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Trump Ramps Up Pressure On Allies To Help Secure Strait Of Hormuz; Gas Price Surges To $3.72, Highest Since October 2023; Allies Rebuff Trump Demand To Send Ships To Strait of Hormuz; Trump Addresses War In Iran At Kennedy Center Meeting; Trump To Allies: "We Want Them To Come And Help Us" With Strait. Aired 12-12:30p ET

Aired March 16, 2026 - 12:00   ET

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

[12:00:00]

DANA BASH, CNN HOST, INSIDE POLITICS: Help Wanted. President Trump is now asking for backup for Iran. I'm Dana Bash. Let's go behind the headlines at Inside Politics.

You're looking at live pictures at the White House, where any moment now, President Trump is expected to talk to reporters during a Kennedy Center board meeting that he's hosting there in the East Room. The president is expected to take questions from reporters as questions continue to mount about the war in Iran as it enters week three, specifically, the president's new push for allies to help open the Strait of Hormuz as Iran chokes the world's oil lifeline, sending gas prices spiking.

Here's how the president put it last night on Air Force One.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

DONALD TRUMP, PRESIDENT OF UNITED STATES OF AMERICA: We need -- really I am demanding that these countries come in and protect their own territory, because it is their territory. It's a place from which they get their energy. And they should come and they should help us protect it. You could make the case that maybe we shouldn't even be there at all.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BASH: Sources tell my colleague Kevin Liptak that U.S. officials spent the weekend scrambling to rally support from other countries. The plan was for President Trump to roll out a coalition in the coming days, but even as America's closest allies are hesitant to send their militaries in harm's way.

I'm joined by a terrific group of reporters here. Hello. Welcome to our temporary set. It's nice to be here. I do want to start with what the president is trying to do. Phil, and I'm going to start with you on this. And as I do, let's just look at the status of oil and gas prices.

Oil Brent crude international is around 102, and WTI U.S. domestic is around 95, yesterday both topped 100. You can put that in perspective for us, and this really has a lot of impact on a lot of industries globally, but especially, you know, we're talking about domestic politics here in the U.S., speaking of gas prices, that's what people see. Today, 3.72, a week ago 3.48, a month ago 2.99.

PHIL MATTINGLY, CNN ANCHOR & CHIEF DOMESTIC CORRESPONDENT: The cascading effect of when you're talking about Brent crude in particular, which has been now sitting pretty regularly, over $100 a barrel. If you go back just a couple of months, it was barely $61, $62 a barrel. Right now, it's been a dramatic increase that, yes, has a immediate impact, downstream effect on the prices people are paying at the gas pump, which essentially becomes -- as Ron Klain used to say, during the Biden administration, the political billboard on the corner of everybody's neighborhood that they see the gas has gone up 40, 50, 60 cents. And so that becomes the political problem, especially heading into the mid-terms where you want an immediate solution.

I think the bigger issue right now is, it is a global economic problem, and the potential for a global economic, honestly, it's not hyperbole. When you talk to analysts and folks who are working in this space, they say catastrophe is possible if there isn't a solution at some point in the near term.

Just given the scale, this is -- you're talking about diesel, you're talking about fuel for airplanes, you're talking about fertilizer. You're talking about entire industries that are essential to the international economy basically shutting down if this doesn't open up quickly. And that's why you've seen what you've seen over the course of the last several days. The president is right. The U.S. is not reliant in a major way on the oil that transits through the Strait of Hormuz. We are a producer at a scale that we hadn't been in several decades. We are energy independent by all accounts.

But oil is a global market, and it has a direct effect on U.S. consumers and the necessity right now, given the scale, complexity, risks that come with trying to reopen a straight that Iran still has capacity to bring great harm to, means that other countries would need to get involved, and other countries right now are saying, we didn't hear from you on the front end. It's a little late to be calling right now.

