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CNN Live Event/Special
CNN Saturday Morning Table for Five. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth Criticized for Comments on Military Rules of Engagement after U.S. Second Strike on Boat in Caribbean May Be Classified as War Crime; FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino Admits His Previously Expressed Opinion on His Podcast Driven by Financial Interests; Suspect Arrested for Planting Pipe Bombs at Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee Headquarters in 2020; President Trump's Comments on Affordability Draw Criticism in Wake of Negative Economic Indicators; Soccer Organization FIFA Awards President Trump Peace Prize; President Trump Renames U.S. Institute of Peace After Himself. Aired 10-11a ET.
Aired December 06, 2025 - 10:00 ET
THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
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[10:00:35]
ABBY PHILLIP, CNN ANCHOR: Today, he signaled the rules of war would be blurred.
PETE HEGSETH, WAR SECRETARY: We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement.
PHILLIP: Now, Pete Hegseth is at the center of a potential war crimes scandal.
HEGSETH: I didn't stick around. I did not personally see survivors.
PHILLIP: Plus, the FBI's number two admits he peddled conspiracies for cash.
DAN BONGINO, FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR: I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions.
PHILLIP: Also, the price of denial.
DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENT: The word "affordability" is a con job by the Democrats.
PHILLIP: Why Americans aren't buying the presidents rejection of their concerns.
And Trump dismantled the Institute of Peace. Now his name is on it.
TRUMP: Thank you for putting a certain name on that building.
PHILLIP: Here in studio, Adam Mockler, Hal Lambert, Cari Champion, and Noah Rothman.
It's the weekend. Join the conversation at a "TABLE FOR FIVE".
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Hi, everyone. I'm Abby Phillip in New York. It should be no surprise that the nation is debating an alleged war crime by the Trump administration. Why? Well, because they telegraphed it. All this week the administration has shifted its story about that second strike that targeted the survivors of an alleged drug boat. Now Donald Trump says that he didn't know anything about it. But Pete Hegseth said he didn't order it, an admiral did. In fact, Hegseth said that he actually left the room before that second strike happened. But, despite all of these deflections, the defense secretary approves of the decision. And it's not shocking because this is what he told military leaders two months ago.
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PETE HEGSETH, WAR SECRETARY: We also don't fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality, and authority for warfighting.
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PHILLIP: It is also worth noting that Hegseth wrote in his book similar themes. He also once defended two soldiers who were convicted of war crimes and another who was demoted.
Now, by the way, all of this comes as the Pentagons watchdog finds that his Signal chat earlier this year put the lives of troops in danger. And I think that is the big picture here of this moment, which is that Pete Hegseth has signaled for a long time that he's wanted to change these rules of engagement. He has repeatedly downplayed the idea of war crimes going all the way back to that case involving Eddie Gallagher and those other service members who were being investigated for war crimes. And now the administration, I would actually expect that they would own up to this, but they seem to just be changing their story about what exactly happened here and who was responsible for it, Hal.
HAL LAMBERT, POINT BRIDGE CAPITAL FOUNDER AND CEO: Well, you know, the Democrats, we already know they have Trump derangement syndrome. We didn't know they had another one, just Hegseth derangement syndrome, because every time something they don't like happens, they come out and say he should resign. He should be fired.
Look we're taking out drug boats, right? They've done I think, they've killed 87 people doing this. Obama did hundreds if not thousands of bomb attacks all around the world in different countries on land, killing civilians at the at the time. Now, again, he was going after named terrorists, which is what we're doing there. It's Tren de Aragua is who we're going after. There are named terrorist group.
PHILLIP: Is it?
LAMBERT: Yes. Those are Venezuelan gangs.
PHILLIP: Is it Tren de Aragua. Are you sure about that, Hal?
LAMBERT: Those are the Venezuelan gangs that run the drugs.
PHILLIP: I don't know. I don't know how the administration hasn't said that.
LAMBERT: But there wasn't outrage when Obama was doing this all over the world, hundreds and hundreds of times.
PHILLIP: There was outrage, as I've pointed out many times on this show. But the question is -- the question that I asked you was if they want to change the rules of engagement and make it so that these types of attacks are allowed, why not just own up to it? Why are they changing their story constantly about what happened here?
LAMBERT: Well, I don't think that people knew exactly what had happened because they weren't there on the ground.
PHILLIP: They've had the video for months.
LAMBERT: President Trump -- President Trump wasn't there. He wasn't there when the when this happened. Hegseth said he wasn't in the room when they made the decision. But by the way, they hit the boat the first time, they hit it, they obviously are trying to kill the people on the boat. That's the whole purpose of bombing things.
ADAM MOCKLER, COMMENTATOR, MEIDASTOUCH NETWORK: First of all, it's not Hegseth derangement syndrome to say that a former FOX News host shouldn't be leading the most powerful military in the world.
[10:05:02]
Secondly, Obama had an authorized use of military force over a lot of these post 9/11 air spaces. He could do these strikes.
