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CNN Live Event/Special
CNN Saturday Morning Table for Five: President Trump Facing Pressure Domestically and Internationally Over Ongoing Iran Conflict; President Trump Criticizes NATO Allies for Not Contributing Military Assets to Support U.S. in Iran Conflict; Some Conservatives Claim Questioning Iran Conflict Unpatriotic; Trump Administration's Asking of Americans to Sacrifice in Short Term for Long Term Benefits Facing Backlash; President Trump's Arts Commission Approves 24-Karat Gold Coin Featuring President's Likeness. Aired 10-11a ET
Aired March 21, 2026 - 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, a president under pressure. The war against Iran takes a toll, with no end in sight.
DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENT: I'm really not afraid of anything.
PHILLIP: Plus, is it unpatriotic to disagree or ask questions about the war?
LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: The rest of the do-nothing Democrats are clearly rooting for failure.
PHILLIP: The growing refrain against dissent. Also --
UNIDENTIFIED FEMALE: Maybe you should take one less trip to Starbucks. Let's just try to be patriots about this.
PHILLIP: From war to tariffs, MAGA keeps asking Americans to make sacrifices for things they don't want.
And Lincoln, Washington, Jefferson, FDR, JFK, and now Donald Trump's handpicked arts commission greenlights putting him on a coin made of gold.
Here in studio, Adam Mockler, Brianna Lyman, Jamal Simmons, and Noah Rothman. It's the weekend. Joined the conversation at a "TABLE FOR FIVE".
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Hello everyone. I'm Abby Phillip in New York.
As the war against Iran enters its fourth week, the pressure is mounting on Donald Trump economically, politically, domestically, and globally. Thousands more U.S. Marines and sailors are heading toward the Middle East in what is likely to be a treacherous mission. The president faces the danger of losing control of the war after Israel struck a gas field that he claimed he wasn't aware of. He's facing tensions with allies after he says that they refused his help in the war. He's facing rising gas prices at home along with higher inflation and lower markets. He's asking for money for a war that is not popular with Americans and a price tag not popular with Republicans. He's facing criticism from many of his own supporters for what they say are broken promises. And all of this is coming as primaries and campaigns are heating up for the midterm elections.
This is a Trump administration that is in a perilous moment, whether you agree or 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.
NOAH ROTHMAN, AUTHOR, BLOOD AND PROGRESS, A CENTURY OF LEFT-WING VIOLENCE IN AMERICA: Oh, we're talking not about the midterms. We're talking about history. This is an epochal 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.
PHILLIP: You think so?
ROTHMAN: Oh yes, he responded. He responded to the markets within weeks. And the market -- and the markets have been moving here in ways that the president is not reacting to.
PHILLIP: OK. All right, well, we'll agree to disagree on that. I'm not sure that he, I think he tried to stick by his guns on a lot of the -- on a lot of the tariffs, for example. But on this, 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.
ADAM MOCKLER, COMMENTATOR, MEIDASTOUCH NETWORK: 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 a $1,000 tax on American families in 2025. Now this war is spiking the price of oil, spiking 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.
PHILLIP: I think it might take a lot longer.
MOCKLER: Longer than a week. So that means we're going to blow through this four to six week timeline. We're experiencing major mission creep already before we even reach this. Mission creep is when the size, scope, and scale of the mission slowly expands. We experienced it in Afghanistan and Iraq, and I'm very worried that's going to happen now.
ROTHMAN: Adam, 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.
[10:05:02]
But the purpose of this war, as they have said, perhaps not to my satisfaction and frequency --
MOCKLER: They've said a lot of things, a lot of things.
ROTHMAN: But nevertheless, 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.
MOCKLER: Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
ROTHMAN: 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.
MOCKLER: If we achieved our objectives --
ROTHMAN: -- is the value.
JAMAL SIMMONS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: 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 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. But he's been talking trash about them for 18 months. PHILLIP: Here's what he wrote about NATO on Friday. He said, "Without
the USA, NATO is 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 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.
