Scott Bessent Gives Deranged Financial Advice on Beating Inflation

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks that people struggling with rising inflation should simply move from a blue state to a red state.

“I can tell you.… You know the best way to bring your inflation rate down? Move from a blue state to a red state,” Bessent declared on MSNBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “Blue state inflation is half a percent higher, and that is because they don’t deregulate, they keep prices up. Energy is higher.

What a baffling, tone-deaf statement. How would people already struggling with rising prices have the time or money to uproot their jobs, homes, and families to move to a state that has a few thousand more Republican voters?

“Move to a red state where the general cost of living and quality of life is worse, pay is worse, you have fewer protections, less access to healthcare, are less safe, but hey, you’ll save half a penny per dollar on your groceries,” one X user replied. “Fucking ghoul.”

“Great message. Tired of high grocery prices? Sell your home, find a new job, buy a new home, move somewhere else, start life over. Magic!” wrote another. “Now your grocery bill is $10 less.”

This blue-state-versus-red-state narrative that Bessent, the GOP, and even many Democrats push is so tired. There are poor, working-class Americans struggling to survive in “coastal elite” states like New York and California just like there are in the deep South and the Rust Belt. Bessent’s comments only further distract from the much larger issues of impending recession and economic inequality.

There’s no way anyone had this on their bingo cards: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s had enough of childish antics. 

The former die-hard Donald Trump fan took a moment on Monday to call out her critics—who now include the president she’d once pledged her loyalty to—following her announcement that she would resign from Congress in January. 

“Everyone just runs their mouths but results are the only thing that matter to the American people. Smears, lies, attacks, and name calling is childish behavior, divisive, and bad for our country. Memes and red meat rants do nothing. Actions speak louder than words,” Green wrote on X. 

“Be quiet, be kind, be humble and fix the real problems that are crushing Americans. Not foreign country’s problems. Not the donor’s problems,” she wrote. “The American people’s problems that both political parties created and dumped on the American people.”

Of course, the Republican firebrand has levied more than her fair share of outlandish lies and name-calling during her time in office.  

Her mention of “childish behavior” seems to be a reference to Trump’s post on Truth Social Saturday, in which he resorted to schoolyard taunts to address the resignation of “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” claiming that the Georgia Republican “went BAD.”

Trump had doubled down on the nickname Monday morning, praising a Fox & Friends segment that also bashed Greene—except he confused a prerecorded clip during the show for a live one.

Democratic activists are looking to overhaul the party’s presidential primary process with ranked-choice voting.

Proponents of the idea have privately met with Democratic National Committee Chair Ken Martin and other leading party officials who want to see ranked-choice voting in action for 2028. Those behind the push include Representative Jamie Raskin, the nonprofit Fairvote Action, and Joe Biden pollster Celinda Lake.

Axios reports that ranked-choice supporters told a DNC breakfast meeting in D.C. that they believe it would unify and strengthen the party, prevent votes from being “wasted” after candidates withdraw, and encourage candidates to build coalitions. The publication quotes DNC members as being divided on the issue, with some being open and others thinking that it is best left to state parties.

Raskin told Axios that ranked-choice voting “favors positive politics rather than negative politics, and that’s a great thing for the Democratic Party primaries.”

“Oftentimes there’s a sense of acrimony and bitterness that can last decades. Think about the race between Hillary and Bernie Sanders,” Raskin added.

The change would only happen by getting past the DNC’s rules and bylaws committee, then the majority of the committee’s 450 members, and then state Democratic parties. Some states would also have to change their election laws. Some localities already use it for local and state elections, including Alaska, Maine, San Francisco, Minneapolis, and most famously, New York City, where Zohran Mamdani’s upstart campaign used ranked-choice voting to triumph in the Democratic mayoral primary.

Will the Democratic Party go for it? Party moderates might be skeptical, considering that in 2016 and 2020, the current system produced their preferred presidential nominees in Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. But the 2016 primary fight also fueled discord between progressives and moderates as the contest between Sanders and Clinton went late into the primary process, with some blaming it for Clinton’s loss in the general election.

If the Democrats institute ranked-choice voting, it would certainly grab attention and give the party pro-democracy credentials, allowing more candidates a chance to win. But that may inspire pushback from the party’s old-guard—even as the Democrats continue to articulate a vision for the future.

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s abrupt resignation announcement has only revealed even more cracks in the GOP’s foundation. Punchbowl News reports that even more Republican representatives are considering resigning in the middle of their term due to what they see as the “arrogance of this White House.”

“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened,” one anonymous senior House Republican told Jake Sherman. “They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.”

It’s unclear which Republicans are on the brink of resignation, but their feeling of disrespect—and their failure to win on various issues—have led many on the right to throw in the towel for 2026 as they expect the party to lose its already slim majority.

“More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower,” the anonymous representative continued. “Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”

This should be a massive wake-up call for President Trump and GOP leadership. A sitting, high-ranking member is predicting that they will lose the House due to resignations before the midterms.