LAMBERT: Pakistan?
MOCKLER: But thirdly, finally, the Coast Guard has admitted they interdicted 212 boats since 2024 with no violence, nothing happening, and basically one in four of those boats, 25 percent of those boats had no drugs on them. So I want to ask you, would you be OK striking boats if there is a one in four chance that there's no drugs on the boat, according to the Coast Guard.
LAMBERT: We have 60,000 Americans dying a year.
MOCKLER: Do you want to my answer?
LAMBERT: No. I want to give you some facts.
MOCKLER: No, you should answer my question.
LAMBERT: You said there's no danger. We have 5,000 Americans.
MOCKLER: I didn't say there's no danger. What are you talking about?
LAMBERT: We have 5,000 Americans dying a month. We've killed 87 of them.
MOCKLER: You know what's interesting? If Donald Trump cared about --
LAMBERT: You guys are off the rails. Why are you upset about it?
MOCKLER: I'm not upset. I'm upset that Donald Trump claims to care about drugs, that he pardoned the former Honduran president. And I have to sit across from you that claims Trump is doing this to take care and save Americans. When I ask you a question, I want you to answer, if there's a 25 percent, if there's a 25 percent chance that there's no drugs on one of these boats, are you OK with striking them?
LAMBERT: Who said there's a 25 percent chance that's at our border?
MOCKLER: The Coast Guard.
LAMBERT: That's at our border.
MOCKLER: No, the Coast Guard.
LAMBERT: That's at our border.
MOCKLER: No, the Coast Guard said --
(CROSS TALK)
LAMBERT: That's not off the border of Venezuela. We don't have the Coast Guard off the border of Venezuela
MOCKLER: Rand Paul subpoenaed the Coast Guard because they operate in the ocean.
LAMBERT: They don't operate off the coast of Venezuela.
MOCKLER: But they do operate in a space where these alleged drugs would be coming to the United States, which is actually not necessarily the case off the coast of Venezuela. We don't actually know whether this boat was coming to the United States.
But let me get back to this idea of the of the -- the idea of Pete Hegseth and his, I don't know, allergy to JAG officers. He wrote this in his book that this was an instance where he got a briefing from a JAG officer about rules of engagement. He said, "After this briefing, I pulled my platoon together, huddling amid their confusion to tell them I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That's a bullshit rule that's going to get people killed. And I will have your back, just like our commanders. We are coming home. The enemy will not."
NOAH ROTHMAN, SENIOR WRITER, "NATIONAL REVIEW": Well, this is why I don't blame anybody who actually bought into the salacious, really explosive notions that were bandied about by "The Washington Post," the notion that there was this no quarter order that was given that would really reflect poorly on the Pentagon and open the secretary of defense and his subordinates up to prosecution. Those began to fall apart over the course of this week, in part because we had an act of Congress for the first time in a long time that sought actual information to clarify some of this stuff.
We found out that despite Pete Hegseth allergy, as you say to JAG officers, they were there. They were providing real-time legal guidance. There's apparently this, as the secretary said, he had subordinated this to the admiral who executed these strikes that were debilitating the platform and not the people, which actually matters. This is why the administration landed on its feet today, because it doesn't have to argue now that this was a violation of Geneva Conventions, which does seem to be firm.
PHILLIP: I don't know that that's --
ROTHMAN: Where they don't have to argue about and what they don't want to argue about is the legality of the mission itself.
PHILLIP: Well, I do think I mean, you're right that Congress actually did something this week.
CARI CHAMPION, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: That's a good job.
PHILLIP: That's important. But I don't think that they've settled the issue of whether they, as you said, were taking out the platform as opposed to the people, because what was revealed in the briefing was that these men were clinging to the remnants of a destroyed boat. So the boat was destroyed. They were, it seemed, trying to save their own lives, which is not in and of itself a hostile act.
ROTHMAN: I mean, we can draw inferences from the fact that they had to use four Hellfires to neutralize this one boat. That's an expensive boat.
PHILLIP: That's a different inference, right? Like, I think it's a question about why do we need to use that kind of --
CHAMPION: I still thing, and I he brought up something that I think is a good point -- sorry, I didn't mean to cut you off, but he brought up something. That was a really good point, Adam. It's like, where are the drugs? Have we still been able to see them? And if in fact, I'm reading today about whether or not we know if they've even made it here, these alleged drugs that you speak of, have they been here? Have they made it to the United States? Yes. Drugs are a problem here.
LAMBERT: My understanding is they briefed the Intelligence Committee in Congress that there were drugs, that they've brought the drugs off these boats. So they have they have briefed them.
CHAMPION: Briefed. Have we seen them? I don't think anybody has.
