Trump’s team has raked in billions from Venezuelan oil since the capture of Nicolas Maduro, and nobody in the White House can say where that money actually went. The president’s border czar just revealed that Trump calls staff about major policy decisions at two and four in the morning, raising new questions about the sleepless 80 year-old’s fitness for the job. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton ran away from reporters asking questions about his fifteen homes and potential voter fraud. And a brand new poll shows MAGA voters are abandoning Trump over his war in Iran as gas prices climb past four dollars a gallon.
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White House Refuses to Answer Questions About Missing $13 Billion
In January, American troops captured Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro and replaced him with Vice President Delcy Rodriguez. Since then, the Trump administration has seized control of Venezuela’s oil exports, which make up roughly a quarter of that country’s entire economy.
The Financial Times reports that the move has generated about $13 billion in revenue so far. And the White House has been unusually quiet about what happened to all that money.
Trump signed an executive order claiming the oil funds are intended to be Venezuelan property, held by the U.S. in a so-called “custodial capacity.” But Trump himself has been bragging that the U.S. is “making a lot of money” off Venezuelan oil. The Department of Energy insists the money will benefit “the American people and the Venezuelan people,” without providing any further explanation.
Now, economists are telling the Financial Times that Venezuela’s economy shows effectively no signs of recovery more than six months after Maduro’s capture. That should be a huge red flag for anyone paying attention. If billions in oil revenue were actually flowing back into Venezuela’s economy, there would be evidence of it.
Democratic Congressman Joaquin Castro of Texas told the Financial Times that Trump’s invasion of Venezuela has been all about oil, power, and graft from the very start, with billions in revenue controlled by the administration with zero transparency and zero safeguards.
Republican Congresswoman Maria Elvira Salazar of Florida is also alarmed. She used a recent hearing to demand full disclosure about Venezuelan oil money, stressing that the White House has to be transparent about what it did with billions of dollars.
All of this is happening while Venezuela is in desperate need. In late June, two earthquakes struck Venezuela, devastating the capital Caracas and the surrounding region, causing an estimated thirty seven billion dollars in damage and killing at least fifty three hundred people. The country needs that money now more than ever, and there’s a real chance they’ll never see a huge chunk of it.
We’ve seen this movie before. A hundred years ago the Teapot Dome scandal blew up when a cabinet secretary quietly handed America’s public oil reserves to private tycoons in exchange for bribes, and it took a determined Senate investigation to drag the truth into the daylight. When a government seizes another nation’s oil and then can’t say where thirteen billion dollars went, that isn’t foreign policy, that’s a heist, and the only thing that’s ever stopped a heist like this is a public that insists on seeing the books.
Trump’s Border Czar Reveals New Details About His Bizarre Sleep Schedule
Border Czar Tom Homan went on Katie Miller’s podcast recently and revealed some pretty eyebrow-raising details about Trump’s sleep habits.
When Miller asked Homan about the earliest and latest calls he’s ever gotten from Trump were, the border czar said he’s gotten calls at two and four in the morning. He said it can sometimes happen several times a week, usually while Trump is on Air Force One.
In one call, Trump asked what Homan was doing. Homan responded that he was sleeping, since it was four in the morning on a Sunday. Trump didn’t care, asking Homan what he thought about putting ICE agents in airports. Homan, naturally, told Trump it was a brilliant idea. Then the president told him he’d be in charge of getting it running.
That was back in March, when ICE agents suddenly showed up at airports during a federal government shutdown. This was compounded by unpaid TSA workers calling out in record numbers, resulting in hours-long security lines. The move was sold as a way to speed up travel, though Homan admitted it was also about making arrests, despite those agents having absolutely no training in airport security screening.
We’ve known for awhile that Trump barely gets any sleep, and is often up into the early hours of morning posting on Truth Social. On a Thursday night this month, the president posted 19 times between midnight and 2:30 AM The Daily Beast found only five days in April where his overnight posting suggested he actually got a full night’s rest.