Greene sounded off on these issues in her exit manifesto on Friday. She wrote:

Almost one year into our majority, the legislature has been mostly sidelined.… During the longest shutdown in our nation’s history, I raged against my own Speaker and my own party for refusing to proactively work diligently to pass a plan to save American healthcare and protect Americans from outrageous overpriced and unaffordable health insurance policies. The House should have been in session working everyday to fix this disaster, but instead America was forced fed disgusting political drama once again from both sides of the aisle.

My bills which reflect many of President Trump’s Executive Orders … just sit collecting dust.

Many common Americans are no longer easily convinced by paid political propaganda spokespersons and consultants on TV and paid shills on social media.… They know how much credit card debt they have, they know how much their own bills have gone up over the past 5 years, they actually do their own grocery shopping and know food cost too much, their rent has increasingly gone up, they have been outbid by corporate asset managers too many times when they put in an offer to buy a house, they have been laid off after being forced to train their visa holding replacement, the college degree they were told to earn only left them in debt with no big six figure salary, they see more homeless people than ever on their own community streets, they can’t afford health insurance or practically any insurance, and they just aren’t stupid.

President Trump is waging his own cultural crusade, begging billionaire Larry Ellison—whose son owns Paramount—to bring back iconic 1980s and ’90s action comedies like the Rush Hour franchise, according to Semafor. 

Trump’s affinity for Rush Hour isn’t just because it’s a funny, mostly politically incorrect movie that embodies the 1990s (or at least the first one is). He also has the loyalty and political support of multiple people involved. Rush Hour producer Arthur Sarkissian is also in charge of the production company that made The Man You Don’t Know, an incredibly pro-Trump documentary that focused on humanizing the president. 

Moreover, Trump has the support of the movie’s leading men, who have refused to publicly criticize him. 

“Just give him a chance to try to change America and change the world,” Jackie Chan said in 2016. “He’s a businessman.… I think he knows how to handle these types of things.” In 2018, his co-star Chris Tucker said he hope Trump “does good.’ 

The role of Ellison—and his son David—cannot be ignored. It’s been clear that the right-wing, pro-Israel billionaires are waging a new culture war against algorithms that don’t fit their narrative. Bringing back these ’80s and ’90s anti-woke, machismo-filled films like Rush Hour is just a different point of attack for them. God only knows how badly they’ll butcher a remake if it ever comes out.  

Scott Bessent’s latest baffling defense of President Donald Trump’s tariffs suggests the treasury secretary doesn’t really understand how they work.

During an interview on NBC News’s Meet the Press Sunday, host Kristen Welker pressed Bessent on Trump’s decision to scale back tariffs on certain products that had seen price increases, such as bananas and coffee. “Isn’t the fact that you’re rolling back tariffs an admission that ultimately they do drive up prices for consumers?” Welker asked.

“Kristen, how much does your arm weigh?” Bessent asked.

“That I do not know,” Welker said, laughing.

“Exactly, but you know how much you weigh, and you get on the scale every morning. Inflation is a composite number, and we look at everything. We try to push down the things we can control,” Bessent replied.

The implication of Bessent’s response is that Trump officials don’t really know how much anything contributes to inflation, highlighting the administration’s measure-once-cut-twice approach to governance.

Trump has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down, despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years. He has also pushed claims he defeated Biden-era inflation, even though inflation has steadily increased for the last five months in a row.

In reality, Trump’s tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants have significantly contributed to rising prices—and Americans are noticing. A recent poll found that only 26 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s work managing the cost of living, down from 29 percent earlier this month.

In a move that will only raise the prospect of conflict, the Trump administration has formally designated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his government allies as members of a foreign terrorist organization. 

The White House is targeting the “Cartel de los Soles,” which describes corrupt government officials, mostly within the Venezuelan military, who have been linked to drug trafficking. The designation lets President Trump place more sanctions against Maduro, focusing on his assets and power structure. Officially, it doesn’t mention the use of military force, but it is likely to make military action easier. 

Trump has already sent aircraft carriers to the Caribbean Sea, part of a deployment of dozens of warships, as well as 15,000 troops, to the region. The administration has been bombing boats in the waters around central America, north of Venezuela, which the government claims are transporting drugs to the U.S., with very weak legal justifications.

The White House has also authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela and is pushing conspiracy theories that the country rigged the 2020 presidential election against Trump. All of this adds up to an open campaign of regime change against Venezuela, with Trump musing about airstrikes against Venezuelan military targets on land. 

While the stated purpose of all of these actions is fighting drug trafficking, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent let slip last week that oil prices could drop “if something happens down in Venezuela.” Does Trump, who is infamous for taking rash action, plan to start a war in Venezuela for cheap oil and a boost to his flagging poll numbers?  

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly revealed that President Donald Trump’s disastrous 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is really just Russia’s “wish list”—and not a U.S. plan at all. It suddenly makes so much more sense why the plan appeared to be translated from Russian!

