Breaking News from Pod Save America - Trump LEAKS War Plans at Chaotic Press Conference

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Did Trump just LEAK his War Plans? Trump sparks outrage after a chaotic press conference where he may have revealed key war details, as Republicans push back on his $200 billion request. Tommy Vietor and Ben Rhodes break it down. CHECK OUT OUR SPONSOR: ZIP RECRUITER - http://ziprecruiter.com/CROOKED Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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All right, Ben, we are now three weeks into Donald Trump's war with Iran. So Ben and I, we just want to take a beat to discuss where we think this thing is headed. The impact on the region and the world so far, and then the political debate here in the United States, as wonderful as it always is. But before we get to the serious stuff, Ben, we have to laugh so that we don't cry. I don't think you've seen this yet. I want you to check out this brand new spin. This is from Friday from Donald Trump, where he's asked about the Strait of Hormuz before he got onto the helicopter

to go, you know, fuck around and play golf for the weekend while this war. war is raging. Let's watch. We're doing very well overall. You know, we don't use the straight. We don't, the United States. We don't need it. Europe needs it. Korea, Japan, China, a lot of other people. So they'll have to get involved a little bit on that one. You said opening the straight of our rules is a simple military maneuver. Very simple. Yeah, but what did you mean by that? It's a simple military maneuver. It's relatively safe, but you need a lot of help in the sense of you need ships. You need volume.

And NATO could help us, but they so far haven't had the courage to do so. And others could help us. But, you know, we don't use it. You know, at a certain point, it'll open itself. So there we go, Ben. We don't use the straight-or-moos, but it's going to open itself. Reminders, a reminder, 20% of the world's energy goes through the straight-or-humus. But we don't need it now, and it's going to take care of itself.

That clip kind of encapsulates everything that's been wrong. with this war, if you think about it, because, number one, it shows a complete lack of understanding of what's actually happening. It's not a simple military maneuver because you have to deal with mines, you have to deal with like a missiles, a crazy coastline with like mountainous territory where people can hide, drones, like nothing simple about this. An army that's planned for this for decades. Yes. So he doesn't know what he's talking about with the straight. his assessment of geopolitics is absurd in global economics because whether there are American ships going through the strait of Hormuz, ask any American filling up their fucking gas tank today whether the Strait of Hormuz is relevant to Americans. His disparaging of allies as if they did something wrong when he's the idiot that started a war that's destroying the world in the global economy is particularly rich.

But also, Tommy, like his seeming belief that he can spin away consequences. Dude, everything else in his life, he's been able to talk things into a reality and to sort of just like sell whatever version of events he wants. In this case, everyone knows he's a liar and an idiot because he's like, oh, the war is already won and they turn on the TV and they see some giant LNG facility at Qatar getting blown up. Or he's like, oh, prices will come down in the long run. And then you go to the gas tank and, you know, gas is a dollar. more than it was a month ago. Like it is, he cannot spin this away.

That's right. I mean, it's tragic that it took a war, but events have finally caught up to Donald Trump. Yeah. And, you know, he can't call this like the Russia hoax,

you know, and hide something behind a curtain. Like, we're all feeling this. Everybody in the world is impacted by this thing he did. Prices are up. And everyone's like, it was this event that you ordered.

This person. This one person. We know, you did this, idiot. Yeah, this might work on like Fox News, but nowhere else. way, if you are as frustrated as we have been at a lot of the coverage of this conflict,

please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube. Unlike a lot of other news outlets, especially Fox, we've not been in a coma for 20 years. No. We remember the global war in terror and the war in Iraq and how terribly it all ended for everyone, and we're going to keep pushing back in the lies in the bullshit from the White House. So please subscribe to Pod Save the World on YouTube because when you do, you help us get good factual information into the YouTube algorithm from a progressive perspective and hopefully display some of the bullshit from Fox and Ben Shapiro.

and all the other little war propagandists out there who are trying to sell this thing. But Ben, let's start with this growing fear that Trump is going to send ground troops into Iran. There's a bunch of data points late this week that suggest this is going to happen. So the first is, there's reports now that the U.S. is sending thousands more sailors than Marines to the Middle East. I've seen reports of up to 7,500 Marines. CBS reported that the Pentagon is preparing detailed war plans for a ground invasion. And then Axios reported that the Trump administration is considering plans to occupy or blockade Karg Island to pressure the Iranians to reopen the straight or maybe, you know,

whatever else in some negotiation. As we've talked about on the show, Kargai Islands about 15 miles off the coast of Iran, 90% of Iran's oil exports flow through it. Here's just a couple quotes for you from this Axio story. Quote, we need about a month to weaken the Iranians with more strikes, take the island, and then we get them by the balls and use it for negotiations, source with knowledge of the White House thinking said. Here's another quote from a senior official.

