Senate Republicans are getting closer to changing the upper chamber’s rules to allow for a slew of President Donald Trump’s lower-level nominees to be confirmed, and they’re closing in on a revived proposal from Democrats to do it.

The hope among Republicans is that using a tool that Senate Democrats once considered would allow them to avoid turning to the ‘nuclear option,’ meaning a rule change with a simple majority vote.

‘The Democrats should support it, because it was their original proposal that we’re continuing on,’ Senate Majority Whip John Barrasso, R-Wyo., told Fox News Digital. ‘And I wouldn’t be surprised if they won’t. This historic obstruction by the Democrats is all playing to their far-left liberal base, who hate President Trump.’

Republicans met throughout the week behind closed doors to discuss their options and have begun to coalesce around a proposal that would allow them to take one vote to confirm a group of nominees, also known as ‘en bloc,’ for sub-Cabinet level positions.

So far, the only nominee to make it through the Senate with ease was Secretary of State Marco Rubio in January. Since then, various positions throughout the bureaucracy have stacked up and have not received a voice vote or gone through unanimous consent — two commonly-used fast-track procedures for lower-level positions in the administration.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., said that before Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., was in charge of the Democrats, ‘this was always done in a way where, if you had some of the lower-level nominees in the administration, those were all voted en bloc, they were packaged, they were grouped, they were stacked.’

‘This is the first president in history who, at this point in his presidency, hasn’t had at least one nominee clear by unanimous consent or voice vote,’ he said. ‘It is unprecedented what they’re doing. It’s got to be stopped.’

And the number of nominees on the Senate’s calendar continues to grow, reaching 149 picks awaiting confirmation this week. The goal would be to make that rule change before lawmakers leave town for a week starting Sept. 22.

The idea comes from legislation proposed in 2023 by Sens. Amy Klobuchar, D-Minn., Angus King, I-Maine, and former Sen. Ben Cardin, D-Md. Republicans are eyeing their own spin on it, such as possibly not limiting the number of en bloc nominees in a group or excluding judicial nominees.

Republicans would prefer to avoid going nuclear — the last time the nuclear option was used was in 2019, when then-Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., lowered debate time on nominees to two hours — but they are willing to do so, given that Democrats haven’t budged on their blockade.

They may only be making a public display of resistance, however.

‘Democrats privately support what Republicans are talking about,’ a senior GOP aide familiar with negotiations told Fox News Digital. ‘They’re just too afraid to admit it.’

Sen. James Lankford, who worked with Thune and Barrasso over the recess to build a consensus on a rule change proposal, told Fox News Digital that his Democratic colleagues acknowledged that they’ve ‘created a precedent that is not sustainable.’

‘But then they’ll say, ‘but my progressive base is screaming at me to fight however I want to. I know I’m damaging the Senate, but I got to show that I’m fighting,’’ the Oklahoma Republican said.

‘We feel stuck, I mean, literally,’ Lankford continued. ‘Some of my colleagues have said, ‘We’re not the ones going nuclear. They’re the ones that are going nuclear.’’

Klobuchar told Fox News Digital that she appreciated the prior work she’s done with Lankford on ‘ways to make the Senate better’ but wasn’t ready to get behind the GOP’s version of her legislation.

‘When I proposed that, it was meant to pass as legislation, which means you would have needed bipartisan votes, and the reason that’s not happening right now is because the president keeps flaunting the law,’ she said.

Not every Senate Democrat is on board with the wholesale blockade, however.

Sen. John Fetterman, D-Pa., told Fox News Digital that lawmakers should all behave in a way in which administrations, either Republican or Democratic, get ‘those basic kinds of considerations’ for nominees.

‘That’s not the resistance,’ he said. ‘I just think that’s kind of unhelpful to just move forward. I mean, you can oppose people like the big ones, whether it’s [Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F.] Kennedy or others.’

Fox News Digital reached out to Schumer’s office for comment but did not immediately hear back. 

Following unrelenting criticism from the United Nations, the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) is once again being targeted by NGOs, even as it delivered its 155 millionth meal to Gazans on Saturday.

Doctors Without Borders, known by its French acronym MSF has launched ads criticizing GHFMeta’s Ad Library shows that in August it ran several Facebook ads targeting the foundation. One ad read ‘This is not aid. This is orchestrated killing.’ Another said, ‘In MSF’s 54 years, rarely have we seen such levels of systemized violence.’

Both allegations are taken from an Aug. 6 article on MSF’s website in which General Director Raquel Ayora describes accounts received from patients reportedly injured around GHF sites. Ayora says aid seekers claimed to have witnessed ‘children shot in the chest while reaching for food. People crushed or suffocated in stampedes. Entire crowds gunned down at distribution points.’ 

