeah, it could fund, I mean, six days could have funded the entire TSA for a year. But that's really like a microcosm of this broader effort, that everything we're doing on a daily basis should not be going overseas.

It should be spending money on Americans. Like, we should be focused on infrastructure and health care and and food and education. But we're not. All those things get ignored in exactly, you know, in direct conflict. with what this administration campaigned on. Yeah, you could end child poverty in America for the price of like a two-week war in the Middle East. It's insane, which is why, by the way, the American people fucking hate this idea and they think it's crazy and they think the war is unpopular. So there's a poll out today. Reuters Ipsos

found that 65% of Americans think Trump is going to send troops into a large-scale ground war in Iran, but only 7% of them support the idea, right? So that's one data point. Nate Silver is tracking Trump's sort of daily polling average. This week, He reached a new net low at 15.3 points underwater. UGov has a poll out where they found 24% of Trump, 2024 voters disapprove of Trump's handling. 24%? Yeah, disapprove.

In 17% of Republicans, it's approved. Total approval is only 36%. Brian, one way we could make those polling numbers on this war even worse is watch progressive independent media. A lot of the national coverage has been a little too credulous, a little too pro-war, a little to Iraq War Redux. We promise to not be like that. Please subscribe to Brian Tyler Cohen's channel.

Subscribe to Pod Save America here on YouTube. There's a lot of right wing crap, a lot of pro-war propaganda on YouTube. Help us displace it. Please, subscribe. It's free. So, like, no one wants this war. Trump didn't prepare us for it. There's no clear endgame.

Well, he made no case for it in the beginning. So nobody even knows what we're doing there. And the thing that they landed on to try and serve as some tenuous justification for all of this is that there was an imminent threat from Iran. Joe Kent, who just resigned from the administration, not a good guy, by the way, like this avowed neo-Nazi, but spoke with Tucker Carlson and said there was no imminent threat from Iran when Tulsi Gabbard was asked under oath in front of Congress whether Iran was like two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon.

Yeah, having a nuclear weapon. She refused to answer because she knew that if she had answered the question, honestly, she would have undermined Trump. And if she had lied in deference to Trump, she would have perjured herself. Let's watch Tulsi. So Tulsi's been on Capitol Hill this week. The Intel world does this yearly worldwide threat assessment hearing that they all despise. we hated it when I was in government. But it's like the only chance. You know, once a sheer chance

to ask these people in an open setting, you know, what terrorist threats are, how they're viewing the world, like what the threat is from Russia, China, et cetera. So she obviously she got a bunch of questions about Iran, especially the claim that Iran posed an imminent threat to the U.S. And as you said, she has no good answers. Because the truth contradicts Trump. And she can't say that out loud because last time she did it, she got slapped down. And before you know it, she's on the beach posting photos for herself doing yoga and the next day. Trump is toppling Venezuela. That's what happens if you tell the truth.

So this is Georgia Senator John Asoff questioning Tulsi earlier this week. Let's watch. The White House stated on March 1st of this year that this war was launched and was, quote, a military campaign to eliminate the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime, end quote. That's a statement from the White House, quote, the imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was an imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? The intelligence community assessed that Iran maintained the intention to rebuild and to continue

to grow their nuclear enrichment capability. Was it the assessment of the intelligence community that there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no. Senator, the only person who can determine what is and is not an imminent threat is the president. False. This is the worldwide threat searing where you present to Congress, national intelligence,

timely objective and independent of political considerations. You've stated today that the intelligence community's assessment is that Iran's nuclear enrichment program was obliterated and that, quote, there had been no efforts since then to try to rebuild their enrichment capability. Was it the intelligence community's assessment that nevertheless, despite this obliteration, there was a, quote, imminent nuclear threat posed by the Iranian regime? Yes or no? It is not the intelligence community's responsibility to determine what is and is not an imminent threat. Okay.