BASH: That's exactly where I want to go with this next. First, let's just listen a little bit more to what the president said last night. And the question was about NATO countries coming to or heeding the call for help.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

TRUMP: We're always there for NATO. We're helping them with Ukraine, as many, it's got an ocean in between us. It doesn't affect us, but we've helped them. I'd be interesting to see what country wouldn't help us with a very small endeavor, which is just keeping the Strait open.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

[12:05:00] BASH: Catherine, you covered the White House. Let me just look at some of the -- and show you and our viewers some of the responses from the countries in -- who are prominent countries in NATO. Germany, this war has nothing to do with NATO. It's not NATO's war. U.K., we will not be drawn into the wider war. Italy, Italy is not part of the conflict. Australia, we will not be sending a ship to the Strait of Hormuz, Japan, we are proceeding with consideration.

I'm bold enough to remember wars where you got a coalition of the willing together before an attack and not try to do it midstream?

CATHERINE LUCEY, WHITE HOUSE CORRESPONDENT, BLOOMBERG NEWS: Yeah. That would have required getting buy in from these allies ahead of time, which hasn't happened. And now you're seeing they are quite united. They're just not united with President Trump. And so, this is an issue there. You're hearing consistently from these countries. They are skeptical. They don't want to escalate this war. They don't want to feel like they're being pressured.

And that means these, the problems that Phil is talking about with oil prices, with the pressures on the global economy, are going to continue. And we know from talking to folks in and around the White House. They have been -- there have been at least, you know, some folks looking for ways to both find off ramps but also find ways to ease pressures on gas prices and on oil, but you know, there's only so many tools they have here.

MANU RAJU, CNN CHIEF CONGRESSIONAL CORRESPONDENT: And the fact that Trump said this is a very small task or very small ask. I mean, this is a very dangerous thing he's asking them to do, which is to help secure this, have potentially be fired upon. We've seen American service members die in this war so far that obviously, other countries are very concerned about whether they can do it, the concerns about loss of lives and the like.

But also, Trump spent the last, what, year and a half, since he's over a year since being in office, tearing down the very relationships that he's trying to prop up and use to help him in this war. He alienated much of Europe over the whole Greenland fight. Tariffs have obviously not gone very well with much of the world and now he's asking for a favor and you're seeing right there. A lot of them are saying they're just not going to be bullied into this, given the scale of the risks and the fact that he's alienated a lot of them.

BASH: And just on that note, just going back to last Saturday, a post that the president put up on his Truth Social after Starmer said back then that the U.K. wouldn't assist the U.S. in this and Israel in this offensive. The president said, that's OK, Prime Minister, Starmer, we don't need them any longer, but we will remember we don't need people to join wars that we've already won.

Phil Mattingly, you have done so much reporting on the preparedness for what we're now seeing in the Strait of Hormuz. Can you put into context what we're seeing this outreach to countries for help versus what the military had planned for, at least knew was a possibility and versus what's happening now. MATTINGLY: I think this is an extremely important distinction and dynamic to understand in this moment, which is the U.S. military for decades has had a series of plans, has trained for, has conducted exercises related specifically to what to do in the event of a significant disruption in the Strait of Hormuz, driven by Iran. It has always been known as kind of their highest up the escalatory ladder move, if they thought there was an existential threat on the regime. Clearly there has been.

The U.S. military has prepared for several options and briefed the president in advance for several of the potential operations that they could conduct should something like this occur. What you're seeing right now is not a reflection of the lack of options on the table on the front end with the lack of preparedness from the U.S. military.

What you're seeing right now is the options that are currently on the table for this moment, given we're 15 days in, and what has actually taken place up to this point operationally are risky. They are labor and resource intensive. And there is a problem at this point in time in an asymmetric war that is clearly broken out in this point where it doesn't take a lot for Iran to create this problem.

It takes significant amount of capability, assets and the risks that come with that, particularly if you're talking about using ground forces, particularly if you're talking about hitting Iran's oil infrastructure or capacity to actually ship oil, which they have been largely left alone up to this point.