And here's the other question I think is really interesting, what we're talking about, especially when we talk about this particular person, but it is about how, in fact, he operates as someone who is now in charge of this Department of Defense. I do believe there is some room for us to be concerned. At the very highest, his operational behavior scares me, and his situational awareness. To your point, he wants to change the way this is done 100 percent. But is he going about it the right way? Should we be concerned? And the damage that he's doing now, what are the long-term effects? You bring up Obama. No one is going to argue that, but we're going to have to stay current. This is where we are also.
LAMBERT: But I'm saying but the Democrats never complained when Obama was doing it. That's my point.
MOCKLER: People did, absolutely.
PHILLIP: That's not true. That is totally --
LAMBERT: Nobody called for anybody to resign.
PHILLIP: Hold on, hold on, Hal. That is completely false. Those airstrikes were so incredibly controversial that Obama was getting, you know, incoming from his own party, from progressives.
[10:10:05]
Major newspapers like "The New York Times" reported extensively on them, won the Pulitzer Prize for their reporting on those strikes. And yes, there are complicated legal issues about the AUMF that they utilized, about the targets, about whether or not the killing of those civilians was justified or not, just like there are legitimate questions about this strike that I think actually could be cleared up if the Trump administration would actually be transparent.
There is a video. They've had it for two months. They could release it immediately. And they aren't doing that. I think that's extremely telling.
MOCKLER: Yes, the video needs to be released. We need full transparency. And I also want to build onto something. When Pete Hegseth says that the rules of engagement shouldn't really matter as much, that actually puts U.S. troops directly in danger. Senator Thom Tillis had a really good quote. He said, we have a lot of men and women who are at risk overseas and who will be over the next few years. When we lower the bar for the rule of engagement --
CHAMPION: Because he's actually like a cowboy.
MOCKLER: Yes, when we're putting them. So what happens when a country just like, kind of arbitrarily kills some U.S. citizens and they use our defense --
CHAMPION: Philosophy.
MOCKLER: -- for their defense?
CHAMPION: Exactly. ORTAGUS: They use that as a pretext to do that.
ROTHMAN: There are a lot of places that export illegal narcotics. We could be going to war with a lot of places on the planet earth if this wasn't a pretextual notion. And I would support what I believe is the text of what the administration is trying to do here, which is a regime change.
LAMBERT: Yes, of course.
ROTHMAN: This is a bad actor in the in the western hemisphere. He is the financial lifeline for Cuba, which has been a thorn in American sides all over the world for 70 years. It is the foothold in the western hemisphere for Russia and China. And they could say, listen, this is a geopolitical bank shot. We're trying to clear out a regime that we don't like, but it's far too close to the Iraq war. That's why they won't say it.
PHILLIP: I don't think they won't say that.
ROTHMAN: That's why they won't say it.
PHILLIP: Or is it also because they're worried that they would actually then have to address their MAGA base who they sold on this idea of not engaging in more wars? And even he was in the Middle East earlier this year talking about the failure of regime change. Wouldn't he have to explain that?
ROTHMAN: I think so, which is why they probably don't want to explain it. But it's easier to explain than expanding our national security policy to include drug importation and then calling that terrorism, which has a distinct legal definition and is frankly, morally fraught. The notion that somebody who is a victim, whose loved one was a victim of terrorism, who was torn apart by a nail bomb, was shot so that somebody else could send a message to our political class, that's the same thing as somebody who willingly puts substances into their bodies. That's national security threat? You're going to have to explain that to Congress and establish a legal rationale for it. And if you do, it's going to open up the United States to a whole lot more theaters of operation than I think we've fully contemplated.
PHILLIP: That's an important point.
Next for us, though, the deputy director of the FBI says that he pushed baseless conspiracies in the past for money after his conspiracy about the D.C. pipe bomber falls apart.
Plus, it's become one of Trumps biggest blind spots. Why he's calling the affordability crisis a con job.
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[10:17:35]
PHILLIP: Welcome back. A cold case suddenly turns hot after the feds arrest a suspect in that pipe bomb mystery. For the last five years, no one knew who planted this device in the nation's capital the night before January 6th. And that didn't stop podcast hosts from pushing conspiracies about it, including the FBI's current deputy director.
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DAN BONGINO, FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR: There is a massive cover up because the person who planted those pipe bombs, they don't want you to know who it was because it's either a connected anti-Trump insider, or this was an inside job. This was a setup. I have zero doubt.
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PHILLIP: Fast forward to now and a dose of truth serum, it seems.
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DAN BONGINO, FBI DEPUTY DIRECTOR: I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions. That's clear. And one day I'll be back in that space. But that's not what I'm paid for now. I'm paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.
The difference between us and them is, you know, we evolve. As information and new inputs come out, we can produce different outputs because that's what we believe in. We believe in facts and investigations guided by facts.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Look, it's worth noting that sources say that the suspect told them that he believes the 2020 election was stolen. That seems to be a very pertinent piece of information here.
But I will say, let me just start by saying the fact that this arrest was made with no new information, just existing information, it does raise a lot of questions about what was going on in the FBI over the last four years and why this was missed. However, I think Dan Bongino is telling on himself because he peddled a conspiracy that this was an inside job by the FBI, which it was not. And the and owning up to that -- give him credit for that too. Owning up to it is important and good.