That is up to the president based on a volume of information. No, it is precisely, it is precisely your responsibility to determine what constitutes a threat to the United States. This is the worldwide threats hearing where, as you noted in your opening testimony, quote, you represent the ICs assessment of threats. You are here to represent the IC's assessment of threats. That's a quote from your own opening statement. So, yeah, sort of think like one of the main reasons we spend billions of dollars on intelligence is to identify threats ahead of time and then assess which ones are imminent.

It feels like that's kind of like her whole job. No, no, no, no, no, no. No, you deserve it. The job, the job is for Donald Trump to just fart out whatever he thinks. Nobody else's opinion matters. We don't even need an intelligence community. whatever, you know, errant synapse fires in Donald Trump's brain and falls out of his face,

that's the threat that we face. Whatever he saw on Lindell TV earlier. That's right. By the way, just quickly, shout out John Ossuff there. Like, great job using your time, asking questions, following up, using her words against her, pinning her down.

He's really good. That was great. Yeah. That was great. But, look, as you said, like, Tulsi had a very difficult job up on the hill this week, because first of all,

she ran against wars with Iran in 2020 when she ran for president. That was like the issue. She sold shirts that said no war with Iran. Because she served in Iraq and she thought regime change wars were insane. Cut two. She's right.

Yeah, cut two. Selling your soul. Her colleague. She went from selling shirts to selling her soul. Good. One pays more. That was good. Well, honestly, good question.

Shirts probably is a government. That is true. Shirts probably do pay better. Should have stuck with the shirts. Yeah. Go back to the shirts. Her former colleague, this guy, Joe Ken, who he mentioned earlier, he resigned earlier this week.

He put out a resignation letter and then did that Tucker Carlson interview where he stated unequivocally that there was no imminent threat from Iran. He also said that. that Ron was not on the cusp of having a nuclear weapon. As you mentioned earlier, Donald Trump said they were two weeks away from having a nuclear weapon, which is crazy. Kent also said some troubling stuff, like blaming basically the entire war on Israel. He also blamed the Iraq War on Israel, which, again, I find that narrative frustrating

when it's that overstated because it absolved Donald Trump of responsibility. You know, like, he decided to go to war with Iran because he's an idiot. And like Lindsey Graham at a much of a neocon war. mongers told him he'd be a historic figure if he toppled the ayatollas. Certainly, Bebbenayn Yahoo and Israelis were feeding him information and putting political pressure on Trump to do something about Iran. It's also true, according to Marco Rubio, that the Israelis were planning to strike the Iranians because they had intelligence about this meeting where they could decapitate the regime.

And the U.S. thought, well, that means the Iranians will fire back at us so that we decided to preempt that strike. They kind of leave out the option where the U.S. could say, hey, what if you didn't do that? What if you didn't start a war that we get dragged into? But like, don't absolve Donald Trump of responsibility. He's not a little baby. He's the president. Liberal Tears is brought to you by Surfshark.

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to get four extra months of Surfshark VPN. That's surfshark.com slash rank code rank. It's also worth noting that we had a diplomatic solution that would have prevented Iran from enriching their nuclear capabilities. And that was and that was that, but that had Obama's name on it. And so God forbid the JCPOA stay in place because. is, you know, nothing that Obama had his hands on could ever possibly stay in place. It really, it's so interesting because all of this stuff is evidence of Trump trying to build his legacy, but almost simultaneous with that is him trying to tear down Obama's legacy. He has predicated so much of his identity equally with building up his own as trying to destroy

any, you know, semblance of what Obama had built. And I think he just lit his presidency on fire through this Iran war, to be honest with you. Well, I'm curious about that point. Like, if what is the best case scenario, how quickly could things? snap back. And the reason I ask that is because now it doesn't seem as neatly contained as it was before. Like we are watching Iran bomb Qatar and this major LNG facility that supplies a massive amount of liquefied natural gas. There's bombings all around the Middle East. So it seems like other countries are getting sucked into this conflict. And even if we extricate ourselves,

it doesn't feel like it would just kind of revert back to the status quo neatly. And so I'm just curious, like what is, give us an example of best case scenario, medium scenario, and worst case scenario in terms of if we left today. Well, just to emphasize the point you made about this LNG facility in Qatar, I mean, the CEO of Qatar's big energy company today said that 17% of their LNG is going to be offline for three to five years because of that airstrike. So that is a huge amount of natural gas that, by the way, Europe was buying from Qatar because they were told not to buy it from the Russians and now they're screwed.

