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Trump: $200 Billion Is A "Small Price To Pay" On War With Iran; Sara Bareilles Shares Unreleased Song Inspired By Anderson Cooper; Netanyahu: Israel "Acted Alone" In Striking Iran Gas Field. Aired 8:30-9a ET

Aired March 20, 2026 - 08:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[08:30:57]

SARA SIDNER, CNN ANCHOR: This morning. Lawmakers are raising serious questions about the cost of the war with Iran. There are even some Republicans on the Hill saying all out no to this. Others say they need much more detail before they sign off on what is expected to be a $200 billion request for new funding for the war; the president called that a small price to pay.

Let's put $200 billion in context. Two hundred billion is about a quarter of the entire annual U.S. defense budget. $200 billion is larger than the Department of Education, the Department of Commerce, and Department of Homeland Security combined.

Now here is what has been spent so far. CNN previously reported that the Pentagon told lawmakers that the first six days of the war cost $11.3 billion.

CSIS notes that this number does not include other notable costs, including the estimated cost of combat losses and infrastructure damage. That $1.4 billion combat losses like, for example, the three F-15 fighter jets that were mistakenly shot down by Kuwait air defenses in those first days of the war. CSIS also points to operations and support costs, which are over 26 million and all of this puts the total cost at $12.7 billion in just the first six days of the war -- Kate.

KATE BOLDUAN, CNN ANCHOR: Joining us right now is Democratic Congressman Jason Crow of Colorado. He sits on the House Armed Services, House Intelligence Committee, is also a former army ranger who served in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thanks for coming in, Congressman. Let's talk about the price tag. Well, more specifically, what they're likely to be asking. Hegseth says that $200 billion, that number could move. The way the president put it is, we're asking for a lot of reasons beyond even what were talking about in Iran calls it a small price to pay to make sure that we stay tippity top.

What does that funding request suggest to you about how long the United States is planning to be in this war?

REP. JASON CROW (D-CO): Well, Donald Trump saying this is a small price to pay tells you everything you need to know. I mean, he thinks taxpayer money is monopoly money. He doesn't really care. It's just a matter of shuffling around.

But it's a pretty darn big price to pay for Americans. You know we are looking at $2 billion a day now is the burn rate for taxpayer dollars on this. We're looking at the damage and the cost in U.S. credibility. The damage and the cost to our alliances.

Let's not forget that we're damaging our alliances and our reputation, so much so that our partners and our allies are unwilling to even come to our aid in Hormuz. And I can't really blame them for that, since we stumbled into this without consultation, without letting them know about this war. And then, of course, the biggest price of all is the price of our fallen warriors, our service members who have paid the ultimate price in defense of this country, which the president continues to be very cavalier about.

So, this is huge, you know, and then $300 million a day in increased energy prices are what Americans are paying. So if you can't pay your rent, you can't pay your mortgage, you can't buy your groceries. These are pretty big prices to pay.

BOLDUAN: My colleague Jeremy Diamond in Israel asked the Israeli prime minister about that South Pars gas field attack. I want to play for you what he said.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

JEREMY DIAMOND, CNN JERUSALEM CORRESPONDENT: Also indicated today that you made a commitment to President Trump not to strike these oil and gas facilities in the future. Should President Trump come to you one day and say oil prices are too high, it's time to end this war, will you listen to him? And do you need the United States in order to continue this campaign alone?

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISER: I don't think any two leaders have been as coordinated as President Trump and I. He's the leader. I'm, you know, his ally. America is the leader. But ultimately, President Trump makes his own decisions, and do I respect them? Yes, I do.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BOLDUAN: Congressman, from what you hear there, from what you learned in the intel hearing yesterday, do you know and feel confident of who is calling the shots?

[08:35:03]

CROW: No, I'm not confident about that. We haven't received the briefings. We haven't received the information that members of Congress, let alone members of the Armed Services and Intelligence Committee, which are the primary committees of jurisdiction and who have to oversee the expenditure of these funds and make sure our service members are protected. We're not getting the information. And I don't know.