CHAMPION: Abby, I don't know if we can give him credit for that. I don't even think he meant to.
I'd like to say, where in the world do they find this audacity? Is it underneath the couch? I mean, is it in between your pocket? The audacity is crazy. He was telling us straight up without even thinking that he was telling on himself.
I just want to do a quick little timeline because I was so interested, because he was such a popular podcaster and was such a personality who runs everything. So when this first happened, as he just said, massive conspiracy theory.
[10:20:00] September 2022, on his podcast, he was like, I believe and I have been told with good authority that the person who is responsible is a connected anti-Trumper. And he said that it ultimately will be one of the biggest conspiracy theories in America.
I'm fast forwarding because I don't want to go through all the hits that I have. Early 2024, still a podcaster, again, the same thing. He has someone on from "Revolver News" who goes into why this is such a deep issue within the FBI and it's a big critical problem because they are a massive cover up.
And then the last date, because I'm still so -- I'm like, how do we get to this point? As early -- as recently as November 2024, January 2025, before he was actually appointed, he still holding feet to the fire, saying the FBI needs to say that this is a corruption. And he would not walk it back. And he's saying he was paid to make up this story.
PHILLIP: -- people who consume that type of --
CHAMPION: Information.
PHILLIP: -- content to understand that they are being conned, that people are just making things up and selling it to them as fact. And then when they're in a position of power, kind of like the Epstein files, they then come out and they say, oh.
CHAMPION: My bad.
PHILLIP: My bad. I was paid to just say things for clicks and for views. I mean, that is --
ROTHMAN: We should we should say just for our own sake and for the audience's sake, that this person is apparently giving conflicting answers to investigators, that he has said that he doesn't believe that the 2020 election was legitimate. But he's also said a lot of things that we don't know the details of, but it has apparently given investigators the assumption --
CHAMPION: Why do we --
(CROSS TALK)
CHAMPION: We're talking about this guy who is the deputy director.
ROTHMAN: Because we don't want to do what Dan Bongino did, which is to establish facts that are not in evidence.
(CROSS TALK)
PHILLIP: Well, I guess the only fact that I'm establishing in evidence is that, according to the FBI, this was not an FBI plant.
ROTHMAN: It was not.
PHILLIP: That's the only fact I know at this moment. So that's the only one I'm putting on the table.
ROTHMAN: And Mr. Bongino, he wasn't operating on facts at all when he was making these inferences. There were no facts and evidence. What we have now is a couple of slivers of evidence that we can draw inferences from, but they are not established. They're just are using our judgments. So we shouldn't make overbroad conclusions.
CHAMPION: Here's the problem. Here's this popular, this popular podcast, podcaster who has this huge audience and people believe in conspiracy theories. You know, that especially deep MAGA. They want to believe it. They want to believe.
And so now this guy has this this entire -- I guess he's a senior law enforcement official now. And now he's like, I'm getting paid to look at the evidence, and the evidence says, actually, I was wrong. But he won't even admit that he's wrong. And so that is my issue in the world that we live in where we don't look for facts, that we just trust anything anyone says. And I believe that's why this administration is in the place that it is right now, how this president got elected, running on conspiracy theories. And now we're saying, OK, it's not true. My bad, my bad.
ROTHMAN: I don't disagree, I disagree with any of that. I think we have a different perspective, though, insofar this I think this is an optimistic sign. It's sort of valuable to see somebody who was previously a very conspiratorial podcaster and entertainer, by his own admission, become the deputy director of the FBI and become an institutionalist. He's protecting the --
PHILLIP: Well, he said, he said for now, because he's going to go back and maybe do the same thing.
ROTHMAN: Once he's out of the institution. But the institution is molding and shaping --
PHILLIP: In the meantime, there was there was earlier this year a horrible conspiracy about a person who was not the bomber. They were ruining people's lives over this stuff. There is damage being done. And I don't know that there was -- I'll give him credit for saying it, but not enough contrition for the lies.
CHAMPION: Not enough contrition.
LAMBERT: One thing I want to say, though, is you said something about the election being stolen. He said that he also there's evidently a lot of far left things that he had views on. So we don't really know what his political view is at this point. I read that there were he was a far left --
CHAMPION: Who are we talking about?
LAMBERT: The bomber, the bomber.
MOCKLER: It doesn't even matter. What matters the most --
LAMBERT: It matters a little bit. MOCKLER: We're talking about Dan Bongino.
LAMBERT: I know, but here's why it matters. Because what Dan Bongino said was that this comes from the left, and therefore they don't want to show -- they don't want people to know who.
MOCKLER: He said a lot more than that.
LAMBERT: He did say a lot more than that, but that was one thing he said. So if that turned out to be true -- look, the problem is, why didn't the FBI catch this guy? All they had to do was go look at evidence that we pulled it up. No, no, there is a question there. Why didn't they? So was the -- is it incompetence?