We've always had boots on the ground in conflicts under every president, including Trump. I know this is a fixation in the media and I get the politics, but the president is going to do what's right. That's another ominous one. And then, Ben, I don't know if you caught these comments from BB Netanyahu earlier this week. Yes, let's play that too. What conditions for Israel need to be satisfied for you to recognize a transitional leader, formerly recognize a new leadership in Iran? No, you want a transitional leader that will have a transition. You don't want to replace one Ayatollah with another.

You don't want to replace Hitler with Himmler. So I think the question is, will the conditions be created for such a change? I think it's too early to say. And I think in the final account, as I said, it's up to the Iranian people to show that to choose the moment and to rise to the moment, we can create the conditions, but they have to, you know, they have to explode those conditions at a certain point. It is often said that you can't win – you can't do revolutions from the – air. That is true. You can't do it only from there. You can do a lot of things from the

air and we're doing, but there has to be, there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities. So, you know, Ben, we've talked on the show how we expect there to be some sort of like substantial and incredibly risky but more limited ground components to go into Iran and get the highly enriched uranium and then get it out. But what Netanyahu is talking about there and whatever that Trump official is saying about the Karg Island strategy sounds like something much more maximalist from like regime change to like a forced surrender

option. Yeah, this whole thing is kind of crazy and any of these ground operations would be extensive. So is Fahan where the nuclear material is, it's in the center of Iran. Just look at a map. It's like they chose it for a region. And so you'd have to get all the way in. You'd have to secure this perimeter. It's more than just like some Hollywood special operation. One of our former colleagues at a thousand personnel per site. Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Carg Island, same thing. It's still Iranian territory in range of Iranian missiles and drones and all the rest of it. I'm sure that they are planning now since we're telegraphing our punch. Like, I'm sure there are things, you know, booby traps that can be laid, you know. And then you start to, the Israelis seem like

they will not, look, the Iranians are winning this war if their regime is surviving and they are demonstrating that they control the street. And thereby, Israel is losing this war. And Netanyahu seems like he cannot politically accept an outcome in which the Iranian regime is still there. But I don't see any sign that the Iranian regime is going anywhere. There's not a popular uprising because they already massacred thousands of protesters before this happened. And I'm beginning to get worried that I think Isfahan and Karg Island would be nuts. Any ground troops are nuts. That would be even crazier if you're trying to invade with a political objective tied to that invasion. And so this all feels quite ominous. The other thing I'd say is that that quote, and something

jumped out of me in the quote, all these wars have ground troops. First of all, that doesn't make them right, like most of them had been wrong. But also, like, Iran is different. We have already experienced it. It's different. It's a bigger country. It's a bigger population. It's a bigger physical territory. It has more geopolitical connectivity than Iraq or Afghanistan had. Like, they seem to not know the stakes that they're playing in. Yeah, it's a bigger military. You know, on Wednesday's episode, we talked about the resignation of this guy named Joe Kent. He was the top counterterrorism official, the head of NCTC. In his resignation letter, he said some really important things.

Like there was no imminent threat of Iran getting a nuclear weapon. So Trump lied. There was no imminent threat from an intercontinental ballistic missile, i.e. a missile that could hit the U.S. until like 2035, even if they decided to pursue one. But then he's done a bunch of interviews since we had that conversation. And one thing that jumped out of me, Ben, is he said that in the lead up to this most recent conflict with Iran,

there was no deliberation or debate. So you and I were NSC, National Security Council staff. Yeah. The way it works is the deputies committee assembles. So that's the second, the deputies of all the relevant agencies, State Department, Department of Defense, et cetera, intel guys. You hash out ideas, kind of think about downsize, do contingency plannings. Then the principles meet, right?

The Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense. Then it gets to the president and he or she makes a call. In this case, it was just a little cabal of staffers at Mar-a-Lago, while the people who were critics of the war literally got fucking relegated to Washington. That's why we saw that picture of J.D. Vance running his own little situation room meeting from Washington as Trump and the big boys ordered the military operation. Yeah, it's pretty wild. It is wild. And look, this stuff matters.

And this is when, again, it's catching up to them. Their NSC staff, Tommy, is down to, like, I think something in like the 30s. Wow. If you don't count the support staff, like the sit room guys, policy staff, they have no NSC. They have no process. the idea that you would do something as consequential as start a war of this scale to try to end the Iranian regime with no real interagency meetings.