You know, will the real justification for this war please stand up? Because it's changed six times in the last two weeks. It continues to change. It's staggering. I want to know who's calling the shots. I want to know who's in charge.

And I want to know what are we trying to achieve and when is it going to end, right?

I spent 24 years the last 24 years, either fighting these wars in Iraq and Afghanistan or helping wind them down in Congress. It's one of the reasons I came to Congress is to actually end this cycle of endless conflict, to stop spending $5 trillion to $8 trillion, which is what we spent in the last two decades, 7,000 American lives in endless credibility and lost opportunity, fighting wars that have all ended poorly for us.

Americans are done with it. I'm done with it. It's insane that Donald Trump continues to do it, and it just has to come to an end.

BOLDUAN: That being said, the president was asked about reporting that he is considering deploying thousands of troops to reinforce operations over there, to secure the Strait or Kharg Island or to secure Iran's stockpiles of highly enriched uranium. The president's response, when asked about it, was, "I'm not putting troops anywhere. If I were, I certainly wouldn't tell you, but I'm not putting troops in."

Do you think -- what do you take from that? But do you think it is inevitable that they will, or do you think there's still a chance that the president could end this operation and end this war before it gets to that?

CROW: Kate with that answer, tells me is we have a president that feels like he can operate with impunity, that he's not accountable to Congress, he's not accountable to the American people. He's accountable to nobody in his mind.

He -- if he wants to do it, he can do it. If he doesn't want to do it, he doesn't have to do it. He can wake up tomorrow morning and decide what he wants to do, and he's answerable to nobody. That is dangerous and every American should be appalled by that.

And the reason he feels that way is because congressional Republicans have allowed him to feel that way. They have capitulated in their duty, their constitutional duty to oversee these wars and to take votes and to appropriate money or not appropriate money. But damn well they need to have that debate and make that decision and then go home to their constituents and be held accountable for it. The constitutional system is out of whack. That's the bottom line here, right?

The reason why our founders put Congress in charge of this is because they knew that the most important decision a nation has to make, which is to go to war and to send our sons and daughters into conflict and to fight and die on our behalf that needs to be put into the hands of the American people. And you do that by making representatives and senators accountable to the American people.

Right now, that is not the case, which is why I'm going to fight so hard to make sure that we are putting Congress in the intent of that is to put the American people back in the drivers seat so that they get to decide whether this is in their best interest, and they get to decide whether they want to send their sons and daughters off to fight these wars, and whether they want to pay their hard earned money to finance it.

BOLDUAN: Congressman Jason Crow, thanks for your time.

John?

JOHN BERMAN, CNN ANCHOR: All right. There is no briefing from the Pentagon today. But when they do brief, many people, including us, we've observed you almost get two briefings at once. You get the chair of the Joint Chiefs, Dan Caine, who gives a nuts and bolts review of the facts on the ground in the air over Iran. And then you also get what is really a very political briefing from the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, with almost campaign like rhetoric in terminology.

So how is that being received with us now?

CNN chief data analyst Harry Enten.

So, how popular is the secretary of defense and what he's doing?

HARRY ENTEN, CNN CHIEF DATA ANALYST: Pete Hegseth in those briefings are going over like a lead balloon. What are we talking about? Let's take a look here.

Look at the net approval, net popularity rating for Pete Hegseth in recent polling. You look at Quinnipiac. Look at this -- 15 points underwater. You think that's low. Why don't we go over to Yahoo/YouGov, even lower, way down there at minus 18 points.

Come over to this side of the aisle. Look at independents. This has been the story of the Trump presidency, ad it is the story of Pete Hegseth.

You think -- you see unpopularity overall. Look at independence even lower minutes 28 points among independents, according to Quinnipiac. And then taking the cake. Look at this, 33 points underwater. Pete Hegseth is with independents, according to Yahoo/YouGov. As I said at the beginning, he's going over like a lead balloon, not just overall, but especially with independence.