The Strait of Hormuz is still closed. I mean, the Brent crude price was way over 105 or it was up to like 109 today. So energy prices are way up. They are likely to stay up even if the war ended today. So best case, right? I think best case, honestly, is Trump ending the war tomorrow and saying, we won, we're ready to move on. Now, I don't think that means the Israelis are going to stop and I don't think that means the Iranians are going to stop. So I think this thing continues in the Strait of Hormuz will stay closed for some indeterminate period of time.

I think what Trump has decided is that the only way to de-escalate is to escalate first and that he's going to decide they need to take out a bunch more targets, possibly launch a ground invasion, either to get the highly enriched uranium that's still in Iran or to- That was supposedly obliterated. Supposedly obliterated or to take Karg Island, which is this facility where 90% of Iran's oil gets exported or possibly to occupy the territory that sits alongside the Strait of Hormuz because a lot of military. expert say, that's the only way you can totally ensure that ships going through the Strait of Hormuz are safe because it's, you know, it's a narrow choke point. It's like 21 miles wide. It's a narrowest point. So I think that we're in this for a while because the Iranians have a say. And the Iranian calculus now is we need to make this hurt so badly that we're not back in this place in six months, right? They want, they want the United States to say to these Israelis, you can't

do this again in a year just because you see them rebuilding their ballistic missile capacity or something like they want to make sure that we feel pain. I mean how long I want to go back to that question like like give me best case scenario and worst case scenario on how long it'll take before gas prices go back down or or things go back to normal like like what do you presume? I mean you know I think I think the best case scenarios at this point is if he left tomorrow for if you end it tomorrow and things just calm down I think you're probably seeing elevated oil prices well into the summer. Okay. The worst case is the the straight of whom moves stays close. and you have major oil fields in places like Iraq or Kuwait that have to shut down oil wells.

And it's not easy to restart an oil well once you shut it down because it gets like corroded and there's like a paraffin wax in there that hardens up. And like sometimes you can't get them back going at all. Now there's a worst worst case, which is the Iranians like blowing up a major oil and gas field. I mean, Trump, Trump last night threatened to to just eviscerate the PARs oil field, the major like the biggest oil natural gas. deposit in the world that the Iranian share with guitar. He threatened to just destroy it all. So I guess there's a worse, worse. So that's cool. I feel like he's just trying to out crazy everybody so that they would be just too worried about doing any of this stuff. And frankly, it's not a not not completely off base. In the past it has worked for him. But you know,

on that point, Brian, of sort of like trying to out crazy. I mean, another person I think who used his worldwide threat assessment time well was Congressman Jason Crow. In this exchange with Tulsi Gabbard. I thought he did a really good job unpacking all the ways that this new Iranian regime is actually worse and potentially more dangerous for America. So let's watch that. Director Gabbard, it is your job and the job of your agency and department to assess the views of Iranian leadership, their policy beliefs and policy positions, correct? Yes. That includes now deceased Ali Komeni of Iran, correct? Yes. And the now leader, his son Moushtaba Komeni, correct?

Yes. The son is considered more of a hardliner than his father. Isn't that correct? Yes. So hardline that even some of Iran's leaders thought he was too aggressive. Isn't that correct? That is the intelligence community assessment, yes. Mushhtaba, the son, is particularly close to the brutal Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps

and their most hardline commanders, correct? That is the intelligence community assessment. He was involved in ordering violent crackdowns on Iranian protesters, including their murder, correct? Yes. And we don't know if the son will continue his father's religious ban on developing nuclear weapons. Is that correct? It is unknown at this time. You testified before this committee last year that the elder now deceased Comene had in 2003 banned the nuclear weapons program or suspended it, correct?