GHF spokesperson Chapin Fay called MSF’s accusations, ‘false and disgraceful,’ saying that it is ‘amplifying a disinformation campaign orchestrated by the Hamas-linked Gaza Health Ministry. They know better. By repeating these lies, they’re not aiding civilians, they’re aiding Hamas.’

‘No civilians have ever been shot at any of our distribution sites,’ Fay told Fox News Digital.

Fay said that ‘Nearly every day, Nasser Hospital issues false reports to the media of civilians killed near our sites, based solely on testimony from others. Not a single MSF doctor has ever witnessed an incident near our sites. Any conflict between Israel and Hamas, sometimes several kilometers away, the Gaza Health Ministry falsely links to GHF.’

In response to questions about whether MSF employees have witnessed injuries or deaths at GHF sites firsthand, a spokesperson told Fox News Digital that, ‘MSF has documented the impacts of violence and chaos at GHF sites in Gaza, based on firsthand accounts of our personnel and patients at two clinical sites, as well as a body of medical data.’

MSF declined to respond to questions about how much money it has spent on ads targeting GHF, or whether it has advocated for medical care for Israeli hostages taken by Hamas. 

The MSF spokesperson added, ‘For the past 22 months, humanitarian organizations working in Gaza and the West Bank have consistently faced baseless and inaccuratesmear campaigns.’

Though there is growing outcry about purported violence near GHF sites, reporting from the United Nations indicates that there were twice as many deaths surrounding humanitarian aid convoys (576) as there were deaths around GHF sites (259) between July 21 and Aug. 18. 

A U.N. Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs update from August states there were 1,889 deaths near aid sites between May 27 and Aug. 18, 1,025 ‘near militarized distribution sites’ and 864 ‘along convoy supply routes.’ As of July 21, U.N. News reported there were 1,054 deaths at food distribution sites, with 766 near GHF sites, and 288 near U.N. and humanitarian aid convoys.

The U.N. Human Rights Office did not respond to a request for confirmation of these figures by press time. 

Amid tensions between GHF and humanitarian aid organizations, Fay said that GHF nonetheless provided support to MSF in early August after it requested help to ‘safeguard their medical aid from the elements.’ A GHF post on X from Aug. 7. showed what it said were pallets of MSF aid in GHF care. MSF did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request to confirm that they asked GHF for assistance with their supplies. 

When GHF staff were brought to Nasser Hospital after a Hamas attack in June that killed eight, they did not receive care from MSF staff, according to Fay.

A GHF employee’s written statement provided to Fox News Digital describes how wounded workers were taken to Nasser Hospital, where doctors refused to treat them. The witness said survivors were placed in a courtyard, where hospital staff incited others to beat them. One GHF employee was reportedly stabbed.

‘Three more GHF staff died due to their lack of treatment by Nasser Hospital. MSF doctors work there, yet claim they weren’t aware of the situation,’ Fay said.

In an Aug. 25 report following the Israeli bombing of Nasser Hospital, MSF said that it ‘has been operational in Nasser since before the conflict escalated in October 2023, providing trauma and burn care, physiotherapy, neonatal and pediatric services, and treatment for malnourished children, among other critical services.’

The Foundation for Defense of Democracies has reported multiple times since October 2023 that Hamas fighters have been operating out of Nasser Hospital. On Aug. 26, FDD senior research analyst Joe Truzman shared photos on X of two Hamas summonses that reportedly ordered individuals to come to Nasser Hospital for questioning.

MSF did not respond to questions about GHF employees failing to receive care or whether its staff at Nasser Hospital were aware of Hamas’ operations at the site.

In an online statement about the incident, MSF said it ‘has seen no credible evidence that healthcare was refused by Ministry of Health or other medical staff.’ The group also said ‘MSF staff have not been present in the emergency department of Nasser Hospital since 2024.’
 

On Saturday, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation announced a new initiative to provide medical care to Gazans through a program with Samaritan’s Purse.

In a statement on X, the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation said that in addition to treating wounds, injuries and infections, it was also helping pregnant women.

America’s so-called allies – Britain, France, Canada, Australia and others – are about to stab President Donald Trump in the back. The goal is to lay waste to the president’s signature foreign policy success – the Abraham Accords.

The Abraham Accords denied violent Palestinian rejectionists a veto over the normalization of relations between Arab states and Israel. Now Palestinians and their band of useful idiots have launched a coup. The scheme opens by overthrowing the fundamental principle of a negotiated settlement to the Arab-Israeli conflict. United Arab Emirates officials have speciously started blaming Israel for the Accords’ demise.