BERMAN: The type of political partisan language he uses is a break from almost every secretary of defense in the past that I can certainly think of.

[08:40:00] So how does his popularity compare to those past secretaries?

ENTEN: Yeah, past secretaries of defense at a time of war this early on in the war tend to be very popular, very different. I mean, just look at this slide. Secretary of defense has net popularity at this point in the gulf war.

Look at Dick Cheney. He was 62 points above water.

Look at Donald Rumsfeld who, of course, became unpopular later. But at the beginning of the Iraq war. Look at this, he was 58 points above water.

Pete Hegseth -- I mean, look at this, it's just completely on the other side of the aisle, 17 points below water in the average.

I mean, Donald Rumsfeld was what, 75 points more popular than Pete Hegseth was in the popular. And Dick Cheney was nearly 80 points more popular. He is on a completely different planet. This war is being received completely differently, at least when looking at the secretary of defenses.

Normally, secretary of defenses are celebrated early in wars. At this point, Pete Hegseth is anything but celebrated.

BERMAN: Is this just a Trump thing? Can you say, hey, you know, Donald Trump's unpopular, so all of his secretaries of defense must be unpopular?

ENTEN: No, no, secretary of defense is under the first Trump administration were popular especially Mad Dog Mattis.

I mean, take a look at this -- approval of Trump's -- net approval of Trump's secretary of defense. Look at this, Mad Dog Mattis was 37 points above water, 37 points above water at this point in Trump's first term. Compare that again to Pete Hegseth 17 points below water. We're talking about Mattis being more than 50 points more popular than that popularity rating than Pete Hegseth was.

Pete Hegseth is truly unique when it comes to secretary of defenses, breaking records when it comes to unpopularity at this point in a presidency.

BERMAN: One of these things is not like the other.

Harry Enten, thank you very much.

ENTEN: Thank you.

BERMAN: Kate?

BOLDUAN: The Trump administration just approved a $6.2 billion mega merger that is set to reshape local TV as we know it. What does this mean now?

And it's the day millions of K-pop fans have been waiting for. BTS is back with their new album. We are live from South Korea for you.

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[08:46:26]

BERMAN: In a brand-new episode of all there is with Anderson Cooper, Grammy-winning singer/songwriter Sara Bareilles shares how a conversation that Anderson had with Stephen Colbert inspired her to write a song about her own journey through loss and grief.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

ANDERSON COOPER, CNN HOST, "AC360": You've actually listened to this podcast.

SARA BAREILLES, SINGER/SONGWRITER: Many, many times. I found it very powerful, very moving. Its inspired songs.

COOPER: You wrote a song based on a particular episode with Stephen Colbert?

BAREILLES: Yes.

COOPER: It's called "Home".

BAREILLES: It's called "Home".

I was really moved. I think you say it in the interview. It was just about -- it's about telling your story and telling your story, warts and all, is the thing that brings you back home. And I think of home as being like a place of connection, either with self or with others, or with source or God or whatever you think. But for me, on this earth, our work is to find ways to be like bold enough to let people, let other people see us.

COOPER: Let's play "Home".

(MUSIC)

(CRYING)

BAREILLES: Can I hug you, Anderson? I really thank you for that song. You brought me a lot of healing to having those conversations.

COOPER: I knew I should have listened to it beforehand.

(END VIDEOTAPE)

BERMAN: I mean -- maybe, maybe yes.

Anderson Cooper is with us now.

COOPER: Yeah.

BERMAN: I mean I got to say Sara Bareilles wrote a song -- I mean, she wrote a song inspired by you which on its face is -- I don't know if that's ever happened to you before people write songs because of you all the time. But what -- what hit you? What hit you at that moment?

