The Adam Mockler Show - I COOKED a Trump Official TO HIS FACE on CNN

Episode Date: March 21, 2026

Adam Mockler breaks down his most recent CNN appearance. Click below for premium Adam Mockler content 👉 https://www.youtube.com/@adammockler/join 👉 https://adammockler.com/subscribe JOIN THE COMMUNITY: Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/AdamMockler/ Discord: https://discord.gg/y9yzMU3Gff Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/adammockler/ Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/adammockler.com/ Twitter: https://x.com/adammocklerr/ TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@adammockler Contact: [e-mail] Business inquiries: [e-mail] Adam Mockler - Mockler Media LLC Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

When West Jet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to Westjetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. Getting ready for a game means being ready for anything. Like packing a spare stick.

I like to be prepared. That's why I remember 988 Canada's suicide crisis helpline. It's good to know just in case. Anyone can call or text for free confidential support from a train responder anytime. 988 suicide crisis helpline is funded by the government in Canada. I mean, gas prices are spiking, oil prices are spiking. It's not for people. That's a different conversation to have.

We're supposed to be protecting the American people. This president, not only, wait a minute. Safety and security around the globe is Russia getting more money secure, is even? Ron getting more money making us more secure? Yes or no? All right. That was me going back and forth with Donald Trump's former deputy press secretary, Hogan Gidley, and I want you to watch until the end because it continues to get heated. This is a special edition of my CNN debates because I did two debates back to back, and I'm going to put them both in this video for you all to enjoy. So make sure you drop a like below. Subscribe to help the Adam McClure feed get to 2 million followers,

which would be a record for Gen Z-built independent media, and thank you all. There are lots of possibilities, including unintended consequences, if we do decide, as the president seems to suggest, that, okay, we have these limited objectives. They're met up until a certain point that he is decided, but then we pull out, and then what? You know, we've got the Iranian regime that is wounded, but still largely intact, according to Tulsi Gabbard,

the director of national intelligence. What happens then when they're still in charge? They're still going to be trying to wreak havoc all around the world. Every single day this war is waged, the world becomes an inherently more dangerous place. We're helping our enemies, like Russia, get more money by lifting sanctions. We're helping Iran have more money by lifting sanctions. You know more about Iraq than me, obviously, but I did some research. Iran is four times the size of Iraq, three times the military, and twice the population.

So I see two likely scenarios in which this plays out. Either Trump does go boots on the ground, which he's being kind of weird out, but he's currently sending troops to the Middle East, so we don't know. If he does do that, it'll be almost impossible to invade a country like Iran. The geography means that mountains are on all borders, and it would be almost an impossible invasion,

which would result in thousands of troops dying. So the other scenario is that Trump backs off and looks for an off-ramp. Well, what did we get from this? We made Iran more extreme. Khamene's 86-year-old father is now replaced by the 30-year-old younger son, who is more extreme, more radical.

The moderates in this country are being per. The IRGC is becoming more radical. So what do we get for this? Either a more radical Iranian regime that will continue to fight, or we got boots on the ground. There's no, I don't know. Let me play what Trump said about who,

if anybody there is to talk to in Iran. Their leaders are all gone. The next set of leaders are all gone and the next set of leaders are mostly gone. And now nobody wants to be a leader over there anymore. We're having a hard time. We want to talk to them and there's nobody to talk to. to. We have nobody to talk to. And you know what? We like it that way.