The staging ground for this ‘Et tu, Brute?’ moment is the United Nations. French President Emmanuel Macron announced on Sept. 3, 2025, that he, and his Saudi counterpart, have called upon world leaders to assemble at the United Nations in New York City on Sept. 22 and endorse this agenda. Formally, the substance has been committed to paper in what they are outlandishly calling ‘The New York Declaration.’

This means that by the time President Trump addresses the General Assembly on the following day, he will have been reduced to the guy with the broom bringing up the rear. His hopes and plans for peace in the Middle East will have already been rejected by virtually every head of state or government in attendance. 

The New York Declaration first appeared at the conclusion of a confab, chaired by the French and the Saudis, at the U.N. in July of this year. The United States and Israel stayed away. The vast majority of states ignored State Department pleas to do the same. 

The document weighs in at 30 pages of anti-Israel venom and attacks on American foreign affairs. It twists the horrors of Oct. 7, 2023 – when more than 1,400 Jews (and others in Israel) were murdered, raped, tortured and kidnapped – into a political win for Palestinians. 

Here are just some of the Declaration’s extraordinarily dangerous demands:

A ‘State of Palestine’ before ‘mutual recognition’ of the Jewish state. 

A Palestinian ‘right of return’ that would flood Israel with millions of Palestinians from the river to the sea – thus ending the Jewish state.

A fully armed Palestinian state (called a ‘one state, one gun policy’) and an indefensible Jewish state.

An arms embargo on Israel (‘ceasing the provision or transfer of Arms’) cutting off the country’s ability to defend itself.

A global pogrom to arrest and prosecute Israelis in national and international courts the world over.

Abandoning the hostages and rewarding the kidnappers by conditioning their release on Israel freeing convicted Palestinian criminals and fully withdrawing from Gaza. 

And here is what the Declaration does not mention: Jews. Judaism. The Jewish state. Antisemitism – the actual driver of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Even Jerusalem is only discussed in terms of Islamic and Christian rights. Jewish history is nowhere.

The Declaration represents multilateral bullying at its worst. But the United States is not powerless. 

The president has options:

Don’t go. If the event to adopt the Declaration on Sept. 22 isn’t canceled or world leaders don’t decide to pull out, then cancel the president’s appearance on the 23rd. President Trump doesn’t need the U.N. stage to be heard loud and clear. The U.N. needs America.

Send the U.N. packing. Back in 1988, President Ronald Reagan and Secretary of State George Shultz denied Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat a visa to speak at the U.N. The General Assembly reacted by temporarily moving to Geneva. Lesson learned: move the whole lot out of the USA for good.

Stop paying. Bypass the organization and fund directly only what is consistent with American values and interests and is fully accountable to the U.S. taxpayer.

Apply sanctions. Impunity for the Declaration’s signatories is the wrong message to send states that endanger American national security and undermine our vital foreign policy goals. 

On Oct. 7, Palestinian terrorists massacred the nationals of 69 countries and kidnapped people from 22. That’s the Palestinian multilateralism the United Nations is all set to reward. 

Failing to respond is not an option.

President Donald Trump attacked Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler of New York on Friday morning, deriding him as a ‘psychopathic nut job’ and ‘one of the most disgusting Congressmen in USA History’ in a Truth Social post days after the congressman noted in a statement that he will not seek re-election in 2026.

‘Jerry Nadler, one of the most disgusting Congressmen in USA History is, at long last, calling it ‘quits’ – He’s finally leaving Congress!’ the president declared in the post.

‘I’ve been beating this bum for 40 years, first as a New York City developer, where he opposed me, for no reason, at every corner, but could NEVER stop me from getting the job done, and then, as your President, where this psychopathic nut job, together with Crazy Nancy Pelosi, Impeached me twice, AND LOST, wasting Millions of Dollars in time and taxpayer money,’ the president continued.

‘It will be a great day for the U.S.A. when Nadler, a pathetic lightweight, is out of office and leaves our beautiful, and NOW VERY SAFE, Washington, D.C. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!’ Trump added.

Nadler dismissed Trump’s broadsides in a statement obtained by Fox News Digital on Friday.

‘I’ve known Donald Trump almost as long as he’s known Jeffrey Epstein. I’ve always known him for the charlatan he is. Now I know him as a twice impeached president, convicted felon, and chief insurrectionist. I don’t take anything he says seriously and neither should anyone else,’ Nadler declared in the statement.

The lawmaker has served in the U.S. House of Representatives for more than three decades. 