CHAMPION: Do you believe what's coming from the FBI right now? I can't believe anything.
LAMBERT: It's a valid question.
CHAMPION: It's a valid question to say, is this true? So, so you're telling me they just sifted through the papers and found some good old police work with the Biden administration didn't do so.
(CROSS TALK)
LAMBERT: That's what they reported. That's exactly what's being reported.
PHILLIP: I will say I do think that that is possible.
CHAMPION: Yes.
PHILLIP: It is actually possible --
MOCKLER: It's a valid question.
PHILLIP: -- that information was in their possession, and whether it was bad police work or indifference or whatever, I don't know what it was, but I do think that there are answers that need to be gotten about that.
LAMBERT: It was very bizarre. And by the way, one last thing. You know, he put a bomb at both the Republican and the Democrat side. So the whole thing is weird to begin with. And he's walking around, he's on video, he has a phone. No one can find it.
PHILLIP: Well, let me actually -- since we were talking about this, let me play what Kash Patel and Don Jr. were saying about this earlier.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KASH PATEL, FBI DIRECTOR: In this instance, the prior administration had the same exact information that this FBI had access to and chose not to put the resources on target.
[10:25:00]
Why they didn't want to do that is a question for them, but it was an intentional failure.
DONALD TRUMP JR., EXECUTIVE VICE PRESIDENT, TRUMP ORGANIZATION: I never understood how this could just disappear. I mean, two pipe bombs targeting the headquarters of the Republican Party, targeting the headquarters of the Democrat Party. That, to me, is a far greater threat than any of the nonsense, you know, grandma taking a selfie inside of January 6th. And yet it just disappeared. It's almost like that was the backup plan if they didn't get what they wanted out of January 6th, which to me seems like a very clear setup operation.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MOCKLER: Well, look, you're absolutely right.
PHILLIP: One conspiracy gives way to another, it seems.
MOCKLER: So Kash Patel and Don Junior and Dan Bongino are now on this conspiracy theory treadmill where one gets disproven and they jump to the next. The problem is Dan Bongino, like a bunch of other MAGA commentators, got super rich off of peddling lies and is now coming into the friction of actually being in a position of power. There's a chance that he goes and lies more.
But think about how many lives he ruined, how many lies he told. He went on a whole like few month campaign about Vance Boelter, about all this stuff, all these lies that he's told will culminate into tricking Americans.
I used to go to Trump rallies during his campaign and I would debate with his supporters. That was my thing, debating his supporters. I'll never forget, there was this one woman with American flag face paint. I asked her who her favorite podcaster was. She said Dan Bongino. I asked her if she would vote for Putin or Kamala if she could choose. She said I'd vote for Vladimir Putin. Kamala is a traitor to this country. So this is the effect that Dan Bongino is having when he's lying to Americans who just want to love their country. They think they love their country.
PHILLIP: Next for us, inflation, 1 million jobs lost, rising prices. But Republicans say, relax, it's all going to be fine. We'll discuss.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:31:07]
PHILLIP: It may have helped Donald Trump get elected, but now it appears to be a blind spot. America has an affordability crisis backed up by the facts and also by feelings, by the way. And at one point, Trump and his allies recognized that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENT: Affordability is much better with the Republicans.
REP. MIKE JOHNSON, (R-LA) HOUSE SPEAKER: Affordability issues are real.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Were here to deliver affordability and low cost.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: I want to thank the leadership team who has prioritized affordability in this country again.
REP. STEVE SCALISE, (R-LA) HOUSE MAJORITY LEADER: We're also focusing on affordability.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Were all unleashed, single-mindedly focusing on affordability.
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Affordability is always going to be an important point that the Republican Party needs to drive home.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: But the president has gone to bat ever since he was elected on affordability.
TRUMP: You know, there's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word. It doesn't mean anything to anybody. The word "affordability" is a con job by the Democrats.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: So not only do prices and polls prove Trump wrong that the economy is not a problem for voters, but there has been more bad news this week. There were more than a million jobs lost this year. That's the most since the pandemic. And Republicans like J.D. Vance and Mike Johnson say this in response.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
REP. MIKE JOHNSON, (R-LA) HOUSE SPEAKER: So I would tell everybody, relax, OK? Steady at the wheel, everybody. It's going to be fine.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: It's going to be fine, everybody. I mean, it might be fine, but I do think they are falling, as we've said many times, they're falling into the same trap that the Biden administration fell into. They benefited from that, but now they could be hurt by it.
ROTHMAN: Yes, this is a show me, not tell me sort of situation. And if you're doing what the Biden administrations mistake was, which I think was to tell people that their economic circumstances are not -- you're experiencing something that you shouldn't even believe your own eyes. Look at the macro statistics.
PHILLIP: Inflation is transient.
ROTHMAN: It's transitory, yes, precisely.