Is that really the plan, Hogan? No one to talk to? How does this war end then? Well, I mean, look, I think Donald Trump has been pretty obvious of what he wanted to accomplish on the front end of this, and I think he's done a pretty good job executing that. The military for all of its incredible lethality has been showcased as one of the surgical, strategic entities on the face of the planet with what they've been able to accomplish under Donald Trump's administration, this operation, no different. As Donald Trump has pointed out many times, not only did he completely eradicate any potential for Iran to create a nuclear weapon. He also destroyed their ballistic missile capability,

which of course is vital to safety and security around the globe, but also in that region. In addition, he has prevented them now from carrying out other terrorist activities through proxies around the globe, too, not to mention the fact, destroyed their Navy. So this administration has done things that both Republican and Democrat presidents have talked about for a long time, both Republican and Democrat candidates for president. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Hillary Clinton, all said Iran can't get a nuclear weapon. And also, Barack Obama said that as well. Who's going to prevent them from getting a nuclear weapon? Donald Trump has done that here. And I would argue, antithetical to this one here, this world is a whole lot safer without a nuclear capable Iran than ever before.

I mean, gas prices are spiking. Oil prices are spiking. It's not safer for people. That's a different conversation to have. You're talking about safety and security around the globe, this president, not only. Wait a minute. In the first time. around the globe is Russia getting more money secure is Iran getting more money making us more secure

yes or no all right in the first administration this president was able to get peace deals in Middle East we're talking about now we're starting wars now in this administration he's preventing Iran from getting a nuclear weapon eight months ago for the entire months ago or not are you safer because of this war in your view um in some ways let's be very balanced about it in some ways their military capability has been degraded I'm sure they're on the run. And so in some ways, but in other ways, I think, we're less safe because the economy is more uncertain.

And I want to give the president some due here, and you know, I'm often very critical of the president. He said something there that people should listen to. He was looking for a secularist to do a deal with, and they killed all the secularists. And so the question is, at what point did that happen, and when did it happen, and when was that divergence? because it sort of feels like the Israelis killed the secularists in terms of what the president is saying.

So we're safer in some ways. I'll give Hogan some credit for that. But I would say that generally this didn't need to happen. I don't think anybody around the president thought it needed to happen. And it was reported that Bacent, Gabbard, Vance, were all put in the situation room and away from Morrowago. So there was dissent inside of his own administration. in terms of the war. And if I could just ask Hogan a question,

you guys campaigned on no more forever wars. And so this is the definition of a forever war. And might I just add to that? And he explicitly said in the campaign that his opponent would start a war with Iran. And then he started a war with Iran. So you can say, of course, like he said, like every other president has said,

Iran should never have a nuclear weapon. But he was the only person who explicitly argued to the American people that they should elect him because the other guy or woman was going to start a war. And then he did the exact same thing. What he said was he wanted no more stupid wars and he wanted no more long-term protracted wars. He also said that he was going to start a war with Iran. He literally said no new wars, but he said Kamala Harris was going to start a war with Iran. Sure. He said Obama was going to start one in 2013.

He said Obama was going to start a war. I don't like to tell my age, but I'm 58 years old. And you're a spring chick in my name. 47 years of my life. For 47 years of my life, George H. Bush, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama, George W. Bush have said to me that, you know, Iran's a threat. Iran is a threat. And yes, we are safer today than we were prior to this regime being gone. Right now what President Trump needs to do is continue.

The regime is not gone. The regime is going to be gone. How? There's 300,000 IRGC members who will die to the very last one. The radar is gone. The air force is not the regime. One person is not the regime. We know that that actually isn't true because I had, what do you mean? It's not true. I had Israelis in my office today and they're getting bombarded in Tel Aviv. Every 90 minutes, they're taking their kids out of their apartments and putting them into Bob Shelters. They're not 100% gone.

I hear what the president's saying, but I'm just telling you what's happening. on the ground. Okay. We're very close to them being gone and they're going to be gone. This guy. Trump is not going to stop here. He is not going to, he is not the guy to back off and saying. For 47 years, Iran has been a threat. I agree. I would like, nothing more than the dismantling of the Iranian regime. And is no longer a threat today. That's not true. That is not true. I wish there was some way that two leaders could maybe negotiate and we could have more oversight over their nuclear capabilities to minimize it. I wish there was some sort of deal. I would, in which one had deal. Obama had a deal. He gave him $6 billion. It was their own money. What are you talking about?