‘For more than 32 years, I have had the honor of serving the people of New York in the United States Congress. Today, I am announcing that I will not be seeking re-election next year and that this term in Congress will be my last. This decision has not been easy. But I know in my heart it is the right one and that it is the right time to pass the torch to a new generation,’ he said in a statement issued on Tuesday.

‘When I step down at the end of this term, I will have served for 50 years in continuous elected public service to the people of New York,’ he noted in the statement.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. appeared before the Senate Finance Committee on Thursday in a hearing that made the Jerry Springer show look like an Oxford Union debate, but amid the pompous posturing from Democrats, an important truth came out.

Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., thought he scored major points by asking RFK Jr the gotcha question — ‘how many Americans died of COVID?’ When the secretary said that he did not know, a giddy Warner thought he could spike the football.

But here’s the thing: RFK Jr. is right. Nobody actually knows how many people have died of COVID, because we don’t really even know what dying of COVID means. 

Democrats and dim-witted fact-checkers will cry out that we have that data, that both the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the World Health Organization say 1.2 million lives were lost to the Chinese virus.

However, we know that at the height of the pandemic some motorcycle accidents were listed as COVID deaths if the victim tested positive for it, and we know that thousands and thousands of Americans with myriad medical conditions died with, not of, COVID.

We also know that during the pandemic, both the CDC and the WHO were two of the worst and least reliable actors in the entire miserable fiasco. Everybody paying attention admits now that CDC guidance on masking and social distancing might as well have been magical incantations.

There was no data to back up these restrictions, and even when the CDC did collect data, they didn’t just do a bad job, they intentionally stacked the deck to make COVID look as deadly and terrifying as possible.

Meanwhile, the CDC and the medical establishment nationwide spent most of 2020, as COVID restrictions raged, not just refusing to listen to contrary voices like Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, and Dr. Scott Atlas, but trying to destroy their lives and careers.

This led to another very telling moment in the hearing, this time involving Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., who made one of the most hilariously comic appeals to authority in recent memory. 

The socialist senator told Kennedy, ‘We’ve got the entire medical community on one side, The AMA [American Medical Association] representing hundreds of thousands of doctors, the American Academy of Pediatrics, the American Health Association.’ Then he asked Kennedy, what organizations does his side have?

I’m going to be less polite than the secretary was and say, none of them, thank goodness, because these are the same lunatics who lied their way through COVID and affirm 87 genders.

Kennedy’s more politic answer was that he is backed up by and working with the very scientists, like Bhattacharya, who were right about COVID in the first place, while Bernie’s alphabet soup of medical incompetence was masking babies.

Democrats and the medical establishment are now like middle-school bullies who don’t have a high school growth spurt and are suddenly as harmless as a flower. President Donald Trump knows this, and it is exactly why he tapped the Kennedy scion to fix public health.

In a less cynical time, the coin of the Kennedy realm was public service. John F. Kennedy campaigning in West Virginia in 1960, looking up at the voters on their porch, knowing they were the boss, not him, asking for their trust, not demanding it.

So too, RFK Jr. is hellbent on serving the people, not the establishment. That’s why so many MAHA moms who know they have been lied to about what they feed their kids held their noses and voted for the orange man.

The obvious elephant in the hearing on Thursday was pointed out by Sanders himself: Every single senator on the dais takes big bucks from big pharmaceutical companies, the same companies that fund all the ‘independent research’ thrown at Kennedy.

The age of ‘just shut up and trust the science,’ is well and truly over. As George W. Bush once put it, ‘fool me once, shame on me, fool me twice…well, you’re not gonna fool me again.’ That’s where the American people are when it comes to the medical establishment.

Kennedy stood his ground in the contentious and cacophonous hearing. He gave as good as he got, and he is absolutely right that nobody knows how many died of COVID, or how many were saved by the vaccine.

The very people in the CDC tasked with tracking such data fumbled so badly that neither RFK Jr. nor the American people can rely on their bungled assessments.

This chaos of data, as the secretary called it, is exactly why he is cleaning house at HHS, and that is exactly what President Trump and the voters want and expect from him. 

NEW YORK – Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett hasn’t seen The Handmaid’s Tale. But she was well-prepared to be interrupted by any number of red-draped protesters, should they storm in to interrupt her confirmation hearing, the same way they did for her colleague, Brett Kavanaugh, several years prior. 

As she recounted in an interview at the Lincoln Center Thursday night, the preparation had been for naught: Her confirmation took place behind closed doors, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic and the social precautions in place at the time. It also made the lengthy confirmation process and her first days as a justice on the nation’s highest court ‘awkward,’ she said, to laughter. ‘Very awkward.’ 