Last week, reports began to emerge of a sprawling peace plan that would require Ukraine to give up Donbas—an industrial region in the east sought by Russia—reduce the size of its armed forces, and agree not to use certain weapons, making it significantly harder for Ukraine to defend itself from Russian military incursion. Those concessions caused shock waves through Europe and Ukraine, as Trump demanded Kyiv respond by Thanksgiving.

Original reports claimed that the plan was drafted as the result of a meeting between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev—but now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is telling lawmakers that the United States had nothing to do with it at all.

Speaking Saturday, independent Maine Senator Angus King said that Rubio had clarified the plan was “not the administration’s position, it is essentially the wish list of the Russians that is now being presented to the Europeans and to the Ukrainians.”

Republican South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said at the same press conference that Rubio had clearly distanced the U.S. from the proposal. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received. And as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it,” Rounds said.

Two European diplomats told Axios that when they pressed the Trump administration for clarification, they were specifically told it was not a “Trump plan.”

The implication of Rubio’s latest revelation seems to be that after months of negotiations, the United States is simply a mouthpiece for Russia’s unchanging desire for more territory and control.

But some are calling B.S. on the backtracking—including those at the State Department.

“This is blatantly false,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott wrote on X Saturday. “As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians.”

Rubio also pushed back on the claims from lawmakers about their discussion with him. “The peace proposal was authored by the U.S. It is offered as a strong framework for ongoing negotiations,” he wrote on X Saturday. “It is based on input from the Russian side. But it is also based on previous and ongoing input from Ukraine.”

In a statement Sunday, King clarified that it “has now been established” that the plan was “endorsed” by the Trump administration but maintained that it still “favored the interests of Russia.”

Last week, Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly read the plan line by line to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But now, U.S. officials have started to refer to the plan as merely a “framework.”

This story has been updated.

Senator Mark Kelly, one of the Democratic lawmakers targeted by President Donald Trump for his role in a video advising military personnel to respect the Constitution over the president’s orders, had some strong words for the president.

“[The president] tries to intimidate Congress, he looks at government accountability as a nuisance,” Kelly said, speaking to CBS News’s Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation on Sunday.  “The message he sent a couple days ago was, he declared that loyalty to the Constitution was now punishable by death. Those are serious words, coming from the president of the United States. He’s trying to intimidate us. But Margaret, I’m not going to be intimidated.”

 “You’ve just heard Jason Crow, he’s not going to be intimidated either,” Kelly continued. “We both served our country, we swore an oath, all we said was we reiterated what’s basically the rule of law, which is that members of the military should not, can not, follow illegal orders.”

Kelly is a retired astronaut and Navy veteran, and the other Democrats in the video also had military or intelligence backgrounds. 

After the lawmakers released the video last week, the president posted several rage-filled rants about the video, saying that it was seditious and “punishable by DEATH.”

Almost all of them have received bomb threats after the president’s online attacks.

On Friday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to reporters about Trump’s language and violent rhetoric in the wake of the video.

“It’s not just shocking, it’s not just offensive, it’s bizarre, it is erratic, it’s volatile. I think it indicates a mental state that we should all be questioning right now,” she said.

She continued, saying that the lawmakers had “a very clear message to U.S. service members, which is that you do not have to obey an illegal order, and I think that’s an important message to reiterate, because this administration seems to be increasingly trying to go down that path.”

Breaking a year-long ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel struck the suburbs of Beirut on Sunday, killing at least five people and wounding 28 others, according to the BBC and Lebanon’s Health Ministry.

Israel says it killed a senior Hezbollah official, Haytham Tabtabai, in an attack aimed at discouraging the militant group from rearming.

Hezbollah has not attacked Israel since the ceasefire began last November, according to the AP.

In a statement, Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of refusing to implement its side of the deal, post-ceasefire. He asked the international community to “intervene with strength and seriousness to stop the attacks on Lebanon and its people.”

This is not the first time Israel has broken its ceasefire with Hezbollah, nor has the country kept its ceasefire agreement with Hamas.

According to the Gaza Government Media office, Israel has violated the ceasefire with Gaza nearly 500 times in 44 days, killing hundreds of Palestinians, reported Al Jazeera.

Yesterday in Gaza, Israel launched airstrikes that killed at least 24 people. One strike targeted a vehicle, killing 11 people and wounding over 20. Hospital director Mohamed Abu Selmiya told reporters that most of the victims were children.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that it launched the strikes after a Hamas fighter shot at Israeli soldiers in Israeli-occupied Gaza, none of whom were hurt. Earlier in the week, Israeli strikes killed at least 33 other Palestinians.

Israel has mounted more and more attacks on Gaza and on Lebanon in recent weeks, despite ceasefire agreements. The intensified strikes come at the same time as the U.N. Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which would create a “Board of Peace” to oversee the future of the region.

But as Israel continues to kill civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, despite existing ceasefires, it’s hard to find hope that Trump’s new peace plan will do much of anything at all.