Can I just say it? Can I ask Margaret? Let me ask Margaret a question. Yes. Is the president, in your view, looking for an off ramp here based on his public statements? I mean, I wish, I don't think anybody knows what the president's looking for. That's part of the problem. But, you know, to the point that we were just discussing, I just respectfully, I just, I don't understand how you can say that we're safer, how anybody can say that we're safer, because we've just really we started a war with somebody who state sponsors terrorism. We don't have a new coming towards us anymore. It's very good and is very good at asymmetric warfare.

And so if the facts were, there was a country who was about to launch a nuclear weapon at us, yes. If those were the facts, then we would be safer. But I think that you are discounting the asymmetric nature of how Iran is going to respond and how they might currently respond to us. And I also think that you're discounting to some and respectfully just to some extent. fact that we are doing an all-air strike campaign. So we are just dropping sledgehammers from 10,000 feet in the air, and we don't have boots on the ground. We don't have a robust state department, USAID, you know, rebuilding construction infrastructure there. I just think we've seen

the story before, and it resulted in something that was much more dangerous than we sought to dismantle in Iraq. Tonight, President Trump is not backing away from his frustration with NATO. In a scathing truth social post, he says, NATO is a paper tiger without the U.S. And that's the United States. they are complaining about high oil prices but aren't helping to open the strait of Hormuz. He added that the opening of the strait would be easy to do for them with so little risk, cowards, and we will remember, he adds. He later voiced even more of that disappointment. 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. At a certain point. So actually, Hogan was just saying right before the break, that maybe we break it and we don't fix it,

is the straight of Hormuz sort of on that trajectory where Trump says, well, it's closed and we just get on out of there and leave it the way it is for other people to deal with. The timeline of this has been so humiliating for the United States. Donald Trump made this grandiose announcement that he was assembling a coalition of ships to escort, a coalition of countries to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. Then he realizes, wait a minute, the same countries I've been antagonizing relentlessly over the past few years

might not want to help go on a suicide mission going through the Strait of Hormuz, which at its most navigable narrow shipping lane is two miles wide. Iran can just lob missiles over into that shipping lane. So it's almost a suicide mission for ships to escort other ships through that. And no countries, countries that are NATO allies that have been bullied by Trump, are going to be willing to do this. They're not going to be willing to go on this suicide mission for someone that's kind of an asshole to them. Well, and we are like weeks after our threat to invade Greenland, right? Exactly.

So, like, I can't imagine, you know, treaters are really important. And I think that's something that this administration unfortunately sort of discards is the value things like international law like treaties. In the U.S. Constitution, for people who are originalists, you can look at the Supremacy Clause and you realize that treaties are actually on the exact same footing at the United States. the Constitution and as statutes that are passed by Congress. So when I think that when we threatened to take over Greenland, that probably really offended our NATO partners, I'd also say that we're the strongest military in the world. And so I imagine that the NATO partners are thinking, like, why do you need our help? Yeah, and that is a good question.

I mean, why? He's saying, he's talking out of both sides of his mouth. He's saying, we can do it ourselves, but we want their help, and then it's calling them out for not helping us. If we could do it ourselves, why aren't we doing it? Why haven't we done it yet? All right, segment one was fun, but now let's jump into segment two because it gets more intense. Just to recap, Donald Trump's former deputy press secretary Hogan Gidley, the guy sitting next to me,

was just spewing right-wing talking points the entire time, not a modicum of critical thought going through his school. I really appreciated Margaret Donovan, the military veteran and lawyer sitting to the left of me. She gave great commentary that was supported by facts in her experience, rather than right-wing talking points like the guy that was sitting next to me. So let's jump into segment two. Again, I urge you to watch until the end. That's the best way to help boost the video.