The Trump administration gives Democrats soundbites like the con job thing, which make absolutely no sense to me. But it's another -- the show me part of this, I think they're doing a little bit better on that. And this week the Trump administration got rid of the Biden administration's electric vehicle and emissions mandates designed to subsidize electric car purchases at the expense of the affordability of new and used vehicles that are combustion engine. That is going to have a real world effect. That is going to allow consumers more choice. More choice provides more options. That allows them to keep more money, put more money in their pockets that they can use to subsidize or rather to patronize other, more efficient businesses in the markets. That is how you reduce prices, by sending signals to the market that this firm is efficient and this firm isn't.
PHILLIP: I have some questions about that.
ROTHMAN: That's Adam Smith.
PHILLIP: But that's a separate policy issue. I mean, no, no, but I'm just saying, I think that there are some real questions about whether that's going to do what they think it's going to do, because gas vehicles are readily available in the marketplace, but we're actually falling behind China and the rest of the world in providing low cost electric vehicles to consumers.
ROTHMAN: People don't want low cost electric vehicles.
PHILLIP: If you go to -- if you go to Europe, they're everywhere. And China is eating our lunch in that market, and we are not competing. That's going to be a problem, too.
However, I take your point about this is the -- if that's what the type of thing that they want to do, it's probably worth doing that as opposed to what Trump is, a, doing on tariffs, and, b, saying on the economy in general. When will they make the turn, and when will it be too late if they don't?
LAMBERT: Well, look, I think the two main cost problems for people are housing and health care. Those are the two main things. And then food, you could add food is the third.
PHILLIP: Food is for sure, yes.
LAMBERT: So, so the food thing can be handled in certain ways. It's a lot easier to handle the food aspect than it is the housing and the health care. So if we focus on housing -- and by the way, when Trump used the term "con job," he's referring to really the Democrats view of affordability and saying they're going to tackle affordability when they didn't do it under Biden for four years, as we just talked about. They ignored it. And Schiff, Senator Schiff came out with a proposal. It's the same old thing. It's subsidies. Let's have government put money into housing, affordable credits, all this stuff.
[10:35:01]
CHAMPION: But just a couple weeks ago, he was OK with affordability.
LAMBERT: But no, you have to, you have to increase supply. You have to reduce regulatory burdens. Where is housing the most expensive? It's typically in blue cities, blue states, where there's a lot of regulation to build something, a lot of regulation to fix, you know, fix up a place. Try doing that in New York. It's very difficult. You've got to reduce regulations and you've got to increase supply of housing. And you don't do that by having the government come in and go, hey, here's $50,000 here and here and here and do it.
PHILLIP: You also don't do that by taking a lot of people out of the workforce who build houses.
MOCKLER: I agree that we need to increase the supply of housing, but everything else you listed, Trump is actively making worse. I mean, the ACA subsidies, they had a lot of chances to help people with health care. When it comes to food, beef is skyrocketing. Walk into the grocery store, everything is up, maybe save, like eggs, but everything is up. Orange juice I just read was up 31 percent. And Donald Trump's tariffs are disproportionately harming low income families.
LAMBERT: No, they're not.
MOCKLER: They absolutely are.
LAMBERT: They're not.
MOCKLER: Like, lower income families spend more of their income on consumer goods, and consumer goods are hit disproportionately by tariffs. It's super simple. It's regressive, not progressive.
LAMBERT: You can say no, they're not, but you're just denying basic economics.
LAMBERT: You're just wrong.
LAMBERT: It's Econ 101.
PHILLIP: I don't think, I don't think he's wrong.
LAMBERT: He is.
(CROSS TALK)
LAMBERT: The tariffs have barely been passed through at all. Those consumer prices are not up at those at the goods level. They're just not.
PHILLIP: Let me just give you as an example, a cup of coffee, OK. Coffee prices have skyrocketed because of tariffs. Regular people who go to the grocery store, they buy coffee for their homes are paying those prices. And you know why I know that it's the tariffs. Because the Trump administration then turned around and rolled the tariffs back to lower the price of coffee.
However, I want to play this from Kevin Hassett, because he was confronted on FOX News, of all places, with numbers showing that people are losing their jobs in the economy. And here's how he explained it.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
KEVIN HASSETT, DIRECTOR, NATIONAL ECONOMIC COUNCIL: The flow of jobs in and out is a little bit higher. There's a little bit more turnover. A lot of times that could happen because people feel like they're actually able to get another job if they leave this job.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: That could be an explanation, but I'm not sure it is the explanation in this moment. You know, when we see the unemployment, the job losses at a million, that's kind of where we're at in the pandemic. That's more than where we were at in the pandemic. So that's seems unequivocally to be a bad sign.