That revelation was just one of many Barrett made during a wide-ranging interview Thursday, just days before the publication of her forthcoming memoir, ‘Listening to the Law.’ 

Like her book, Barrett’s appearance proved to be as telling for what she didn’t say as for what she did. 

Barrett, 53, spoke easily about her family, her faith, and the kindness of her newfound colleagues on the Supreme Court, whom she says lent her not only the use of their office supplies and bench memos during her first days on the job, but also temporarily dispatched their own staff to help her answer phones and restock supplies. ‘There is an indispensable human element to judging,’ Barrett observes in her memoir, something she says is all the more true when serving on a nine-person bench.

‘Thinking in categories of left and right — it’s just the wrong way to think about the law,’ she said Thursday night to the jam-packed audience at Alice Tully Hall. 

Even so, Barrett artfully dodged some of the more polarizing issues the court has faced in the past eight months. 

She was demonstrably less candid on questions involving the so-called emergency, or ‘shadow’ docket — the vehicle by which President Donald Trump has sought to temporarily stay lower court decisions that would have paused or halted some of his most sweeping executive orders from taking force.

The Supreme Court has presided over a record blitz of emergency appeals and orders filed by the administration and other aggrieved parties during Trump’s first eight months back in office. Justices on the 6-3 conservative bench have ruled in Trump’s favor in the majority of emergency applications, allowing the administration to proceed with its ban on transgender service members in the military, its termination of millions of dollars in Education Department grants and its firing of probationary employees across the federal government, among many other actions.

The court has sided with Trump in the majority of these requests, prompting a fresh level of scrutiny — and rare public criticism from some of her colleagues on the bench.

The Supreme Court ‘is at its best when it can review cases that have been fully adjudicated’ by the lower courts, she offered, before the conversation moved on. 

Barrett also sought to defend the court as a body that operates beyond the politics of a given moment, and (ideally) outside the reach of public opinion. She noted that public perceptions of what a judge ought to do is, at times, at odds with what the Constitution and existing Supreme Court precedent proscribe. 

‘I think everyone expects the court to deliver the results it likes,’ Barrett said Thursday night. There’s a ‘disconnect between what people want in the moment,’ and what the court should deliver, she said.

People ‘want what they want,’ and will inevitably be disappointed by the results, she said.

Like other justices who have authored memoirs while on the bench, Barrett offered a lofty, and at times idealistic, view of the court. 

Pressed by journalist Bari Weiss about her majority opinion in Trump v CASA earlier this year, Barrett insisted that her ‘spicy’ remarks towards Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson were nothing more than an attempt to ‘set the calibration right.’

‘I thought Justice Jackson had made an argument in strong terms that I thought warranted a response,’ Barrett said.

Thursday night’s interview was the first of many public appearances Barrett is slated to give in coordination with her book release next week. It offered at times a refreshingly personal glimpse into her nearly five years on the Supreme Court — a job she says she wasn’t quite sure she wanted, when the offer finally came. 

Barrett recounted what her husband told her at the time, when she was weighing whether to go through with the confirmation process. Should she choose to move forward, he told her, ‘We have to burn the boats.’

The phrase, adopted from Alexander the Great, refers to the notion that one must eliminate all options for backup plans or retreat.  

It was one she held onto during the confirmation process, when media outlets pilloried her as an out-of-touch and hyper-religious mother of seven, when quips from lawmakers, such as then-Sen. Dianne Feinstein — ‘the dogma lives loudly within you’ — might have rattled her further. 

‘To do the job well, you have to have thick skin,’ she told the audience Thursday night.

She also dismissed fears of a constitutional crisis.

‘I don’t think that we are currently in a constitutional crisis,’ Barrett said. ‘I think that our country remains committed to the rule of law. I think we have functioning courts.’

Reverend Franklin Graham, one of the nation’s most prominent Christian voices, is standing behind Vice President JD Vance after his profane rebuke of senators in a heated social media post over Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. 

In an exclusive statement to Fox News Digital, Graham acknowledged that while he admired Vance’s stand, the Vice President’s ‘salty’ choice of words could have been better.

Graham said in the statement: ‘We have had many vice presidents who have used salty language, but the point Vice President Vance was making is correct. Could he have used a better choice of words? In my opinion, yes; but I appreciate the vice president standing up for Secretary Kennedy who is trying to buck a very corrupt system and is trying to improve the health of the American people. God bless Secretary Kennedy and Vice President Vance.’