BRIANNA LYMAN, "THE FEDERALIST" CORRESPONDENT: I think it actually is the opposite. It's the --
PHILLIP: How does it show strength that he can't get NATO to come along with him?
LYMAN: 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 him, 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 the escalator because he has wanted them to pay for their fair share.
Last but not least, look, the Strait of Hormuz is not just beneficial to the United States, OK? Europe is also benefiting from it, right? Sulfur travels through that Strait 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 in and step up, because you are our allies, should you not help us when we need help some help?
MOCKLER: -- a war that we started.
LYMAN: We're at war because of Iran started war 47 years ago. We're finishing the war.
SIMMONS: We're not picking sides for backyard soccer here, right? What we're doing is we're trying to figure out, how do we wage a war. And that means you've 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 -- there is no answer to that question. Why didn't we spend the time that we spent, and those of us who are old enough to remember going into Iraq, right? Before that, George Bush, even though I disagreed 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 with that.
PHILLIP: Coalition of the willing. I mean, look, it's been 47 years. What's a few more months getting allies on board?
ROTHMAN: Well, I'll tell you, this was an emergency exigency. This wasn't an eight-month roll out.
PHILLIP: Was it?
PHILLIP: Yes, it was, because after Midnight Hammer, we had evidence. And I think the administration --
PHILLIP: Tulsi Gabbard said the opposite this week in testimony.
ROTHMAN: -- that they had evidence, that they were not -- OK, wait, that they had evidence that they were not developing their nuclear program. What they have said, because they lacked 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 the regime appeared --
PHILLIP: Listen, the arguments that ballistic missiles alone are a justification for war with Iran is not even an argument that this administration is making.
ROTHMAN: They make it all the time.
PHILLIP: They we're making the case --
ROTHMAN: -- yesterday.
PHILLIP: 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. It is -- there's no argument of that.
ROTHMAN: That's the argument that they're making.
PHILLIP: 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 a winning argument, which is why they weren't making it.
ROTHMAN: They started making it again with right before the war, but during the war and afterwards.
[10:10:00]
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 buildup, and it's looking like an exigency, an emergency contingency operation, because that is what it is.
MOCKLER: The contradictions here are endless. So in one breath, this is a 47-year war. It's been going on for 47 years. And 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 one 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.
LYMAN: Then why are they our allies?
MOCKLER: Because we are a coalition --
LYMAN: Do they all get veto power on what President Donald Trump does?
MOCKLER: NATO is a defensive coalition meant to defend countries. Article five is invoked when one is attacked. Article five is not invoked when we attack a country. That is a fundamental axiom of NATO.
LYMAN: 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 --
SIMMONS: Does Trump think of them as our friends?
LYMAN: I think the United States as a whole --
MOCKLER: He leaked texts with the prime minister of Norway.
LYMAN: I think the United States as a whole does. I think President Trump personally thinks that our allies probably need to be maybe --
MOCKLER: He treats them like enemies and he treats Russia like an ally.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMMONS: Greenland by force if necessary. He threatened to take property from one of our allies about it.
LYMAN: And look, none of our allies could do a damn thing about it if he actually took Greenland.
SIMMONS: You're arguing against yourself.
PHILLIP: This is a question -- this is not a question of -- I mean, if it were just a question of who is stronger and who is not, then yes, what would be the point of alliances? But it is a question of leadership. And, and again, I mean, as we were talking earlier about the president's inability to actually develop a coalition for something that presumptively is in the global interest, that seems to me like the clearest sign of the weaknesses of their ability to convince not just us in the layman world, but these are other countries they can share intelligence with of the actual objectives of this conflict.
ROTHMAN: Yes. I actually don't begrudge any European power that's a little miffed at how they've been treated over the last year, especially since they've been hearing from the Pentagon NATO should be an in theater operation. The alliance should be acting in Europe's interest and only in Europe. And then all of a sudden, the administration comes round and says, hey, why don't you help us --
PHILLIP: Go to the Middle East.