ROTHMAN: It could be. Kevin is right that you would show up in unemployment if you were actively looking for a job or moving to another job. I don't know if the statistics show that. Maybe Kevin's right. Irrespective, if the public feels that we're shedding jobs, if job reports are going the wrong way and it starts looking like the economy is beginning to go south, then the consumer confidence will dry up. And if consumer confidence dries up, there's less economic activity, and that will affect the economy overall and make people more nervous and have political repercussions for this administration.
So you don't want to talk up job losses as saying, well, this is actually a good sign for the economy, because that could come back and backfire on you.
PHILLIP: Next for us, Trump renames an agency that he gutted, and he named it after himself. Some have called it, quote, ironic. We'll discuss.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:42:47]
PHILLIP: The U.S. Institute of Peace is now named after Donald Trump. The irony is that the building is now largely empty after his administration essentially dismantled it by way of the DOGE chainsaw. Now, it's no secret that Trump is desperate for a Nobel Peace Prize, and at least one of his friends is giving out a participation prize, or perhaps a consolation prize. During the FIFA World Cup draw on Friday, Trump was handed a newly created peace trophy.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENT: This is truly one of the great honors of my life. And beyond awards, John and I were discussing this. We saved millions and millions of lives. The Congo is an example. Over 10 million people killed, and it was heading for another 10 million very quickly. And it just, you know, the fact that we could do that. India, Pakistan, so many different wars that were able to end, in some cases a little bit before they started.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Well, brilliant on the part of FIFA, but I don't know. I'm not sure. I don't know. I think FIFA is smart to -- they know what to do to flatter Trump. They give him this thing that doesn't exist and no one has ever gotten and no one may ever get again. And here we are.
MOCKLER: This may be the most humiliating thing I've ever seen for the United States. Donald Trump is returning our country to a pre- constitutional order where you can give gifts and receive gifts from other countries/companies, and he gives them things in return. We can look at Qatar or a long list of countries/companies. FIFA realized that if they placate Trumps ego and give him this peace prize that he didn't get from Nobel, that he doesn't deserve for any reason, that he'll maybe do them a favor, maybe give them some specialties, like locations to do FIFA tournaments in the U.S. There's different --
PHILLIP: I think part of what they want is for Trump to not --
CHAMPION: For him not to bother them while they're here.
PHILLIP: Not to interfere, because they -- just this week, the State Department announced that they're going to prioritize World Cup visas. Trump had been threatening to have ICE go to some of these World Cup games. So there are a lot of reasons that FIFA wants him off their back.
CHAMPION: But it doesn't make any sense to me, literally what FIFA is about. They gave him a participation trophy. If you work in sports, if you deal with sports, that is almost an insult to give someone a participation trophy. It says you're not capable, you're not really able to do the job. You really don't deserve a Nobel Peace Prize.
MOCKLER: It was the greatest honor of his life.
[10:45:00]
CHAMPION: It's the greatest honor of his life. Is anybody fact checking the millions and millions of lives he saved? The reality is, it's disgusting, in my opinion, to give this man a participation trophy when in fact, what you want to do for FIFA is take everyone from all over the world and you want them to compete for the highest trophy in the land that has the most respect, allegedly. And you turn around and do this. I understand why you do it, but it makes it all look like a joke. It makes it all look sad.
PHILLIP: What do you make of the putting his name -- I mean, not just renaming it in text, but literally emblazoning his name on the outside of the building of the U.S. Institute of Peace? It could be seen as a frivolous thing, but some people, including some conservatives, have described it as a kind of, to use their phrasing, a third world kind of action where you just slap the dear leader's name on the outside of a building to make him feel better about himself.
ROTHMAN: Does anybody know what the Institute of Peace does? Nobody does.
LAMBERT: They spend $50 million a year.
ROTHMAN: They train diplomats. You know what else trains diplomats? The State Department. This is a redundancy that we do not need.
PHILLIP: But I guess that's fine. But why is he putting his name on it?
ROTHMAN: Because it's a vanity project, for the same reason that he got an institute, by the way, FIFA, a slightly less corrupt institution than the Nobel committee.
CHAMPION: Slightly less.
ROTHMAN: Marginally less.
PHILLIP: But if it does nothing, why would Trump then slap his name on it?
ROTHMAN: Because it's a vanity play.
PHILLIP: What is the vanity play?
ROTHMAN: He likes to see his name up on things, and it's not going to outlast his administration.
LAMBERT: It's a way to troll the left.
ROTHMAN: And it's a way to troll the left. And they take the bait every time.
MOCKLER: I'm glad he's trolling the left while his peace deals are falling through with Israel and Gaza while Putin is rolling him every single day, while the president of Azerbaijan and Albania are laughing at him for claiming that he did a peace deal with them. So I don't know what he's like trying to --
ROTHMAN: Well, they actually just signed a peace deal in sub-Saharan Africa in the White House this week.
PHILLIP: That was the -- that was the same peace deal, that was the same peace deal that they signed a few months ago. But then the war continued.
CHAMPION: And they had to resign again.