That's also how you get bad, because in those meetings, you both use them to make decisions, but you also use them to plan for all the different scenarios. So how would we respond to a straight-of-Hormuz? And so the reason you can tell that these guys are flying by the seat of their pants is like shit happens, and they clearly have no plan for it. It's like, just yell at NATO. Let's call NATO and demand mine sweepers.

Right. That's not a plan. It's nuts. And by the way, CNN found it got a leaked internal assessment from the defense intelligence agency that says Iran could keep the straight of Hormuz shut from anywhere from one to six months. So stay tuned for how high gas prices could go. And also, you know, you can tell how badly they fucked this up and how Trump expected this to be over by now because he is now having to delay his trip to China. Yeah. Which is the most important meeting of his, you know, entire year.

probably with the most important geopolitical foe, and now he has to push it off because this war is spinning out of control. So let's just talk escalation risk for one minute, Ben. Like a lot of them are obvious. Like the Iranians keep hitting countries in the Gulf. They're hitting, you know, oil and gas facilities and civilian targets to the point where you're seeing Saudi officials now threaten on the record to join the war and get into offensive operations. You also have the Israelis hitting, you know, more and bigger oil and gas facilities in Iran. But I really did want to highlight the unintended escalation risks. Watch this clip and then let's talk about it.

So what you saw there was a fragment of an Iranian missile or an interceptor missile that hit in Jerusalem's old city near the western wall, Alaksa Mosque, and the Church of the Holy Sepulch. So basically this fragment goes a couple hundred yards a different direction and it's like literally a choose-your-one adventure of different holy wars that would have been kicked off in that moment.

Yeah. And look, there are all manner of escalation risks like this. This is the biggest one. I mean, it really is. Like if the dome of the rock got blown up. The Iranians bombed maximum. But the Iranians would say that the Israelis did it as a false flag, and frankly, most people would believe that and a lot of people would. The point is that, or obviously the temple, or, you know, Jesus's birthplace. Like, this would add a whole other dimension. But even beyond that, that's the worst one. But, you know, you look at some of these Iranian missiles that they're firing or drones and more getting through.

And what if they like destroy, not just like start a fire somewhere, but like a catastrophic success happens and there's like a destruction of a U.S. military facility or a ship of some nature, right? So the F-35 that got shot down by the drones. Yeah. And then suddenly Trump will want to get them back for that. And so then he'll do something crazier than he's done. And then that escalates too.

Like the longer this goes on, the more likely it is that things like that are going to happen. You already saw that when the Israelis bombed this giant natural gas field. Well, guess what? Iran shares that giant natural gas field with Qatar. So they bombed Qatar and then all of a sudden the global economy may be broken by it. So the escalation is going to happen. The worst is Jerusalem. Yeah.

And also, like, God help you if you work in Iraq right now, like all the embassy staff at Baghdad are getting drones fired at them. NATO just pulled hundreds of personnel out of Iraq. So, like, yeah, there's escalation risk everywhere. The global costs of the war are just exploding in a lot of different ways. We're going to look at a few of them. So the obvious one that we talk about every day is the price of oil. Brent crude was about 106 a barrel when we started recording this. It got as high as $11 a barrel earlier this week. That is up 76 percent year to date. And a Saudi official told the Wall Street Journal that prices could go above $180 per barrel. The Strait of Hormuz is closed through April. The energy supply.

Disruptions though like we're talking about gas being a dollar more expensive here in the US But the New York Times reported on the impact in Southeast Asia and you have 40% of gas stations and Laos are now closed due to lack of supply You have fishermen in Thailand in the Philippines they can't afford to fill their boats and go to work so these people are going to starve Natural gas prices are way up the CEO of Qatar energy says Iranian attacks knocked out 17% of Qatar's liquid natural gas exports capacity That's what you're just talking about that is 20 billion dollars an annual revenue just gone, and it's going to take three to five years to fix. And then the biggest thing I think is not being talked about is a global fuel food crisis that could be triggered here.

A huge percentage of the world's fertilizer goes through the Strait of Humu's. On top of that, other fertilizer manufacturers in India need natural gas from the Gulf to produce fertilizer. So that is going down. So what you'll see is in the near term, prices go up. In the longer term, like crop yields are way down. and people are just going to starve to death. And so, like, I just feel like the true economic cost of this war is really not breaking through to people yet.