ROTHMAN: And west Asia. At the same time, however, we need their ships as escorts, not to conduct combat operations, to just be there. We have an ally that in this fight, which is --
PHILLIP: Escort is not just being there.
ROTHMAN: -- it's the most capable -- the most capable combat operation, it's not a suicide mission.
PHILLIP: We've got to leave it there.
Next for us, is asking questions about the U.S. strategy in Iran the same as rooting against America? Some in MAGA say that it is. We'll discuss.
And should Americans make sacrifices for things that they didn't even ask for? We'll debate.
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[10:18:17]
PHILLIP: In the lead up to the 2004 election, Eminem released a protest track against George W Bush and the Middle East wars. Quote, "We've got our own battles to fight on our soil. No more psychological warfare to trick us into thinking that we ain't loyal if we don't serve our own country." Fast forward to decades from then, and another Middle East war is underway, and it's a similar refrain that we're hearing now toward anyone who is against that war, simply asking questions about it, or demanding answers on the strategy. (BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
LAURA INGRAHAM, FOX NEWS HOST: Murphy, along with Schumer and the rest of the do-nothing Democrats are clearly rooting for failure.
MARK LEVIN, "LIFE, LIBERTY, AND LEVIN" HOST: They're doing everything they can to sabotage the effort of the president of the United States and our patriotic military.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: It is kind of sad when you feel as if the media is kind of pulling against your team, right?
INGRAHAM: The Democrat Party, they're going to remain invested in Americas failure because their own political success depends on Iran turning into a disaster.
PETE HEGSETH, DEFENSE SECRETARY: They want President Trump to fail.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: Look, I mean, it wouldn't be the first government that tries to shut down dissent about a war. But the recent history of this is actually kind of recent for a lot of Americans. And it's a formative memory of what happened when some people called into question the wars of Iraq and Afghanistan.
SIMMONS: That's right. I worked for Bob Graham, who is the co-chair of the Intelligence Committee. He voted against the war in Iraq because he said it wasn't actually going to solve the problem that were going after of terrorism. I think it's perfectly -- and he knew all the information and all the data. It's perfectly acceptable for people to disagree with their government. And I think what I would like is for Donald Trump to say we're in a moment of crisis.
[10:20:02]
The country needs to come together. We're going to shut down some of the things that have been dividing us. We're going to stop going after these immigration raids. We're going to stop going after DEI. We're going to stop making arguments like Rubio made when he went to Munich, and he said, we have bonds of culture and heritage and religion which excludes people who don't have European culture, heritage, or necessarily religion.
We're in an America that where all of us need to sort of come together in moments like this. The president is not tying us together to accomplish the goal he thinks is important.
LYMAN: Hold on, you're mad at Marco Rubio for saying that culture, heritage, whatever ties us together, you know, ties us together. If not those things, what does tie people together? But put that aside.
SIMMONS: Ideology, a belief in freedom, a belief that we have a country that's not rooted in soil or blood. It's a country that's rooted in the fact that we all have the same values, and we want to have a place where we can all prosper and aspire together. That's what ties us together.
LYMAN: I reject the proposition that America is just a propositional nation. But to go back to Abby's entire argument.
SIMMONS: So what is it? What is it then, if it's not a nation rooted in values and ideas and commitment?
LYMAN: Have you ever read Federalist Paper number two by John Jay?
SIMMONS: Tell me what you think it is.
LYMAN: Sure. Federalist paper number two by John Jay says that we are blessed by providence to be a people connected by our culture, our language, our religion.
SIMMONS: So what happens to people who don't share your culture, your language, or your religion?
LYMAN: That's not to say that there aren't other people who could come from a different culture and assimilate to ours. But the thing is, is that assimilation. But to go back to Abby's entire point about media.
SIMMONS: By force? Or by --
LYMAN: Have we ever done by force?
SIMMONS: Sure. Slavery, Indian, Native American.
LYMAN: Slavery was an awful, awful chapter. But that's not to force them to assimilate. That was enslaving them just for --
PHILLIP: Well, I think that kind the point of that, is that --
SIMMONS: We removed their religion. We changed their names.