And thank you. You know what would make us feel hopeful. It might give them a little more credibility. If they also went to the wealthiest in the country and said, we're going to roll back some of the tax cuts that we've given you over the last few years so that you can put in that we can all benefit, we can all sacrifice here.

We're going to go to some of our contractors. We've been given $23 million sweetheart deals to and ask them to roll back some of the benefits that they've been getting from the Trump administration. I'm going to give back my $400 million airplane. I'm going to sell it, and I'm going to put that in the pot. The president hasn't done anything to ask of his friends to put in the pot.

They're only asking the American people to pay more of the gas. Okay, wait, really quickly, a few things. Trump doesn't take his salary, but he's made $4 billion on cryptocurrency. Also, I'm honestly kind of impressed at Donald Trump's handling of the economy so far. I'm impressed with what he's done with it. He's taking an economy that was steady-handed when Joe Biden was anything. Steady-handed. Let me finish.

Wait, what was the inflation? rate when Joe Biden left? I don't know. I just know that it was 2.9%. We now have predictions that it's going to go up to 5%. We think that unemployment's going to keep skyrocketing due to this. Gas prices are skyrocketing. That means people have less money to spend on other things. I have a good idea, too.

Why don't we cut taxes for the richest so that we have less revenue coming in? And then we cut Medicaid for the poorest so that we can justify that. And then we go to war in the Middle East, so we increase our debt even further, even though we haven't learned from the fact that we added $8 trillion dollars to our debt from the last Middle Eastern wars, and then we will continue to pay $1 trillion per year on interest, so it compounds for our generation. That was obviously sarcasm.

So the American people are pretty clear that they think the economy is getting worse. 58% of them say that they think it's getting worse. 67% say that gas prices are going to go up. I do think one of the weird things about what's happening with Trump in this moment, even putting the war aside, is all the other things that are taking up his time. The ballroom, you know, he went to a gala in the middle of a government shutdown when SNAP benefits were about to expire.

Renovating a bathroom, he was trying to have a UFC fight on the lawn of the White House. He wants to put a giant arch. I mean, he is worried about construction and renovation in Washington, D.C., while Americans are worried about the cost of things that they need to survive. A Trump administration that is in a perilous moment, whether you agree or do. disagree with this war, their decisions from this point forward could really matter not just for how the war progresses, but also the politics of it for the Republicans this year in the midterms. Oh, we're talking not about the midterms. We're talking about history. This is an apoccal war.

On the other side of it, we don't know what that looks like, but it will not be the world that existed on February 27th. An entire new world exists for us after this. And the president seems as calm and at peace and steadfast and resolute as I have ever seen him, including with tariffs. How he responded when he introduced those tariffs on Liberation Day in 2025 was very erratic. And he was very, he was easily moved by the polls and by pressure from Republicans and pressure from the markets. You think so? Oh, yeah.

He responded to the markets within weeks. And the markets have been moving here in ways that the president is not reacting to. Okay. All right. Well, we'll agree to disagree on that. I'm glad you brought. I'm not sure that he, I think he tried to stick by his guns on a lot of the tariffs, for example. But on this, I mean, you're right.

It's going to be incredibly significant what he does. But every day, we're getting a different story from Donald Trump about what he is doing. We're not even quite sure that Donald Trump and Israel are on the same page. It doesn't seem like it. I'm glad you brought up the tariffs as well because when they announced the tariffs, they said this is short-term pain for long-term gain. That was like 14 months ago, 12 months ago, and we're still in the short-term pain part? When are we going to enter the long-term gain part?

Because tariffs imposed $1,000 tax on American families in 2025. Now this war is spiking the price of oil, spike in the price of gas, spiking everything, and the economy is suffering. Now, we're entering week four of this war that Trump said would be four to six weeks, and we're sending thousands of new troops to the Middle East, meaning probably take about a week for them to get there. I think it might take a lot longer. A longer than a week.