And the extent to which it touches, like, almost everybody on Earth, you know, this food issue is going to become a massive issue. And because once you have these kinds of disruptions, they tend to be cascading, you know, like the consequences get worse quicker. And then even if somehow there's de-escalation, it's going to take a long time to undo that. we just haven't had a war that is, you know, the Ukraine war is the only other war that is comparable to its global scale. And again, the fact that they didn't consider that, that, again, even more so than Iraq or Afghanistan, the amount of disruption that could come from this war was so clearly like not part of the process of thought that led into it. And all their solutions of escalation are going to make all these problems worse. The reality is Americans are more

insulated from the cost of this beyond our service members than a lot of other people in the world. And that's shameful. And that's also going to contribute to this perception that we, this country, are fucking dangerous and dishonorable and untrustworthy. I wish it weren't the case. But what do you think people in South these days do you think about us right now? You know? Yeah. Yeah. They are not. I mean, they just want to feed their families. I'm sorry, what Donald Trump had to launch a new war for what reason? So Lindsey Graham could make a Ron great again? Yeah, Lindsay Graham could... BB Nanyahu could have his 40-year dream realized.

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like if that exists, I guess. But 55% of voters said a hard no to boots on the ground. Only 37% supported the war in that poll. And then there's some new polling about, sorry. And then there's some new data about funding. for the war. So we now know the administration is going to request another $200 billion, with the B, more than Joe Biden spent in the entirety of the Ukraine war. An organization called the Searchlight Institute did a poll about the funding. They found that 56% of Americans oppose more funding for the Iran War, while only 30% support funding it. Of those who support more Iran war funding, only 15% strongly support it, while 41% of those who oppose strongly oppose it. So the

passions clearly on one side. 61% of independents opposed more funding. And then they basically divided the sample in half and they showed it messaging for and against funding. And even when you did that, there was still like an overwhelming majority opposed to more funding. I don't know if you saw this. Trump again today came out was like, oh, CNN had a poll that showed me at 100% when

it comes to troop deployments. And you see that shit and you're like, this guy's either a liar or fucking delusional. But like neither. Somebody's lying to him. Yeah. And neither is good for the White House. And so that's why I think we're seeing more and more Democrats come out and say they oppose funding. Like Greg Landsman, Congress from Ohio was one of the supporters of the war.

He came out today and said it's time to end it. And even huge Trump supporters like Lauren Bobert from Colorado are making statements like this. I will not vote for a war supplemental. No, I am a no. I have already told leadership. I am a no on any war supplementals. I am so tired of spending money elsewhere. I am tired of the industrial war complex getting all of our harder.

tax dollars. I have folks in Colorado who can't afford to live. We need America First policies right now. And that, I'm not doing that. She hasn't been that fired up since she was a beetle juice. No. Yeah. That's, yeah, that wasn't a, that was a hell no. Or a hell yeah, depending on. I mean, it's telling too, because she's not like MTG. She's not someone who's like been way broken out from him on. Right. Yeah. Like absolutely. I mean, yeah, she's split on a few things. But she's fucking like rock-ribbed conservative.

Yeah, and pretty riled up. And look, any politician taking, I wish that everybody was here earlier, but any politician taking the measure of where this thing is going, you know, I'd like Democrats to get there for principal reasons and many of them are. But even people like her, I think other Republicans with a midterm election coming. Get there now. And I just want to say, the 200 billion is an insane number. Crazy.

And if you think about it, the concerning the, to me about it is that's the Pentagon preparing for like a full war. Yes. That's like an annual appropriation for like an actual full blown war. That's like a year. Yeah. The cost of like one full year of the Iraq war with like tens of thousands of troops deploy there, if not 100,000.

Yeah. So that that's concerning. And like and also in the politics and you mentioned this, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance and the all in pod, you know, would love to just bitch about all this money we gave to the Ukrainians and Donald Trump was going to be the guy that spent money to secure the border at home instead of overseas. And this motherfucker has already spent more money on a stupid, pointless war than in three weeks. You know, like that's, that's, come on, like Trump supporters. Like, thank you for

fucking voting for this. And by the way, there were real concerns in the wake of Ukraine about U.S. stockpiles of certain weapons, especially missile defense systems and interceptor missiles and these tomahawk missiles called T. Lambs. We have so unbelievable. unbelievably exacerbated those problems. It's actually dangerous, but the funding's not going to solve it. Because the problem... It takes years. It takes literally, like, it will take decades to replenish the stockpiles of these weapons.