PHILLIP: There's a whole large portion of Americans who were here from the very beginning who didn't come from European culture, when they came here, did not speak European language.
LYMAN: But European culture --
PHILLIP: And so and so at the actually, the very onset of this country, despite what the Federalist papers, which didn't even -- which didn't even can consider the fact that black Americans were Americans, that is, I think, a fact that you have to take into consideration when we think about --
(CROSS TALK)
ROTHMAN: I think this is a conversation that Democrats would much rather have than whether the press is actually covering this war accurately.
(CROSS TALK)
SIMMONS: -- but this is an incredibly important point.
LYMAN: Hold on, hold on, let me go back. I wanted to answer Abby's original question to go back to that. Abby, your point really quickly, just to make very clear. It was English common culture that built this country. Put that aside, I do think that we should be able --
SIMMONS: Wait, wait, wait, you forget about the people, the millions of people who came here under slavery, who farmed the land, who built the property.
LYMAN: I'm talking about the entire institutions that we have, our political institutions.
Now, wait, let me go back to Abby's question about the media. I think it's totally fair for people to question it, because you have people on the right also questioning it. This is coming from all sides to the president about this war.
I also think it's fair for the president to say that, for example, we have obliterated most of Iran's top people in the regime, right? We have really destroyed their ballistic capabilities. Those are objective wins. And it just, I think there's a lot of people who feel like when they read the news, they're not actually being told that, or if they do, it's a sentence at the end of the paragraph when they're like, you know, look, there's a lot of things up in the air, but we would also like to see that there are some tactical wins. Our military is doing a fantastic job right now. And so I think there's a better way for the media to balance this.
ROTHMAN: I think that's a brilliant point. And it's not just, you know, media doesn't want to be jingoist. We don't want to feed into the chauvinism and whatever, whatever suppositions are going around in newsrooms. You're not actually covering events when you cover strategy, the 30,000 foot perspective, and ignore tactics. Tactics are what happens on the ground. Tactics are events beat, beat, beat. And the beat, beat, beat is 20,000 targets hit with more ordnance, one or more pieces of ordnance. The entire Iranian Navy, 120 ships at the bottom of the sea.
MOCKLER: This means nothing.
LYMAN: It means nothing?
ROTHMAN: It means something. It means something to people who understand what the military does, Adam.
MOCKLER: Listen to this.
ROTHMAN: This is the most lopsided military conflict arguably in the history of mankind.
MOCKLER: OK? It's not something to gloss over and say yada, yada, yada, but.
MOCKLER: But a few things. First of all, we have to do a cost benefit analysis on this and talk about what the timelines from here look like. So there's one timeline in which we go boots on the ground or try to actually go for the nuclear capacities, or try to do regime change via boots on the ground. That is catastrophic due to the geography of Iran. It is surrounded by mountains. They have a bunch of people in the IRGC who are very radicalized.
There is also another path, another timeline, where we go for an offramp and we start to back up. In that timeline, we are left with a regime that is more radicalized. The 86-year-old, was he 86 years old? Khamenei's son is now 30 years his junior and is more radicalized. So we killed the radical supreme leader. Weve now replaced him with a more radical person whose entire family has been killed and who is likely injured. And now we have a more radical populace.
So those are the two timelines. I don't care if we have some short- term wins or some short term -- the cost benefit analysis of this war does not make sense. We are losing troops, losing lives, losing money for two timelines are going to make the world more dangerous.
LYMAN: I think Iran having a nuke would make the world more dangerous.
PHILLIP: Isn't it also possible, isn't it also possible that that some degree of both things could be true? That we can, and are, by the way, the media is covering the actual tactics of this war.
[10:25:02]
However, the strategy, the endgame are just as important, if not more important, because in most conflicts in this world, we are going to be the dominant force, just like we were in Iraq and Afghanistan. That did not stop those conflicts from lasting two decades. That's the issue that I think Americans have right now.