The exchange follows Vance’s viral X post declaring senators were ‘full of s—.’ Kennedy himself endorsed the message, one day after more than 1,000 current and former HHS employees called for Kennedy’s resignation.

The clash unfolded during a contentious Senate Finance Committee hearing on Thursday where Sen. Ron Wyden pressed Kennedy over health policies and accusations of promoting conspiracy theories. Kennedy pushed back, defending his record and policies aimed at challenging pharmaceutical companies.

Vance quickly jumped to Kennedy’s defense on X. ‘When I see all these senators trying to lecture and ‘gotcha’ Bobby Kennedy today all I can think is: You all support off-label, untested, and irreversible hormonal ‘therapies’ for children, mutilating our kids and enriching big pharma. You’re full of s— and everyone knows it,’ Vance wrote.

Kennedy reposted the comment, thanking him: ‘Thank you @JDVance. You put your finger squarely on the preeminent problem.’

That defense extended beyond Vance. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt also backed Kennedy, framing Democrat criticism as proof that the secretary is ‘over the target’ in challenging entrenched interests.

This is not the first time Graham has weighed in on political leaders’ language. He previously urged President Donald Trump to cut down on his profanity. ‘Your storytelling is great, but it could be so much better if you didn’t use foul language,’ Graham wrote in a letter to Trump, citing Matthew 12:36: ‘I tell you, on the day of judgment people will give account for every careless word they speak.’

Graham ultimately closed his statement to Fox News Digital with a blessing: ‘God bless Secretary Kennedy and Vice President Vance.’ 

Representatives for Vice President Vance did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.

Fox News’ Alexandra Koch contributed to this report.

One of former President Joe Biden’s top spokespeople dismissed the fallout from the former president’s disastrous June 2024 debate performance during a closed-door interview with the House Oversight Committee that lasted over five hours.

Andrew Bates, who served as White House senior deputy press secretary and worked in Biden’s communications shop for nearly his entire term, said reactions to Biden’s debate against then-candidate Donald Trump were ‘overblown,’ according to a source familiar with his interview.

Bates ‘ultimately agreed with President Biden’s decision to drop out’ after viewing polling data the week Biden made his choice to drop his re-election bid, the source said.

A source close to Bates, however, said after he had time to process the then-president’s decision and a turn in public polling during the final week of Biden’s candidacy, he agreed Biden had made the right decision to withdraw.

He dismissed concerns about Biden’s age as a ‘polling problem,’ however, and wrote off Americans’ concerns about his age and abilities as the product of mainstream media and right-wing critics, according to the first source – similar to previous Biden allies in their closed-door interviews.

The former spokesman also described relatively infrequent interactions with Biden and allegedly said Biden only met with his press team a few times in a year.

‘He would see President Biden in person a little over once a month, but this could be anything from travel, going with him to the Hill or just seeing him in the hallway,’ the first source said.

But a former Biden White House staffer argued that the press secretary and the communications director were the default representatives of the press and communications team for daily meetings with the president.

Bates also allegedly told investigators he supported the sweeping, and controversial, pardon granted to Hunter Biden toward the end of the president’s term. 

The second source, however, said Bates told investigators that Biden conducted himself ‘honorably’ when asked whether any of his actions were done to benefit his son’s business dealings.

That pardon and the hundreds of other clemency orders signed by Biden are of particular interest to the House Oversight Committee.

Oversight Committee Republicans are investigating whether Biden’s top White House allies covered up signs of mental decline in the former president, and by extension, are looking into whether executive actions signed by autopen were executed with Biden’s full awareness and approval.

Biden himself told the New York Times recently that he made every clemency decision on his own.

His allies have also blasted the GOP-led probe as a partisan exercise.

During his opening statement, obtained by Fox News Digital, Bates defended Biden’s fitness for office while criticizing Trump’s own actions as president.

‘I was proud to support Joe Biden as President because we believe in the same values. In the White House, it was universally understood that Joe Biden was in charge. That is completely consistent with my personal experience with the President,’ Bates told House investigators, according to another source.

A House Oversight Committee spokesperson blasted Bates as ‘delusional’ and accused his opening statement of leaking to media before he read it in the room.

Fox News Digital reached out to Bates via his public relations firm Wolfpack Strategies, as well as his counsel, for further comment.

President Donald Trump on Friday signed his 200th executive order which authorized the Department of Defense to revert its name back to the ‘Department of War.’

Speaking from the Oval Office, Trump said the new name ‘sends a message of victory, a message of strength’ to the world.

‘It has to do with winning,’ the president went on. ‘We should have won every war. We could have won every war. But we really chose to be very politically correct or woke.’

