Trump boasts about billions from Venezuelan oil, but lawmakers are still fighting to learn where the money is, who controls it, and who’s getting paid… At any other time in American history, it would end the career of somebody like Scott Bessent, our limited-intelligence Treasury Secretary. It came out yesterday when Illinois Congressman Sean Casten was questioning him about the “billions of dollars” that Trump keeps claiming America is “getting” from selling Venezuelan oil. Bessent agreed with Trump, saying the oil and oil money we’ve seized from that country is “one of the largest assets to ever go on the U.S. balance sheet.” Billions and billions of dollars. So Casten asked him a simple question: Can you tell us who controls that money and where it is? Can you confirm “whether or not those [funds] are flowing to U.S. persons?” Bessent’s answer was a shocking single word: “No.” He ain’t talkin…

The bond market is warning that 45 years of Republican tax cuts and exploding debt may finally force ordinary Americans to pay for a party the wealthy already enjoyed... Get ready to get your financial ass kicked. That’s the message the bond market sent last week, although almost nobody in the corporate press bothered to translate it into English. If you’ve ever lived in a condo or home with an HOA, though, you may understand what’s happening better than you realize.

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion. — The for-profit Medicare Advantage giants are doing exactly what for-profit companies do, and a million or so seniors are about to find out what “advantage” actually means. — Diesel hit a record $6.05 a gallon Friday, and Trump’s insane war with Iran is entirely responsible for it. — Trump closed his midterm convention in Dallas by making the crowd raise their right hands and pledge they would cheat for him, then told them they’ll go to Hell if they don’t vote the way he wants. — A right-wing think tank has spent twenty years secretly building a database on thousands of Muslim Americans, and only admitted it when HuffPost started asking questions. — Trump got asked a simple question by a Black woman reporter on the tarmac in Dallas and responded by lunging and screaming at her. — An active-duty Navy sailor was trotted out on stage at the Republican convention as a prop, which is against Pentagon rules, and the Pentagon so far has nothing to say about it — The people building artificial intelligence spent the week telling Congress it might kill everybody, so Mikey Johnson decided the House should leave town for six weeks and avoid the topic. — Crazy Alert! Apparently Donald Trump isn’t the only one who can rename things.

Economic desperation opened the door to both FDR and Hitler. Nearly a century later, America again faces competing visions of who should rule and whom government should serve… “The old order is dying and the new cannot yet be born; in this interregnum, monsters appear.” —paraphrase of Italian anti-fascist Antonio Gramsci. While Hakeem Jeffries revealed, as he trash-talked Medicare for All, that he doesn’t believe we’re in a full-blown populist moment in America, Trump, Bannon, and the neofascist tech bros and billionaires fully realize what’s going on — and are committed to making the most of it. As are Bernie Sanders, AOC, Mamdani, El-Sayed and hundreds of other Democratic candidates this year. At its core, populism is a way of understanding politics as a struggle between ordinary people and a powerful elite that has stopped serving them. It’s not inherently left- or right-wing; it’s really a way political scientists describe a moment when the majority of a population has lost faith in the existing system and is looking for alternatives to it.