We can be enamored with how many bombs were dropping and how well we are eliminating the targets. But if the endgame is something that is not what we want, or maybe even worse than we want, that should matter, too.
ROTHMAN: Of course it does. And to Adam's two timelines situation, I don't think there's any universe in which we have the kind of ground force to occupy this entire country. There's no force posture there to support that.
And I also think it's very unlikely that the president stopped short of clearing the Strait of Hormuz, because that would set a new precedent. The United States established a precedent in 1987.
MOCKLER: You didn't talk about my second timeline.
ROTHMAN: Let me finish. In 1987, 1988, they attempted -- they attempted to close the strait. Ronald Reagan opened it up by force. The doctrine is the United States will demonstrate that we can open up this to trade, and I don't think the president will allow that doctrine to lapse and establish a new precedent.
However, your claim that we could have a much more dangerous, virulent regime --
MOCKLER: It's not just we can. It's more --
ROTHMAN: It's a regime without any capacity to develop missiles like it had.
MOCKLER: Like they had eight months ago?
ROTHMAN: It's a regime without capacity to project power. Yes. And it's a regime that will have a very angry populace on its hand that is still very miffed about the fact that 32,000 of their friends and neighbors were shot in the street.
MOCKLER: I head these same things eight months ago. I just want to end this off by saying liberals are not skeptical -- or liberals are not trying to root against America. Liberals are not rooting against America. They're skeptical of an illegal war where the end goal is very unclear.
LYMAN: I hear that talking point constantly.
MOCKLER:. It is constitutional that you have to go through Congress for war. But one final thing. One final thing.
LYMAN: We haven't had an act of war since World War Two.
MOCKLER: One final thing. I want to go back before the 2000s. Walter Cronkite when he was on air actually started to talk about how the populace in America was being lost on Vietnam. They didn't support it. And Republicans in America began to say that Walter Cronkite's rhetoric at the time was the reason we were failing in Vietnam. So it's an age as old as time. Republicans try to blame it on the people who are criticizing the administration. We saw it during Vietnam. We saw it during the 2000s, and we kind of see it today with the Republicans.
SIMMONS: You made a claim earlier that one of the reasons we were there is because of nuclear weapons. The current national security, or director of national intelligence on our side has written that Iran was not pursuing nuclear weapons at the moment. Her deputy resigned, apparently, because of that, somebody I don't necessarily agree with on many other things. And the British national security advisor who was in the negotiations said that Iran had offered as a concession something that would assure us on nuclear weapons.
So the president and his team are not really all lined up on this. They've got to get their act straight if they want us to buy what they're selling.
ROTHMAN: I will concede that the president is an awful communicator on a lot of this stuff. I think his subordinates are much better.
However, the notion here being that there was no threat from the Iranian regime, absent nuclear weapons, and certainly because we have the person who resigned, Joe Kent, former counterterrorism czar, he seems to be relatively out of the loop insofar as he's blaming the Iraq War on Israel, the Syrian civil war on Israel, I guess the Arab spring on Israel, his wife's death on Israel, and this war on Israel.
SIMMONS: Marco Rubio also blamed it on Israel.
ROTHMAN: If you're getting your information from Joe Kent, you're out of the loop. And I think a lot of people were.
SIMMONS: Marco Rubio, the secretary of state, also blamed it on Israel.
PHILLIP: Next for U.S., patriots and sacrifices. MAGA says that you can't be one without making the other. We'll discuss.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:32:55]
PHILLIP: There's a trend growing of Donald Trump and his administration asking Americans to make sacrifices for things many of them don't want.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
DONALD TRUMP, (R) U.S. PRESIDENT: I'm just saying they don't need to have 30 dolls. They can have three.
Some temporary, short-term disruption, and people will understand that.
They don't need to have 250 pencils. They can have five.
ROBERT F. KENNEDY JR., HEALTH AND HUMAN SERVICES SECRETARY: You can buy liver or the cheaper cuts of steak that are very, very affordable.
BROOKE ROLLINS, AGRICULTURE SECRETARY: It can cost around $3 a meal for a piece of chicken, a piece of broccoli, you know, corn tortilla, and one other thing.