New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan went into further detail on Trump’s sleep schedule in their new book “Regime Change.” White House staffers figured out that when they couldn’t reach Trump in the morning, it usually meant he’d been up all night playing on his phone or watching TV, only finally falling asleep around four or five in the morning. They noted Trump has never been known to get a full eight hours of sleep, but people close to him now believe he’s sleeping even less and keeping even weirder hours compared to his first term. That isn’t exactly the most reassuring thing considering this is the man with his finger on the nuclear codes.
There’s a reason we wrote the 25th Amendment into our Constitution in 1967. After a century that saw presidents fall gravely ill with no clear plan for who was really in charge, the country decided there had to be a lawful way to handle a commander in chief who can no longer do the job. This was never about party. It’s that the most powerful office on earth can’t be run on a couple hours of sleep and 4 a.m. phone calls, because the man holding it has our lives, and the world’s, in his hands.
Ken Paxton Runs Away from Reporters After Being Asked About Owning 15 Homes
Texas’ Republican attorney general, Ken Paxton, is in an unusually tight U.S. Senate race against Democratic state representative James Talarico. He was holding a press event with various Texas county sheriffs on Tuesday when journalists asked him about two explosive reports. ProPublica reported that Paxton may have committed voter fraud by casting a ballot from an address where he no longer lives. They also asked him about a recent New York Times report showing that he owns a whopping 15 homes worth a combined $9 million, all on a government salary.
Paxton wasn’t having it. He told reporters he only wanted to answer questions about law enforcement and that he wouldn’t address anything else. But when the journalists at the press conference kept pushing him to answer the previous questions, one of Paxton’s staffers jumped in and announced they were leaving. And just like that, Paxton ended the press conference.
Talarico’s campaign didn’t waste any time mocking Paxton for his quick exit. A Talarico campaign spokesperson said Paxton should answer questions about potentially violating Texas’ election laws and having a massive real estate portfolio on a public employee’s salary. The spokesperson then asked a pretty fair question of their own: if Paxton can’t handle this in a casual press setting, how would he handle an actual debate?
A century and a half ago, Boss Tweed ran New York like his own personal piggy bank, growing rich on a public salary while swearing he’d done nothing wrong, right up until a free press and a few honest reporters exposed him and a jury sent him to prison. That’s the whole American bargain. Nobody is so powerful that they get to enforce the law against everybody else while sprinting away from a simple question about themselves. When a man who built his career hunting phantom voter fraud runs from reporters asking whether he committed it, he’s telling you exactly how much he thinks his own rules apply to him.
MAGA Voters Abandoning Trump in Droves Over Iran War
Back in May, half of Trump’s MAGA base told pollsters they believed the war with Iran was worth the economic pain. But according to a new Politico poll, that number has rapidly dropped to just a little over a third. That’s a 13-point collapse in just two months.
The same poll found that 37 percent of MAGA voters now say the U.S. should only continue fighting the war if costs don’t keep rising. Almost one in five MAGA voters now say the U.S. should end the war outright, regardless of cost.
Trump doesn’t seem to be listening. U.S. Central cOmmand has maintained its bombing of Iran for two straight weeks. On Tuesday, Trump told reporters Iranian officials “want to desperately meet,” but said the U.S. has no interest in peace talks until Iran’s government is ready to do so “in a meaningful way.”
One anonymous White House staffer confided to Politico that the administration knows it’s in an unwinnable position. Senior officials apparently now believe the kind of victory Trump wants is politically impossible, because Americans simply won’t support the level of troop deaths and tax dollars such a victory would require.
This all comes after Trump declared the tenuous ceasefire with Iran was officially “over.” Hostilities have been reaching a slow boil ever since that agreement was buried last month. Two American service members were killed in Jordan just this past weekend. And gas prices have now climbed back above $4 a gallon.
Trump was planning to make 2026 his victory lap, touting his big ugly bill’s tax cuts for the rich, his administration’s savings accounts for newborns named after himself, and slightly lower drug prices. But now, his travel schedule keeps getting interrupted by trips to Dover Air Force Base for the dignified transfer of soldiers’ remains. He’s also been put in the position of defending higher gas prices at rallies as the cost of ending Iran’s nuclear program — which, by the way, he already said he ended in 2025.