There was a fatwa in place that stated that. And that fatwa remained in place last year when you testified before this committee, correct? Yes. And that fatwa remained in place recently, correct? As far as I know it has not been lifted. You're aware of no information that would lift that fatwa. I'm not aware of any intelligence reporting that states that. To be clear on the Mojtabha, the son, who has been named to replace him,

it is unclear of his status or his involvement. He was injured very severely through one of the Israeli strikes. And so the decision making is unclear about what's happening in the Iranian leadership. So it's unclear. So we're less certain of the positions of Iranian leadership and their intentions than we were 60 days ago, correct? That's an accurate assessment. Just to summarize, through this war, we replaced an 86-year-old man named Hamene, who had banned nuclear weapons, who was about to regime change himself because he was 86, with a more hard-lined 56-year-old, also named Homonee, his son, who is controlled by the IRC and probably will want to get a nuclear weapon out because he doesn't want to get bombed again. Does that sound good to you? This is where we put the banner and say, mission accomplished.

Mission accomplished. Great job. Yeah. It's, I mean, you know, that really, again, puts on full display, like, what was the objective here to begin with? Because we haven't been told this. That's why this is the lowest polling war at its outset in American history. Yeah. Because we don't know why we're there again, which would be bad enough, even if he tried, did try to sell some bogus rationale, justification to go to this war. but even worse, given the fact that the whole basis for this presidency was a move away from these foreign wars that have plagued, frankly, our generation for as long as we can remember. I mean, we've been at war in the Middle East my whole life.

Yeah, like it's so, so I mean, this, not only have we not accomplished whatever, you know, tenuous justification Trump put forward, but it's objectively gotten worse, you know, according to Tulsi Gabbard herself. It is really bad. I mean, we're in a scary place right now. I'm very worried about reprisal attacks from the IRGC or Iranians, maybe in the homeland, but maybe against, you know, U.S. American interests abroad. I don't think the Pentagon is telling us the truth about the number of U.S. casualties.

I think they're really trying to cover this up. Like, we don't really know anything about these two refueling tankers that collided and killed six servicemen. And, like, there's going to be this funding fight that we talked about at the top. You know you're going to hear the, like, Fox News 2004, Iraq War era, support the troops by voting for more funding. I think everyone's got to get in their head that is not how you support the troops. You support the troops by bringing these guys home because this is fucking disaster of a mission already. Finally, Brian, just for fun, wanted to play for you just a little bit more from Trump's biolat with the Japanese prime minister, Sanai Takajiichi. Let's watch this exchange.

Japan and U.S. are a very good friend. But one question, why didn't you tell U.S. allies in Europe and Asia like Japan? about the war before attacking Iran. So we are very confused about we Japanese citizens. One thing you don't want to signal too much, you know, when we go in, we went in very hard, and we didn't tell anybody about it because we wanted surprise. Who knows better about surprise than Japan?

Okay? Why didn't you tell me about Pearl Harbor? Okay? Right? Valid question. Got a good point. Valid question. That was a surprise.

It was a surprise. Yeah. You know what? And it turned out well for everybody. If we had Trump been in charge, we wouldn't have had that great speech the day after. Yesterday, December 7th, 1941. The day that we live in infamy, the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by Naval and Air Force of the Empire of Japan. I don't if you could see there, Taki, like, physically gasped because, like, you don't really talk about Pearl Harbor in that context. It's not a fond memory for them.

Yeah. They're not psyched about it either. You know, she's also a super right wing hardliner. Like, they kind of get along. It's a, it's a weird deal. Last thing I wanted to mention to you, did you see that last year, Donald Trump Jr. invested in a rare earth startup at a $200 million valuation. And then three months later, the government gave them a huge loan and now it's worth $2 billion. That's just good investing. What a business is just lucky, frankly. I mean, everything just keeps coming up. Aren't they, aren't they invested in some drone coming? company now that's also servicing the war effort? Yes, from the Pentagon. Yeah. Eric, I think that's Eric. Yeah. Just lucky guys. I mean, just good investors, have a good investing head on their shoulders.

Right place, right time, big on spreadsheets. Yeah. They're numbers guys. They're numbers guys. Eric especially. They know words like, um, Ibita. Yeah. Pro rata.

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