So that means we're going to blow through this four to six-week timeline. We're experiencing major missions. MISSION creep already. Before we even reach this, mission creep is when the size, scope, and scale of the mission slowly expands. We experience in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I'm very worried that's going to happen now. I'm just briefly to respond to you. I agree.

I will say that I don't think the president and his subordinates have said as early and often as they should because that's a messaging operation. Say it again and again and again until everybody can repeat it. Exactly what the purpose of this war is and why it was necessary. But the purpose of this war, as they have said, perhaps not to my satisfaction with the frequency. It's a lot of things. No, they have said that we need to degrade and eliminate Iran's capacity to project power abroad. And when they project power abroad, they kill Americans.

We've gotten really good at interdicting the amount of effort that the Iranians put into killing us. And it takes a lot of time, a lot of resources, a lot of personnel. It's one of the reasons why we can never execute the pivot to Asia. On the other side of this war is the possibility of another world without the Islamic regime. Wait a minute. Without the foremost sponsor of Islamist terrorism in North America, in Europe, in Latin America. And yes, it is a national security issue. Whether or not Israel is on the same page with us,

because the American people are under threat every day. And eliminating that threat is a value. So you might be right. It might be that eliminating Iran was the most important thing. The question I have is why, if that's true, why didn't the president take the time to try to woo the American people, to get them onto his side, to build a coalition with our allies,

to get them onto our side, so we could go out and actually we could prosecute this war with our country being behind them. it, being behind it, and our allies standing with us. Instead, what we have is a president who seems to only know how to use the sticks these days. He doesn't know how to use the carrots. And so we are at this point where it seems like we're making it up as we go, and he's upset because he can't get anybody else in the world to join us. Well, he's been talking trash about them for 18 months. Here's what he wrote about NATO on Friday. He said, without the USA,

NATO was a paper tiger. They didn't want to join the fight to stop a nuclear-powered Iran. He calls them cowards and he says we will remember. I think the question that comes up for me is that doesn't seem like a message that's written from a position of strength. If you have allies, treaty allies, that you then have to turn around and insult and, you know, reprimand and all of that stuff, because you couldn't convince them to come along with you on something. That seems like a sign of weakness. I think it actually is the opposite. It's the fact that he's, well, let me show I'm the strength that he doesn't, that he can't get NATO to come along with him. First of all, it's the fact that he's willing to lose our allies because they so much don't contribute to our own efforts that he says,

we don't need it. Take it or leave it. If we have them, great if we don't have them, we don't need them. Second of all, when it comes to NATO, this is an organization that had never funded appropriately their own share of the burden. And they have been pissed at Donald Trump since the day he came down an escalator because he has wanted them to pay for their fair share. Last but at least, look, the straightforward moves is not just beneficial to the United States. Europe is also benefiting from it, right? sulfur travels through that straight of Hormuz. That sulfur then goes to Africa for farming. It goes to Europe for farming.

They also need to hope and pray that that thing can open. So the fact that right now the United States has done a lot of the bulk work and is saying, can you guys now come and step up? Because you are our allies. Should you not help us when we need some help? We're doing a bulk work of a war that we started? We started war because Iran started war 47 years ago. We're finishing the war.

But we're not picking size for backyard soccer here. What we're doing is we're trying to figure out how do we wage a war. And that means you got to bring people along with you onto your side. And so the question is, why are they just now figuring this out? I don't understand. There is no answer to that question. Why didn't we spend the time that we spent, those of us are old enough to remember going into Iraq, right? Before that, George Bush, even though I disagree with it, but he had a mounted campaign going to United Nations, talking to the American people, stories in the newspapers.

So the American public was on board. The coalition of the willing. I mean, look, it's been 47 years. What's a few more months getting allies on board? Well, I'll tell you, this was an emergency exigency. This wasn't an eight-month buildup. Was it? Yes, it was. Because after Midnight Hammer, we had evidence.