So, for the administration, there's not a lot of great options for a problem that doesn't have an easy fix. And so, trying to bring in other countries to help with the escort process. That helps from a resources' perspective, from a unity of trying to take on these risks' perspective, the hope that Iran wouldn't want to pick a fight with everybody else. But the risks here are, if you start moving in any of the directions, optionally that the president has, then perhaps Iran starts striking oil infrastructure in other Gulf countries, which again spikes prices.

If you start taking out Iran's oil, that spikes prices. So, it's just a really difficult dynamic right now that I think a lot of administration officials were hoping they could eliminate before it actually got to this point, given the scale, and I think, largely successful scale of the operation they had conducted for the first two weeks.

[12:10:00]

LUCEY: That's right. I think there was a whole. And certainly, what we've seen with president Trump, with previous military engagements is he likes these sort of short, sharp shocks, right? He wants to go in quickly. You saw that with Venezuela. You saw the previous Iran strike. And so, I think at least some people around him thought they could do something quickly enough that it wouldn't get to this place. And that obviously hasn't happened.

And now both -- there's all these global impacts, but also the political impact of this is just mounting as the midterm elections roll on. Voters are frustrated already about prices. President Trump spent the first year of his administration talking about how great it was that gas was so low. I mean, up until very recently, this was a big talking point that he has -- he has really pulled back on because that's currently not the case, although he keeps saying, you know, it'll go up, come back down, but that's, you know, that's not clear yet.

RAJU: And they haven't even laid out the full scale of this, the cost to the American taxpayer, which we expect the proposal within the next couple of weeks. And it could be astronomical. And if Congress have to come in and approve what could be tens of billions of dollars, or some estimates being thrown out, $100 billion. They haven't even testified publicly. We have not heard public testimony from any of these cabinet level officials who are mounting this horse. Yes, some of them talk publicly to reporters. That's much different than sitting for a public hearing and that's one of the pressure points we'll see intensify.

BASH: Yeah. And our colleague Ted Barrett reported that that could happen as soon, maybe as soon as this week but we'll see. And again, a live look at the White House. We are waiting for President Trump to arrive for the Kennedy Center board meeting there, just days after removing the man he handpicked to lead the Performing Arts center, though he seems to be there. We're going to bring you the latest when we come back.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

[12:15:00]

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BASH: President Trump is now speaking at the White House during a board meeting with members of the Kennedy Center board.

TRUMP: We have wonderful group of very, very smart, talented, patriots at this table. Our powerful military campaign to end the threats posed by the Iranian regime continued in full force over the past few days. They have been literally obliterated. The air force is gone. The navy is gone. Many, many ships have been sunk. They're war fighting ships, but I guess they didn't know how to use them. And antiaircraft is decimated. Their radar is gone, and their leaders are gone. Other than that, they're doing quite well.

They've been a terror for 47 years. And now, I guess the world, through the United States, with the help of Israel is doing what should have been done many years ago. It should have been done many years ago. Since the beginning of the conflict, we have struck more than 7000 targets across Iran, and these have been mostly commercial and military targets.

We have achieved a 90 percent reduction in their ballistic missile launches and a 95 percent reduction in drone attacks. The missiles are trickling in now at very low levels because they don't have too many missiles left. We've also attacked the manufacturing plants were the places where they manufacture the missiles and the drones and that's going on today. We just hit three of them today.

It's getting very hard for them to manufacture. More than one hundred Iranian naval vessels have been sunk or destroyed over the last week and a half. It has to be some kind of a record. Additional strikes continue to launch from all directions every single hour. As you know, we attacked Kharg Island and knocked it -- knocked it literally, destroyed everything on the island, except for the area where the oil is. I call it the pipes. We left the pipes. We didn't want to do that but that we will do that. We can do that on five minutes notice. It'll be over.