DR. MEHMET OZ, ADMINISTRATOR, CENTERS FOR MEDICARE AND MEDICAID SERVICES: Start working a year earlier right out of high school or work a year later, not retire. It would generate about $3 trillion, $3 trillion to the U.S. economy.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE: You've got to go through short term pain to solve a long term problem.
MICHELE TAFOYA, FORMER SIDELINE REPORTER, NBC SPORTS: I think right now at least, just kind of keeping a stiff upper lip. Maybe you take one less trip to Starbucks and so that gas goes a little further. Let's just try to be patriots about this.
J.D. VANCE, (R) VICE PRESIDENT: This is a temporary blip.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: It's worth noting all of these are things being asked of Americans because of Trump's policies, whether its tariffs or this war. And even Trump's allies are aware of that.
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
STEVE BANNON, HOST, "THE WAR ROOM": The American people are not known for taking short term pain when it comes to economics, particularly oil and gas.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
PHILLIP: He's right about that. You just want to ask Jimmy Carter. He knew all about it.
LYMAN: Yes. And look, I think I think a few things can be true once. I think, to your point, Jimmy Carter, Joe Biden in 2007, said were going to have to sacrifice to be able to get by for the next couple of years. He was talking about energy. So I do think that presidents on both sides of the aisle have asked that.
I also don't think it's politically beneficial to ask that, especially with the midterms coming up. You know, Americans elected Donald Trump in large part to re-right the economy that Joe Biden had wronged. And even before this war started, even though the metrics were trending in the right trajectory, you had a lot of Americans saying, we're still not feeling the relief that we were promised. And people feel, and then they go out and they vote on what they feel. So that wasn't helping.
[10:35:00]
And so I think to add this kind of messaging, it doesn't necessarily make Americans feel less concerned about the prospects heading into future weeks, which again, to Noah's point, that's why the administration has to focus on better messaging, give the American people something to make us feel hopeful.
SIMMONS: You know what will make us feel hopeful and 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 and 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 or I'm going to sell it. And I'm going to put that in the pot. The president hasn't done anything to ask if his friends to put in the pot. They're only asking the American people to pay more at the gas station.
MOCKLER: 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 taken an economy that was steadyhanded when Joe Biden was --
LYMAN: Steadyhanded. That's why Joe Biden lost. DERSHOWITZ: Let me finish. Wait, what was the inflation rate when Joe
Biden left?
LYMAN: I don't know, I just know that --
MOCKLER: It was 2.9 percent. We now have predictions that it's going to go up to five percent. We think that unemployment is 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 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 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.
PHILLIP: The American people are pretty clear that they think the economy is getting worse, 58 percent of them say that they think it's getting worse, 67 percent 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.
ROTHMAN: It's very hard to picture Donald Trump adopting the austere role of a wartime president, but it is nevertheless a very good point that he should be willing to embrace and adopt and characterize, you know, espouse the sort of sacrifices that he's apparently and his administration are asking of the public.
But I do think it's noble that they're asking the public, in forthright terms, to sacrifice. I don't think that's what Joe Biden did. And it's not what Joe Biden's policies were in February of 2022. By the way, when gas shot up a little bit higher than it is right now, Brent crude was about $122 when it popped, and it's right now $119, $120. It could get higher. But he didn't impose sanctions on Russian energy for fears of what it would do to the energy market, for fears of how people, public would react electorally in crass political terms to the to the sacrifices that they might make to beat back the Russian onslaught on the continent.
I just think the priorities were wrong. Again, if we were to if we were to really commit in February 2022 in Ukraine, when Ukraine had this masterful counteroffensive pushing the Russians back from Kharkiv province back to the borders that they practically occupy now, that we could have had a very different world on our hands. And what we're doing now is a policy to beat back an American adversary, one, by the way, that the American public really dislikes. Poll the Islamic Republic. It doesn't poll well.