COOPER: Well, what hit me is that she had said that it was a conversation that Stephen Colbert and I had, which it was. I did not realize she actually used actual words I had said and like sentences I said and things I said about my son and wanting to get better for him and all this stuff.

And so, all that stuff at the end was all stuff I had said, and it completely -- it's beautiful. It's lovely. I was -- I was just kind of blown away by it and obviously -- yeah, you know, this is what happens when you suppress your emotions for your entire life and then they bubble up in very strange and uncomfortable ways on television. And it's unfortunate.

BERMAN: I mean, I was listening to the song along with everyone else as its going and its beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. But then she starts talking about your son there at the end, and it really is powerful.

COOPER: Yeah, yeah.

BERMAN: Your podcast is, Anderson, as you just said, it's all about exploring grief and talking about grief in ways that you feel you didn't and haven't done in the past at moments where you've lost loved ones. And it's so honest. And I think in raw at times.

What -- what are you learning as you go through this?

COOPER: Yeah, I think like a lot of people, I suppress my grief when I was a little kid. Anybody who has lost a parent early on as I did when I was 10 or my brother when I was 21, you know, I buried it all and I just ran from it my entire life and started going to wars. And, you know, used it as fuel to try to achieve things, but never really facing the sadness of it until recently.

And I've learned that the most important thing is just talking about it and talking about it with other people. And you know, you can try to keep a lid on it for decades and that can work for a while, but at a certain point, it doesn't work any longer. And you have to somehow turn to it and develop a companionship with it, as one of my guests on the podcast, Francis Weller, says.

BERMAN: It really is something to see and now, you're a full on muse for a Grammy Award winning artist, which is just so lovely and beautiful.

Thank you for sharing that with everyone. Thank you for sharing.

COOPER: Listen, anytime somebody writes a song about you, anytime somebody writes a song about you, John, listen to it in advance before you're recorded listening.

BERMAN: I'll keep that -- I'll keep that along with me. My, the song that's written about me quite like that -- it's going to be some kind of angry, angry, violent killer app.

All right. Thank you very much, Anderson.

You can listen or watch the full conversation here, all of that, just beautiful song home right now on "All There Is" the podcast. A new episode is available wherever you get your podcasts. You can watch or listen to the entire episode at CNN.com/allthereis.

SIDNER: At least you got him laughing, you got him crying, but you got him laughing. John. Only you can do that. Thank you so much.

All right. Coordinated but independent. That's how President Trump has described how the U.S. and Israel are working together in the war with Iran. But the recent strikes on energy facilities by Israel appears to show a divide in strategy.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

REPORTER: Have you talked to Prime Minister Netanyahu about attacking the oil and gas fields?

TRUMP: Yeah, I did, I did. I told him don't do that and he won't do that. We didn't discuss, you know, we do were independent. We get along great. It's coordinated. But on occasion he'll do something. And if I don't like it. And so, we're not doing that anymore.

NETANYAHU: Fact number one, Israel acted alone against the Asaluyeh gas compound. Fact number two, President Trump asked us to hold off on future attacks, and we're holding out.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

SIDNER: Now, President Trump has said he didn't know anything about the fact that Israel was going to strike the oil fields. But sources have told CNN that the Trump administration was aware of the strike beforehand. "The New York Times" also reporting the same thing.

So, joining us now is foreign policy advisor for the prime minister, Ophir Falk.

I guess the question is, is that true? Did Israel share information with the Trump administration in advance before it hit the Pars Gas field?

[08:55:06]

OPHIR FALK, FOREIGN POLICY ADVISER FOR ISRAEL PRIME MINISTER BENJAMIN NETANYAHU: Thanks for having me, Sara.

Well, of course, as the prime minister said, Israel acted alone. We hit their gravy train, and the president asked us to stop those strikes, and we've stopped those strikes for the time being, but I would like to say that --

(CROSSTALK) SIDNER: But that didn't answer whether or not -- that didn't answer whether -- hold on, that didn't answer whether or not there was coordination between the United States and Israel in the strike.