But for purposes of -- someday rebuilding that country, I guess, we did the right thing, but it's -- it may not stay that way. Just one simple word and the pipes will be gone too, but it will take a long time to rebuild that. We are aggressively dismantling Iran's defense industrial base and ability to rebuild its missiles and drone capability is getting down to close to zero.

And we're hammering their capacity to threaten commercial shipping in the Strait of Hormuz with more than 30 mine laying ships destroyed. We hit to the best of our knowledge, all of their mine laying ships. Now they can put them on other types of ships, I guess, and drop them in, but we don't know that any have even been dropped in. We're not sure that any have been. That's a big negative for them, if they do it and it's a form of suicide.

[12:20:00]

But we don't know that they have dropped any in, but we've -- we've hit all 30 of their ships and destroyed them. They're all at the bottom of the sea. We strongly encourage other nations whose economies depend on the Strait far more than ours. You know, we get less than 1 percent of our oil from this rate and some countries get much more. Japan gets 95 percent, China gets 90 percent, many of the Europeans get quite a -- quite a bit. South Korea gets 35 percent. So, we want them to come and help us with the Strait.

We have it in very good shape. The countries I said, we've already taken care of Iran, but now, because of the fact that, literally, a single terrorist can put something in the water or shoot something or shoot a missile, a small missile, and it's fairly close range because it is a tight area, and which is one of the reasons they've always used that as a weapon.

Iran has always used that as an economic weapon and it's not going to be able to use -- be used very long. Numerous countries have told me they're on the way. Some are very enthusiastic about it, and some aren't. Some are countries that we've helped for many, many years. We've protected them from horrible outside sources, and they weren't that enthusiastic. And the level of enthusiasm, it matters to me.

We have some countries where we have 45,000 soldiers, great soldiers, protecting them from harm's way and we have done a great job. And when we want to know, do you have any mine sweepers? Well, would rather not get involved, sir. I said for, you mean, for 40 years, we're protecting you and you don't want to get involved in something that is very minor, very few shots going to be taken because they don't have many shots left. But they said we would rather not get involved.

I just want the fake news media and everybody else to remember that that was said because when I've been a big critic of all of the protecting of countries, because I know that we'll protect them, and if ever needed -- if we ever needed help, they won't be there for us. I've just known that for a long period of time, just like I knew about the Strait that it would be a weapon, which I predicted a long time ago. Predicted all of this stuff.

You guys were very generous and that I predicted all of it. I predicted Osama bin Laden would knock out the World Trade Center. I made that prediction a year before he did. I said, you better get him. He's a bad guy. I watched him be interviewed one time, and I said, that's a bad guy. You better get him. One year before exactly, I wrote it in a book. You can even check about a year before the World Trade Center then came down. President Clinton actually had a shot at him and he didn't take it. Unfortunately, I'm not blaming him for that, but he didn't take it, and he ended up knocking down the World Trade Center, but I predicted that too. I predicted a lot of things.

We strongly encourage other nations whose economies depend on the Strait for blood. I mean, you know, these people literally need it 90, 95 percent of their energy, or their oil comes out of the Strait, and they should be in here, very happily helping us. And it's incredible. We have such great. We're number one in oil by double. Now we drill, baby drill. We're double any other nation, and it's going to be soon triple any other nation, and that doesn't include Venezuela, who's been great. By the way, the relationship with Venezuela has been fantastic.

Millions, literally, millions of barrels of oil are being taken out, and it's been a great help, and it's been to their great benefit. The president has done a really good job. We get along with them really well, but we've taken out millions of barrels of oil and brought to Houston and other places for -- to the refineries. We have refineries set up specifically for that.

And it's been a great -- it's been a great relationship, and more and more is happening. It's a tremendous oil source and we're getting -- we're stepping it up very rapidly. The big companies are going in, and they will actually -- numbers in a pretty short period of time and numbers that they've never been able to do what we'll be doing. There's a lot of oil under that land.