PHILLIP: I guess we should just make a note. I mean, I think your point of view is the point of view of some Republicans. But at the time, the actual history is that a lot of Republicans, including the current president and current vice president, opposed the United States doing more in Ukraine. They opposed it. So it wasn't like Joe Biden was not doing more and all these Republicans were pushing him to do more, including the current --
ROTHMAN: At the time, he was the president with total control of Congress. The Republicans were irrelevant.
PHILLIP: The politics of it was that he was he was pushing the envelope in ways that could have been politically risky for him, because people were running against him who were pushing for the opposite.
ROTHMAN: But not in February of 2022.
SIMMONS: Well, if you talk to people who were at the Treasury Department, what they would say if you restricted more Russian oil, you would drive the price up. Russia still sold oil in the black market, which would actually give them more money from the oil they sold and the money they had if you did it at the level --
ROTHMAN: They could have done things like the Trump administration is doing, seizing the tankers, seizing the shadow fleet, and crushing, and crushing --
SIMMONS: And they want to believe they want to relieve sanctions on Russian oil, which the president said he wanted to do to help India. And now they're talking about relieving sanctions on Iranian oil. I'm not sure exactly what side of the fence these guys are on.
[10:40:00]
PHILLIP: Next for us, Bruno Mars wont be the only one singing about 24 karat magic anymore. A golden Trump coin is set to be minted, causing a lot of debate. We'll get into it.
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PHILLIP: The list of things with Donald Trump's name and face on it is getting longer. You've heard about the Kennedy Center, the Institute of Peace, battleships, the Justice Department, savings accounts, national park passes, and now a 24-karat gold coin.
[10:45:07]
The president's handpicked arts commission is greenlighting the move ahead of the 250th birthday of America. The size and denomination aren't clear yet, and federal law says no living president can appear on U.S. currency. But, of course, the Trump administration is breaking precedent once again.
Let me just put it this way. I mean, Trump is always wanting to put his face on things. It does need to be gold. But here's Ari Fleischer, who is not a Trump critic by any stretch of the imagination. He says, "I hope this goes nowhere. Honors like this are best bestowed on someone who has served -- after someone has served, especially now. This would be a huge mistake that would hurt the president and his cause. Don't do it. Trump's face on a golden coin? His handpicked panel will decide."
I mean, gold, first of all, that's, it's super expensive. That's the first thing. And secondly, yes, I mean, at a time of war, seriously?
ROTHMAN: It's not the ideal priority for the president.
(LAUGHTER)
MOCKLER: That's a charitable way to say it.
ROTHMAN: And yes, Ari is right. And the fact that Ari is willing to say that and draw fire from the president's still very devoted fan base is telling you something about how serious the moment is and how willing the Republican Party is, and the Republican Party's loyalists are, to reorient the president around what should be his central focus now, the mission that he's about to achieve and will define his legacy.
PHILLIP: I mean, what is up with this stuff? I mean, I guess, you know, one person, Scott Jennings, who is often on the show, he has suggested that it's because Trump is afraid that he won't be honored when he leaves the White House. That doesn't seem like a good enough justification, but it might actually be what's driving this.
MOCKLER: He really cares about his legacy a lot and being a man of history. And I'm going to say this is something really interesting I noticed the other day. I was watching a documentary about Iran, and I noticed that the supreme leader's face is everywhere across the country. It's all over the walls, it's on banners. And of course, this man is he was 1,000 times worse than any U.S. -- this guy was an awful human being, but it reminded me immediately of the way that Trump wants to put his face on everything.
LYMAN: You're comparing Trump to the Iranian dictator?
MOCKLER: No, I said he's 1,000 times worse. But if Trump could have his face all over everything and he could have a Christian theocracy, he would probably have that over the Muslim theocracy.
PHILLIP: A lot of people have suggested that this is -- it's beneath a democratic nation like ours. We don't slap the faces of our presidents everywhere while they're in power. It's just not something that we do. Wouldn't you agree?