We just can't make them faster. Yeah. And I think people need understand this. Like, that creates a hole for, like, three to five years. And, like, you hope you don't use your military in any case. But, yeah, if you're trying and you're like, now is the time to go into Taiwan or North Korea and South Korea or Putin somewhere else, like it is a useful time when the United States is like emptied its kit in this stupid war. Yeah.

Yeah. And also, I mean, just on the politics, I saw a Bloomberg reporter I follow reported today that investors are now betting that the overall U.S. inflation over the next 12 months will be above 5% basically derived from like the yield on a one-year T bill. So again, Mr. Trump, great work there. But, you know, it's broader than just politicians. Like Joe Rogan said on the show the other day that the voter. feel betrayed by Trump's war with Iran.

He said the decision to attack Iran seems insane based on the Trump 2024 platform. Yes. And then this clip caught my eye bend. This is a guy named Sean Ryan, we talked about on the show before. He's a former Navy SEAL. He now hosts this wildly popular podcast

that usually just focuses on military stuff, like most of his interviews or special forces guys or whatever. But he dabbles in politics. He had Trump on in 2024. And then both he and Rogan endorsed Trump in 2024. But as you will see, I'm not so sure that Sean Ryan, and would endorse Trump again today. Let's watch.

Here's what they said on the campaign trail. Trump advisor Stephen Miller on X. Liz Cheney is Kamala's top advisor. Liz wants to invade the whole Middle East. Kamala equals World War III. Trump equals peace. Tulsi Gabbard, October 28, 2024. A vote for Kamala Harris is a vote for Dick Cheney

and a vote for war. War and more war. A vote for Donald Trump is a vote to end wars, not start them. Miller also wrote, Kamala will send your sons to war, J.D. Vance, 2023, on the Wall Street Journal. Trump's best foreign policy? Not starting any wars. He has my support because I know he won't recklessly send Americans to fight wars overseas. The Republican National Committee promoted

Trump, Vance, is the pro-peace ticket. Trump on October 30th, 2020. They're all warhawks when they're sitting in Washington in a nice building saying, in quote, oh, gee, let's send 10,000's troops right into the mouth of the enemy. Pete Hegseth, December 2025 speech, our department will not be distracted by democracy-building interventionism. Undefined wars in regime change. Every single one of these things is a complete lie. Don't forget, during the Biden administration, Trump said this president is going to drive us into war because he doesn't know how to negotiate. Well, here we are. Here we are. The entire world is worried that we're going to go into World War III here. We're going to reason. Pretty goodapo, huh? It reminded me of Brando at the end of Apocalypse now,

reading the Time magazine clips, you know? Anyway, it's a perfect summation of the scale of the betrayal here. And what's interesting is the totality of it is covering both Trump's broken promise on sending people to war, but also shattering his competence narrative. Like, The chef's kiss of the I knew I didn't. We always thought that was bullshit. I think a lot of people genuinely believed, hey, Donald Trump's a negotiator. He wrote the book. He'll deal with the bad guys.

Like, he'll make the deals. And so I think it's shattering different parts of his, you know, political identity in ways that, I don't know, feel pretty existential. I listened. I talked about this with Favre the other day. Like, I don't like to make predictions because I approved how. bad I was at them in 2016. Yeah, we all did. But it really does feel like this is the beginning of the end

for the Trump presidency. Because I just, I don't think you can get the toothpaste back in the tube here. And I think with a guy like Rogan or Sean Ryan, like the Epstein files shattered their faith in him and his honesty. And now this is really going even further. And I saw another Joe Rogan clip making the rounds

where he was talking about, do you see this story about some of the right wing Christian nationalist military leaders? Yes. Like there was one guy like a high level commander was like, Trump, was anointed by Jesus to bring his return back to Earth. And Rogan was like, these guys are as scary as the fucking suicide bombers in the Taliban.

I mean, in some ways, scarier because they can cause more destruction in a long run. They have better tools. Yeah, I mean, I think that just like we've talked throughout this about, you know, events have caught up to Trump. He can't, like, hide the truth from people, all that. what's also coming out here is the fractious nature of his coalition. Like that somehow he was able to keep under a big tent, like insane Christian nationalists who wouldn't have hasten the return of Jesus by having Israel take over the Middle East with like libertarian tech bros, you know,

and just MAGA veterans who don't want another fucking war. And they're all now seeing clearly, I don't want to be in a coalition with those people. Yeah, while gas prices go up and up and up. Anything else we should touch on? No, I mean, boy, those guys have a good clip operation over there. Yeah, they're doing a good job. Thank you for watching this episode of Positate the World here on YouTube.

Please subscribe. Thanks for watching, and we'll see you guys again next week.