‘We won the First World War, we won the Second World War, we won everything before that and in between. And then we decided to go woke and we changed the name to the Department of Defense. So, we’re going Department of War,’ he added.

Trump said the name is ‘a much more appropriate name, especially in light of where the world is right now.’

‘We have the strongest military in the world. We have the greatest equipment in the world. We have the greatest men. New factories of equipment, by far. There’s nobody to even compete,’ he said.

Turning to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, Trump said while smiling, ‘I’d like to ask our, secretary of war, to say a few words.’

Hegseth thanked Trump for signing the order, saying, the name change restores the ‘warrior ethos’ to America’s military.

‘After winning a War for Independence in 1789, George Washington established the War Department and Henry Knox was his first secretary of war. And this country won every major war after that … 150 years after that, we changed the name after World War Two from the Department of War to the Department of Defense in 1947 and as you pointed out, Mr. President, we haven’t won a major war since,’ said Hegseth.

 ‘This name change is not just about renaming, it’s about restoring,’ said the secretary. ‘Words matter. It’s restoring, as you’ve gotten us to, Mr. President, restoring the warrior ethos, restoring victory and clarity as an end state, restoring intentionality to the use of force.’  

Hegseth pledged the War Department ‘is going to fight decisively, not endless conflicts. It’s going to fight to win, not to lose. We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct,’ he said, adding, ‘We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders. So, this War Department, Mr. President, just like America is back.’

The executive order calls for using the Department of War as a secondary title for the Department of Defense, along with phrases like ‘secretary of war’ for Hegseth, according to a White House fact sheet previously shared with Fox News Digital. 

It’s unclear if Congress, which has the authority to establish federal executive departments, will need to step in to issue final approval on the move. However, Trump expressed confidence the name will stick, saying, ‘We’re going with it, and we’re going with it very strongly … but we’ll put it before Congress.’

Fox News Digital’s Diana Stancy and Emma Colton contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump on Friday endorsed Republican Rep. Ashley Hinson as she runs to succeed retiring GOP Sen. Joni Ernst in Iowa.

Hinson — a former TV news anchor who is in her third term representing Iowa’s 2nd Congressional District, which covers the northeastern portion of the state — showcased her support for Trump as she launched her Senate campaign on Tuesday.

‘I’m running to be President Trump’s top ally in the United States Senate,’ she said. And in a Fox News Digital interview this week, Hinson highlighted that she’s ‘proud to stand’ with Trump.

Trump, in a social media post, said, ‘I know Ashley well, and she is a WINNER!’ 

‘I know Ashley well, and she is a WINNER! A Loving Wife and Proud Mother of two sons, Ashley is a wonderful person, has ALWAYS delivered for Iowa, and will continue doing so in the United States Senate,’ the president said. 

‘Ashley Hinson will be an outstanding Senator, and has my Complete and Total Endorsement – SHE WILL NOT LET YOU DOWN!’

Trump’s support followed earlier endorsements from Senate Majority Leader Sen. John Thune and the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), which is the Senate GOP’s campaign arm.

‘We need conservative fighters in the Senate — and that’s exactly what we’ll get with Ashley Hinson,’ Thune wrote early Friday as he endorsed Hinson.

And NRSC chair Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina said, ‘Having traveled Iowa with Ashley, I know she is the fighter the Hawkeye State needs to deliver President Trump’s agenda in 2026 and beyond.’

Hinson doesn’t have the GOP primary field to herself. Former state Sen. Jim Carlin and veteran Joshua Smith had already entered the primary ahead of Ernst’s announcement.

But the support from Trump, Thune, and the NRSC will further boost Hinson, who was already considered the frontrunner for the nomination, and will likely dissuade any others from entering the primary. The president’s clout over the GOP is immense, and his endorsement in a Republican primary is extremely influential.

Hinson’s campaign launch came a few hours after Ernst, in a social media video, officially announced that she wouldn’t seek re-election in next year’s midterms.

‘After a tremendous amount of prayer and reflection, I will not be seeking re-election in 2026,’ the 55-year-old Ernst, who was first elected to the Senate in 2014, said in a video posted to social media.

Ernst, a retired Army Reserve and Iowa National Guard officer who served in the Iraq War, had been wrestling for months over whether to run for re-election in 2026. And in her video, she said, ‘This was no easy decision.’

Ernst first grabbed national attention 11 years ago with her ‘make ’em squeal’ ads as she won the high-profile Senate election in Iowa in the race to succeed retiring longtime Democratic Sen. Tom Harkin.