ROTHMAN: I think the United States needs to be engaged in the world in an extroverted way and engaging with conflicts in an extroverted way. And the fact that the president has incentives to do that, because they are ego driven, I'm willing to concede, but nevertheless, they keep him engaged in the world in ways that keep America --
CHAMPION: What are the these incentives you speak of?
ROTHMAN: His pursuit of glory and vanity and --
CHAMPION: His money? The money that they give him? (CROSS TALK)
PHILLIP: Ronald Reagan established U.S. institute in the 1980s. Now it's empty, the building is empty. They're not doing anything. But Donald Trump saw it fit to put his name on it. I guess he must be thrilled.
LAMBERT: Why did you bring up Reagan?
PHILLIP: Because he established the U.S. Institute of Peace.
LAMBERT: The Ford foundation used to be a conservative foundation. It was --
MOCKLER: He signed the law. Jimmy Carter actually initiated the initiative.
LAMBERT: And it was hijacked by the left. The U.S. Institute of Peace was a big $50 million a year --
ROTHMAN: Listen, talk to any Israeli, talk to any Israeli, and you will hear them say, fall over partially to avoid giving Benjamin Netanyahu credit, but fall over themselves to thank Donald Trump for his engagement in the region and to negotiate things that were previously inconceivable because they're --
MOCKLER: They're disproportionately bombing the other side.
ROTHMAN: You can sigh if you want. But the Sunni negotiated peace agreements with the Jewish state in the region are phenomenal. The diminution of the Iranian threat, which allowed these Sunni kingdoms to warm and create security relationships and eventually diplomatic relationships with the Jewish state is inconceivable a decade ago. And yes, it has a lot to do with the engagement of the president in this region. And he has failed in Europe, but he has not failed --
LAMBERT: No one is talking about Iran with a nuclear weapon anymore, are they?
PHILLIP: All right, we've got to leave it there.
Next for us, our panel's unpopular opinions, what they are not afraid to say out loud.
But first, we've got a programing note for you. Anderson Cooper goes inside a Kenyan prison to see how a special legal program is helping inmates. "The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper" Sunday at 8:00 p.m. on CNN and the next day on the CNN app.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:53:22]
PHILLIP: We're back, and it's time for your unpopular opinions. You each have 30 seconds to tell us yours. Noah, you're up. ROTHMAN: So a lot of people in the northeast, mid-Atlantic, New
England, they make fun of Washington, D.C. for being allergic to snow to a degree that is kind of funny. I've got to admit. There's a coating on the ground in the whole city shuts down. And they say, where is the mayor? Why are they telling us that we' cant go to school? And we all laugh at it.
But I kind of like Washington's convention here that everything has to shut down and be paralyzed because of the tiniest amount of snow. We don't get snow days anymore by virtue of our virtual world. We all work from home. I miss the days where just paralysis reigned when there was just a little bit of snow. Let's bring that back.
PHILLIP: I would support snow days. That's true. I just don't get them. But more power to all the rest of you.
CHAMPION: I don't know much about it, but that sounds good.
Yes, my thought process is this. Vitamins, not all of them, but a lot of them are a hoax. They are a joke. They're bad tasting candy. They're bad actors. Vitamins do not work. As soon as you take them, they leave your system. And then they tell you should take more of them. And you have to spend $60, $80 for a can of vitamins, and I don't even know if they're working. So my issue is this -- no more vitamins. And I'm not a doctor. Don't take -- but since we're promoting conspiracy theories and no one has a problem with that, I say don't take them.
PHILLIP: The gummy kind, or just all.
CHAMPION: Gummy, liquid anything. All of them. They do not work. I just don't know. I just don't know if they work.
PHILLIP: Adam?
MOCKLER: Yes, no more vitamins, no more seafood. Seafood is gross. I don't like it. I'm not a fan. All of your reactions tell me a lot about you. I just don't like seafood that much.
PHILLIP: What is happening? OK.
LAMBERT: All right, I may be coming with the most unpopular comment here.
[10:55:02]
College football playoffs, get rid of it. Go back to the top two teams. They play at the end of the year. Certainly no, certainly no more -- well, they made them for years. So there's certainly no more than four teams. We're at 12. We're probably going to 16. We're probably eventually going to 32. The money has gotten completely out of control, the gambling, the betting, all of it. Take it back, take it back to the final two.
CHAMPION: There are no top two teams. There are no top two teams. It's impossible to figure out what teams in the -- LAMBERT: We've got teams in playoffs that has three losses. Come on.
CHAMPION: No. You look at a strength of schedule. If someone goes undefeated and their schedule is trash, they shouldn't be considered the top team.
LAMBERT: That's true, that's true. I agree with that.
PHILLIP: I'm going to let you guys hash this out once the show is over. Everyone, thank you very much.
Thanks for watching "TABLE FOR FIVE". You can catch me every weeknight at 10:00 p.m. eastern with our Newsnight roundtable, and anytime on your favorite social media, X, Instagram, and TikTok. But in the meantime, CNN's coverage continues right now.
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