White House aides claim higher prices are temporary and that they’ll come back down once the war is over and Iran’s military can no longer stop oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. White House spokesperson Olivia Wales doubled down, saying Trump isn’t making national security decisions based on opinion polls.
But the numbers are still pretty dismal for Trump. Non-MAGA Trump voters are even more opposed to the war, with just 21 percent of them saying it’s worth the cost. A majority of both MAGA and non-MAGA Trump voters now directly blame the war for higher gas prices. And now, Trump’s own base is divided on whether prices would have risen more, less, or stayed at the same level under a Democratic president, with a notable 20 percent of them saying things have actually gotten worse under Trump than they would have if a Democrat was in power.
Republicans are starting to panic. Curt Mills of the American Conservative said Americans largely don’t understand why we’re still at war with Iran, and that even though Trump gets a lot of grace from his own supporters, loyalty has an expiration date.
Trump, of course, says he isn’t worried about any of it. He told reporters Tuesday he’s not thinking about the election at all. Sure. Whatever you say.
After Vietnam, a war Washington kept selling long after the country stopped believing in it, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution in 1973 to reclaim its constitutional say over when Americans get sent off to fight and die. The founders handed the power to declare war to Congress, to the people’s house, precisely so no single man could march the whole nation into an endless conflict on his own say-so. When a president keeps a war going that even his own base has turned against, while flag-draped coffins keep arriving at Dover, he isn’t defying a poll, he’s defying the entire design of the republic.
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The president is keeping us all in the dark about $13 billion in oil money. The 80 year-old with the nuclear codes is constantly awake and giving increasingly bizarre orders at four in the morning. His endorsed Senate candidate won’t answer basic questions about how he owns 15 homes on a public employee salary. And his war is so unpopular that even his biggest supporters are giving up on him. These four stories wouldn’t be covered by cable networks and newspapers owned by pro-Trump billionaires like David Ellison and Jeff Bezos. And if they did cover them, they would be watered down beyond recognition and rendered toothless.
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I’m Thom Hartmann. Thanks for reading, and thanks for supporting independent media.
Here are some stories you may have missed:
Mike Johnson Urges Trump to Seek Swift End to Iran War. House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said Tuesday that he hopes President Donald Trump will move to end the Iran war, as the conflict drags on with just over 100 days until voters cast their ballots in the November midterms, saying “we’ve got to wrap it up.” The Republican-controlled House of Representatives is expected to vote this week on another War Powers Act resolution that would formally end U.S. involvement in Iran before lawmakers leave Washington for the August recess.
Oil Prices Creep Above $95 a Barrel as Iran Tightens Hold on Strait of Hormuz. As the U.S. and Iran continue to conduct strikes, traffic in the Strait of Hormuz — a critical chokepoint for roughly 20 percent of the global oil market — has slowed to a crawl. Oil prices have climbed toward the $95 per barrel mark, while gas prices are average more than $4 per gallon nationwide. Brent crude peaked at $126 per barrel in March, though it had dropped to $71 in early July.
ICE Arresting Family Members of Immigrant Children. U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents are now arresting the relatives of immigrant children when they show up to immigrant detention centers in an attempt to officially take custody of them. Attorneys for the families are accusing of ICE of using children as “bait” to arrest and detain their would-be caregivers, resulting in children waiting for months in shelters as their parents are deported.
Taylor Farms Spent Millions on Lobbying for Deregulation Before Diarrhea Outbreak. WIRED is now reporting that lettuce supplier Taylor Farms — whose products have been abruptly pulled from restaurants and grocery store shelves in the wake of the explosive diarrhea outbreak tied to its produce — donated millions to Republican-aligned groups ahead of the cyclospora outbreak sweeping the country. Between 2020 and 2024, the company donated more than $1.6 million to conservative PACs, and spent $2.1 million on contributions to conservative groups. This includes $1.1 million to Trump’s MAGA Inc. super PAC.