And Ernst highlighted in her video that ’11 years ago, Iowans elected me as the first female combat veteran to the U.S. Senate, and they did so with a mission in mind – to make Washington squeal. And I’m proud to say we have delivered. We’ve cut waste, fraud, and abuse across the federal government.’

Hinson, in a social media post, thanked Ernst for her ‘incredible service to our state and nation’ as well as for her friendship. ‘Iowa is better off thanks to your selfless service,’ she said.

In an Iowa radio interview on Tuesday, she said that among her priorities as she runs for the Senate are ‘secure borders, keeping men out of girls’ sports, cutting taxes for our working families, standing up for Iowa agriculture and helping our young Iowans who are trying to buy a house and start a family.’

Hinson also pledged to campaign across all 99 of Iowa’s counties, starting with a kick-off event on Friday.

And as she entered the race, Hinson was endorsed by Republican Sens. Jim Banks of Indiana, Katie Britt of Alabama, and Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma.

House Majority Leader Rep. Steve Scalise, Majority Whip Rep. Tom Emmer, House Republican Leadership Chair Rep. Elise Stefanik and Iowa House Majority Leader Bobby Kaufmann also backed Hinson.

Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee (DSCC) communications director Maeve Coyle, following Hinson’s announcement, argued that ‘Republicans failed to convince Joni Ernst to run for reelection, and now they may be stuck with Ashley Hinson, who has repeatedly voted to raise costs and make life harder for Iowans by voting to slash Medicaid, cheering on the chaotic tariffs that threaten Iowa’s economy, voting against measures to lower the cost of insulin, and threatening Social Security.’

Responding, Hinson told Fox News Digital, ‘I think they’re misinformed at best.’

And she charged that ‘when I hear the lies and the fearmongering coming out of the left, it’s to only cover up for the fact that they have no message and no real leader other than Bernie and AOC and now Mamdani in New York,’ as she referred to Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York and New York City Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani.

‘If that’s the direction they want to take our country, I think Iowans are going to reject that wholeheartedly,’ she predicted.

Iowa was once a top battleground state that former President Barack Obama carried in his 2008 and 2012 White House victories. But the state has shifted to the right in recent election cycles, with President Donald Trump carrying the state by nine points in 2016, eight points in 2020, and by 13 points last November.

Republicans currently hold both of the state’s U.S. Senate seats – Ernst and longtime Sen. Chuck Grassley – and all four of Iowa’s congressional districts, as well as all statewide offices except for state auditor, which is held by Democrat Rob Sand, who’s running for governor next year.

But Democrats in Iowa are energized after flipping two GOP-held state Senate seats in special elections so far this year.

Five Democrats are already running for Senate in Iowa. The field includes state Rep. Josh Turek, a Paralympian wheelchair basketball player, state Sen. Zach Wahls, Knoxville Chamber of Commerce executive director Nathan Sage and Des Moines School Board Chair Jackie Norris.

‘An open seat in Iowa is just the latest example of Democrats expanding the senatorial map,’ Lauren French, spokesperson for the Democrat-aligned Senate Majority PAC, said in a statement.

But Sen. Tim Scott of South Carolina, the chair of the National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC), said in a statement, ‘The NRSC is confident Iowans will elect a Republican to continue fighting for them and championing President Trump’s agenda in 2026.’

Republicans are aiming to not only defend, but expand, the current 53-47 Senate majority in next year’s elections.

Senate Republicans enjoyed a favorable map in the 2024 cycle as they flipped four seats from blue to red to win back the majority.

But the party in power – the Republicans – traditionally faces political headwinds in the midterm elections. Nevertheless, a current read of the 2026 map indicates the GOP may be able to go on offense in some key states.

In battleground Georgia, which Trump narrowly carried in last year’s White House race, Republicans view first-term Sen. Jon Ossoff as the most vulnerable Democrat incumbent up for re-election next year.

They’re also targeting battleground Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is retiring at the end of next year, and swing state New Hampshire, where longtime Democratic Sen. Jeanne Shaheen decided against seeking a fourth six-year term in the Senate.

Also on the NRSC’s target list is blue-leaning Minnesota, where Democratic Sen. Tina Smith isn’t running for re-election.

But the GOP is defending an open seat in battleground North Carolina, where Republican Sen. Thom Tills decided against seeking re-election. And Republicans will likely be forced to spend resources to defend Sen. Jon Husted of Ohio – who was appointed to succeed former senator and now-Vice President JD Vance – as he faces off next year against former Democratic Sen. Sherrod Brown.

Meanwhile, Democrats are also targeting moderate Sen. Susan Collins – who has yet to announce her expected 2026 re-election — in blue-leaning Maine.