He said Israel acted alone, but the question was whether or not the United States was informed of this beforehand? Because sources to us and "The New York Times" said they were. So, were they?

FALK: I can't speculate on what "The New York Times" says, and I'm not going to get into that. What I can tell you is that never in the -- in the history of human conflict has there been such coordination and cooperation between two great world leaders, Prime Minister Netanyahu and President Trump. They've had great cooperation and coordination.

On this specific strike, we struck -- we hit them alone. We hit them alone. It's their gravy train. We hit them hard. We were asked not to hit them again. And we're holding off on that.

But it's important to see that we're well ahead of our war objectives. Our objective is to remove the existential threat posed by this genocidal ayatollah regime. The best way of doing that is to remove the ayatollah regime.

Another way of doing that is to hit their capabilities, to decimate their nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities. And we're doing that along with the United States day in, day out, day after day, harder and harder. And we're going to continue to do that until we get the -- until we get the job done

SIDNER: Look, Iran is known for terror attacks around the world, and then you have this this war that was started by the United States and Israel to do what it is that you're talking about. But there does seem to be a little bit of a difference in what Israel is looking to do and what the United States is willing to do here -- the reason for this war.

Let me let you just remind people what Netanyahu said yesterday about an air or possibly a ground war.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BENJAMIN NETANYAHU, ISRAELI PRIME MINISTER: We can create the conditions, but they have to -- you know, they have to explode those conditions at a certain point.

It is often said that you can't win -- you can't do revolutions from the air. That is true. You can't do it only from the air. You can do a lot of things from the air. And we're doing.

But there have to be -- there has to be a ground component as well. There are many possibilities for this ground component, and I take the liberty of not sharing with you all those possibilities.

(END VIDEO CLIP) SIDNER: Is Netanyahu arguing here for the need for Israeli and/or American boots on the ground to implement regime change? Is that what we just heard

FALK: Well, the prime minister is -- what he said is that we're creating the conditions for the Iranian people to take their freedom in their own hands. He's 100 percent correct on that.

We're decimating the Iranian regime like never before. For 47 years, they've been terrorizing Americans and Israelis and slaughtering the people, slaughtering the Iranian people on the streets. And now, we are hitting them like never -- never before. And creating, we're creating the conditions for the Iranian people to do the right thing. But at the end of the day, it's up to the Iranian people.

SIDNER: So, you haven't advised him that there should be boots on the ground? Because there are a lot of people concerned about that, but also worried about mission creep here. If it is about regime change, that it can't just happen from the air.

FALK: Well, again, we're working exactly as planned. We're well ahead of schedule. We're hitting them harder than ever before. We're decimating their capabilities.

Their missiles, we're taking them out. Their launchers, we're taking them out. Their leadership, we're taking them out. One by one by one, they -- we're taking them all out.

And at the end of the day, again, we're creating the conditions for the brave people of Iran who have been persecuted for 47 years who just recently 30,000 of them have been slaughtered on the streets of Tehran, we're creating the conditions for them to do the right thing.

As for our operational plans -- clearly, I'm not going to share that with CNN and your great viewers.

SIDNER: All right. Ophir Falk, thank you so much for coming on here, live for us from Jerusalem there.

John?

BERMAN: All right. This morning. ABC pulling the plug on the new season of "The Bachelorette" before it even starts. Just days before the premiere, a video surfaced showing this season's bachelorette Taylor Frankie Paul attacking and throwing objects at an ex-boyfriend. Paul's also facing a separate domestic violence probe in Utah. In a statement, her team says the video lacks context. We should note "The Bachelorette" franchise is produced by Warner Bros. Unscripted Television, which shares a parent company with CNN.

Kate?

BOLDUAN: So BTS is back, and today is a huge day for their fans around the world, releasing a new album, their first since the group had to take that break for years for mandatory military service. And on top of this new album, fans are -- all fans are also getting ready for the.