And I think the administration will recognize that they had evidence that they were not. She said, okay, wait, that they had evidence that they were not developing their nuclear program. What they have said, because they don't lack the resources to get that material out of the lightly irradiated, tons of rubble that it's under. What they said is that they're building with more speed and alacrity than we can build interceptors, ballistic missiles. And this was an emergency buildup because of the protests in December and January. That happened out of the blue. And then we got to tell the regime that the regime appeared week. The arguments that ballistic missiles alone are a justification for war with Iran is not even an argument that this administration is making.

They make it all the time. They were making the case. They were making the case that Iran was a nuclear threat and that we would never let them have a nuclear weapon. Their ballistic missile capability was not such that. Nobody has argued that it could reach the homeland. There's no argument of that. That's not the argument they're making. Israel has been and remains in the zone of danger.

But I guess I don't know that if you were to take that to the American people and say, you know, Iran was building conventional weapons, ballistic missiles, and we need to go to war with them for the first time in 47 years. I'm not sure that would be an argument, which is why they weren't making it. They started making it again. right before the war, but during the war and afterwards. And the argument is very clear that this is a missile capability that will deny us access so that we can't do another midnight hammer without experiencing unacceptable losses

and maybe not achieving our mission results. The reason why this happened in two months is because we had a window of opportunity. The intelligence was there to hit their leadership and we decimated their leadership. The regime was weaker than it had ever been experiencing the worst protests they had ever seen. It wasn't an eight-month build-up, and it's looking like an exigency, an emergency contingency operation, because that is what it is. The contradictions here are endless. So in one breath, this is a 47-year war.

It's been going on for 47 years. In the next breath, there was an imminent threat coming from Iran. And then the next breath, oh, we were just trying to defang their nuclear capabilities. And then once a person will say, oh, we did defang the Iranian regime. But then Trump is now mobilizing thousands of more troops. So obviously, this is going to be elongated and continue to happen. Here's a timeline regarding the Strait of Hormuz as I see it, because you guys were talking about it.

Donald Trump claimed that he was going to assemble a group, a coalition, if you will, of powerful countries to escort ships through the Strait of Hormuz. He then realized, oh wait, the same international community that I have been antagonizing for the past two years isn't going to want to go on a suicide mission through the Strait of Hormuz, which at its most narrow navigable shipping lane is two miles, right off the coast of Iran. They can just lob missiles over. So it's a suicide mission. He realizes, wait, they're not going to help me with that.

And then the countries themselves say, we're not going to join a war. We didn't even start. And then when I come on this panel, you guys are like, oh, these countries don't want to help us finish the job. They didn't start the job. They didn't start any of this. And why are they are allies? Because we are a co- Do they all get like veto power

when President Donald Trump does? NATO is a defensive coalition meant to defend countries. Article 5 is invoked when one is attacked. Article 5 is not invoked when we attack a country. That is a fundamental axiom of NATO. Right, right. And I think what President Trump's argument is

is that if these people nonetheless are supposed to be our friends and our allies, put NATO aside, he thinks of them as our friends. If during our time... Does Trump think of them as our friends? I think the United States as a whole. I think the United States as a whole does. I think President Trump personally thinks

that our allies, probably need to be maybe he treats them like enemies and he treats Russia like allies if necessary why we're threatened to take property I look at one of our allies none of our allies could do a damn thing about it if he actually took Greenland did you guys catch that at the very end of that last segment in one breath she's arguing that Trump doesn't want to seize Grayland that he's not really an authoritarian like that not disrespecting our allies but then in the

next breath she says if he wanted to nobody could do anything about it what an incredibly weird thing to say. I'm going to end this video off with our unpopular opinion for the night. Check it out. My unpopular opinion is that J.D. Vance is great for the Democrats because he has no Riz, which means charisma for you guys. We know what I mean. He also in 2028 will likely just, you know, not be very charismatic. I think it'll be easy for the Democrats, but.