LYMAN: Yes. I mean, look, I think to everyone's point here, not something I would prioritize. I also know that when I speak to Republican voters, and I have independent friends, they don't even know that this is happening because it's such not a topic of mind for them.
I also think, to the other point is that President Trump is an icon. Whether you like him or hate him, he has been consequential in many ways, and he will live on forever in history. Some presidents kind of just go off into the deep end. President Trump will never do that because he shaped history. So I do think eventually we'll probably see him on some kind of commemorative coin or something else. I mean, again, if you don't want him doing it right now, that's fine. That's your prerogative. I don't think this is necessarily like this big detrimental thing that he's doing that's going to --
SIMMONS: It actually is against the law.
(LAUGHTER)
SIMMONS: It's not just --
PHILLIP: They're getting around it, I think, because this would be, I guess technically not currency.
LYMAN: Right, it's a commemorative coin.
PHILLIP: But still.
SIMMONS: -- would seem to be monarchies, right? I mean, Great Britain is our only democratic friend, it looks like he does this. But you go to the Saudis and many other countries, you see that this is something they do with their monarchs. The president has made the argument that he's not trying to become an authoritarian and he doesn't want to be a monarch, yet he's willing to do the things that monarchs are doing. He's arguing against himself.
PHILLIP: All right, next for us, the panel's unpopular opinions, what they are not afraid to say out loud.
But first, a quick programming note. Pamela Brown explores the rise of Christian nationalism and its growing political influence. In this view of one nation under God, is liberty truly for all? "The Whole Story with Anderson Cooper" Sunday at 8:00 p.m. and the next day on the CNN app.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
[10:53:54]
PHILLIP: We're back, and it's time for your unpopular opinions. Noah, you're up first.
ROTHMAN: So I'm a techno optimist. I love all our services. Click location, yes. But social media is terrible, and we lost the last action hero this week, the late Chuck Norris. And there's this whole jokey thing around him which we've all been reminded of. And this is what the internet looked like 15 years ago. If you're too young, you weren't there for it. It was actually kind of wholesome. It was really sweet, kind of hokey, kind of dad jokey. But it reminded me of this bygone era in which people weren't trying to ruin your day every time you got online. It was very nice.
PHILLIP: That's fair. Yes.
MOCKLER: I heard death was scared of Chuck Norris, actually.
(LAUGHTER)
ROTHMAN: Precisely. Remember those?
PHILLIP: Go ahead, Jamal.
SIMMONS: You know, I like a lot of things about how homes are decorated. The one thing I do not like are decorative pillows. I don't understand the purpose of the decorative pillows.
PHILLIP: Spoken like a true man.
SIMMONS: Take the pillows off the bed. Put the pillows back on the bed. But don't you dare sleep on the pillows.
ROTHMAN: The camera.
SIMMONS: We've got pillows. We can't sleep on them. Anyway.
PHILLIP: Adam.
MOCKLER: My unpopular opinion is that J.D. Vance is great for the Democrats because he has no ris, which means charisma for you guys. You know what it means, charisma. But he also, in 2028 will likely just, you know, not be very charismatic. I think it will be easy for the Democrats.
PHILLIP: All right, well revisit that one down the road. Go ahead, Brianna.
LYMAN: Mine's a little less serious than all of these. I think that syrup is the -- I'm sorry, it's so serious. It's the best dipping sauce for French fries.
(LAUGHTER)
LYMAN: I'm so sorry.
PHILLIP: I appreciate you taking unpopular opinions very seriously,
LYMAN: I do. I think everybody should go home and try it if you haven't.
PHILLIP: Noah is horrified right now.
LYMAN: Just trust me on this, please.
ROTHMAN: This is risky, but interesting.
PHILLIP: All right, stand by it. If you're going to with syrup.
LYMAN: Hash browns and syrup.
PHILLIP: All right everyone, thank you very much. And thank you for watching "TABLE FOR FIVE". You can catch me every weeknight at 10:00 p.m. eastern with our News Night Roundtable and anytime on your favorite social media, X, Instagram, and on TikTok. In the meantime, CNN's coverage continues right now.
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