We strongly encourage the other nations to get involved with us and get involved quickly and with great enthusiasm. I have that from a number of them, and I'd like to say their names, but frankly, I don't know if they would want me to or not, because maybe they don't want to be targeted. But I say, it wouldn't matter if you target it or not, because this is a paper tiger that we're dealing with now. It wasn't a paper tiger two weeks ago. It's a paper tiger now.

[12:25:00]

So, now we're going to get down to the reason. We'll take a couple of questions in a moment, but we're going to get down to the reason we're here today. Actually, this was set up a long time ago. It's the Trump Kennedy Center. Over the past year, we've made incredible strides to restore the true purpose and prestige of this revered institution.

Together, we're going to ensure it remains the finest performing arts facility of its kind anywhere in the world. And I don't know that it ever really reached that stage, but it will over a period of time. We're rebuilding it. It's in very, very bad condition. It's been, let -- it's been somewhat of a disaster, to be honest with you. It's been -- it's been let go to hell. That's what they've done.

They did a poor job. They spent money in the wrong places. They built some theaters underneath that nobody uses, little ones, tiny theaters that cost $300 million and the money was spent incorrectly, wrong. We're dealing with some networks on the possibility of renting those little theaters. Nobody is going to use them. They want the big halls, the halls -- the halls are going to be incredible. They're in bad shape, but when they're completed, the bones are potentially something that could be unbelievable.

So, I want to -- before we begin, I want to thank Ric Grenell. He's been a friend of mine for a long time. He's been unbelievable. He went to the -- he was the ambassador, as you know, to Germany. There was no happier woman in the world than Angela Merkel. Angela. She called me. Thank you, sir. Thank you. Although she liked Ric a lot, there was nobody happier that he was no longer going to be the ambassador to Germany.

He was difficult for them. He was not your typical ambassador. He was the opposite. He was -- he would do what was best for the United States, not for Germany. And I want to tell you he did a great job, so good that I put him in charge of the thing called intelligence, and something he didn't --

BASH: OK. We're going to continue to monitor the president talking about his friend Ric Grenell, who just stepped down as the head or executive director of the Kennedy Center. This is a meeting that the president is holding of members of his -- handpicked members of the board of the Kennedy Center as they figure out whether or not to vote to close the Kennedy Center for two years, which the president says is for renovations. We also know that they are having a lot of trouble getting theater and musical acts to come and be there because of the president's changes.

But what we want to talk about is what the president talked about at the beginning, before he made that turn, which is the fact that the United States is at war. He is the commander in chief. And what he said, I believe, three or four times during those opening remarks is that he wants U.S. allies to come to the aid of the U.S. and Israel to help open up the Strait of Hormuz.

My colleagues are here to talk more about what he said. I mean, Phil Mattingly, that was really noteworthy, I think. Obviously, he had printed remarks, but he kept coming back to the idea that the U.S. has been helping countries. He didn't name them, and he actually specifically said, I'm not going to name those who have said yes to helping, because he wants to let them do it themselves. But his argument was, the U.S. is in various countries in and around the region, or even the world, protecting those countries from harm's way, and it's time for those countries to step up and help, clear the way in the Strait of Hormuz.

MATTINGLY: I think repetition of making that statement but also when he went off of his notes and was replaying some of the conversations that he's had over the course of the last 48 hours, which I think sometimes people don't necessarily understand. When he's replaying phone calls that he has and kind of relaying them in public, oftentimes, they're quite accurate.

Most of the time, actually, they are quite accurate. And in this specific case where he was talking about some leaders calling him and saying, look, we just don't want to get involved right now, has been something that's happened several times over the course of the last 48 hours, according to my reporting over the weekend.

And I think when he's talking about, we have troops in some of these nations, some of these nations actually rely on a significant percentage of their domestic oil consumption or gas consumption coming through the Strait of Hormuz. He's specifically referring to Asian countries