Vice President JD Vance stopped short of confirming a 2028 White House run during an appearance on My View with Lara Trump Saturday night, but he acknowledged the possibility—noting if he does his job well, ‘the politics will figure itself out.’

Vance, whose resilience amid an upbringing marked with family turmoil and economic hardship won over the nation, said he ‘doesn’t like thinking about’ a potential presidential bid and insisted his attention remains on his current role.

‘If we do a good job in 2025 and 2026, then we can talk about the politics in 2027,’ Vance said. ‘I really think the American people are so fed up with folks who are already running for the next job, seven months into the current one.’

The second-in-command added if he ends up running, he knows he will have to work for it.

‘There are a lot of great people,’ Vance said. ‘If I do end up running, it’s not going to be given to me—either on the Republican side or on the national side. I’m just going to keep on working hard. … [This] may be the most important job I ever had, outside of being a father to those three beautiful kids. So I’m going to try to do my best job, and I think if I do that, the politics will figure itself out.’

When asked specifically about potential 2028 Democratic candidates, he noted most of them ‘obviously have very bad records.’

Vance mainly focused on discussing his own ticket, praising President Donald Trump’s relentless work ethic and trusting leadership style and explaining the president ‘doesn’t have an off switch.’

‘Sometimes, the president will call you at 12:30 or 2 a.m., and then call you at 6 a.m. about a totally different topic,’ Vance said. ‘It’s like, ‘Mr. president, did you go to sleep last night.’ … What’s made this so much fun is the president, all the time, just saying, ‘JD you go and do this,’ or ‘JD you go and talk to these leaders about this particular issue.’ That ability to delegate and trust his people has been really amazing.’

In 1947, the United States War Department became the Department of Defense, as our nation was entering what would be four decades of Cold War with the Soviet Union, and taking its place as a global superpower.

On Friday, President Donald Trump signed an executive order bringing the original name back to the department created by George Washington in 1789. It brings with it a change that would have earned the hearty approval of our first president.

In the 78 years in which the United States has had a ‘Department of Defense,’ we never declared war a single time, but that didn’t stop thousands upon thousands of American soldiers from sacrificing their lives in Korea, Vietnam, and later, the Middle East.

During this time, the United States widely became known as the world’s policeman. Without actually declaring wars, we played a violent game of Twister across the globe, our Defense Department dipping its toes into conflicts across continents.

Too often, the role of our soldiers was not to kill the enemy, but to maintain order, and just as a police force is restrained from using total force against criminals, our military was too often simply not allowed to bring its full force to bear.

There is a fundamental and important difference between war and policing. Wars can be won, policing cannot. Policing is a never-ending struggle, and that is exactly what America’s military interventions felt like under the reign of the Department of Defense.

‘I want offense too,’ Trump has quipped about the name change. But what he really means is that he wants wars we can win, not endless nation-building boondoggles meant to maintain balance in a world full of conflagrations from Ukraine to Gaza.

Secretary of War, as he is now known, Pete Hegseth has made clear his priority is lethality, not just being a stick for diplomats to use. He wants an army, not a police force.

It was Carl von Clausewitz, the early 19th Century father of modern war, who defined military victory as compelling the enemy to do your will by destroying their desire and means to resist. That is something our military has not done in some time.

But that may be changing.

It was no accident that this cabinet-level name change occurred in the wake of the Trump administration blowing an alleged speedboat full of drugs and drug smugglers from Venezuela to smithereens.

Under the old rubric, that boat might have been stopped, its crew given Miranda rights. In other words, it would have been policed.

But does this mere police work actually work, per Clausewitz, to destroy the Venezuelan gangs’ and government’s will and means to flood our country with deadly drugs? It does not, it just maintains the status quo from the border to the graveyard.

But now, the next guys in line to jump aboard a drug-laden boat headed for Florida aren’t looking at possible jail time, in facilities all but run by their gangs. No, they are looking at a quick exit to eternity under the sea.

Likewise, Trump’s direct attack on Iran’s nuclear facilities sent a new message to the Ayatollah that if he goes too far, we will destroy him and his nation.

The Department of Defense, may it rest in peace, was a noble idea. It was launched in the spirit of ending war, not winning wars. It was meant to prop up democracies around the planet until all nations found the right and just path of freedom and capitalism.

It may have been worth a shot, but it just didn’t work, and that is why the Trump administration is returning to the original premise, that armies don’t exist to protect and serve the world, they exist to kill our enemies.

Not long after President Washington established the War Department, he would give a farewell address in which warned against engaging in foreign entanglements, and yet under the name Department of Defense, our military seemed to do little else.

President Trump is sending the message that the United States will no longer be defending itself through proportional half measures and never-ending peace missions. No, from here on out, the Department of War does not exist to contain or constrain our enemies, it exists, as it should, to destroy them.

Top Biden administration officials questioned and criticized the way the former president’s team handled pardons and made use of an autopen in the waning days of his White House term, a report said, citing internal emails.

A person familiar with the clemency process told Axios that after President Joe Biden pardoned his son Hunter on Dec. 1, 2024, ‘There was a mad dash to find groups of people that he could then pardon — and then they largely didn’t run it by the Justice Department to vet them.’ 

The news agency reported Saturday that several senior Justice Department officials raised concerns with the White House Counsel’s office regarding the process to pardon individuals.

Three days before Biden left office, the president announced that he was ‘commuting the sentences of nearly 2,500 people convicted of non-violent drug offenses who are serving disproportionately long sentences compared to the sentences they would receive today under current law, policy, and practice.’ 

‘With this action, I have now issued more individual pardons and commutations than any president in U.S. history,’ Biden said in a statement on Jan. 17. 

However, Axios reported that the following day, senior Justice Department ethics attorney Bradley Weinsheimer argued in a memo that describing those who were pardoned as nonviolent was ‘untrue, or at least misleading.’ 

‘Unfortunately and despite repeated requests and warnings, we were not afforded a reasonable opportunity to vet and provide input on those you were considering,’ Weinsheimer wrote, according to Axios. 

The news agency said Weinsheimer mentioned a man who pleaded guilty to murder-related charges. 

Weinsheimer described how the Justice Department labeled the man as ‘problematic,’ yet Biden commuted his sentence, Axios reported. 

‘I have no idea if the president was aware of these backgrounds when making clemency decisions,’ Weinsheimer reportedly added. 

Ed Siskel, the former head of the White House Counsel’s office, and representatives for Biden did not immediately respond Saturday to requests for comment from Fox News Digital.

Senior Biden White House officials also pushed back internally on requests to use the autopen, according to Axios, which cited emails it obtained. 

It said Biden White House staff secretary Stef Feldman repeatedly asked for more information and confirmation of Biden’s intentions with the autopen. 

‘When did we get [Biden’s] approval of this?’ Feldman reportedly wrote in a Jan. 7 email regarding the use of autopen to sign an executive order. 

‘I’m going to need email from… original chain confirming [Biden] signs off on the specific documents when they are ready,’ she was cited by Axios as writing in a Jan. 16 email about using autopen to commute cases linked to crack-cocaine sentences. 

The developments come as President Donald Trump has ordered an investigation into Biden’s administration, alleging that top officials used autopen signatures to cover up the former president’s cognitive decline. 

‘I made the decisions about the pardons, executive orders, legislation, and proclamations. Any suggestion that I didn’t is ridiculous and false,’ Biden said in a statement in June.  

‘This is nothing more than a distraction by Donald Trump and Congressional Republicans who are working to push disastrous legislation that would cut essential programs like Medicaid and raise costs on American families, all to pay for tax breaks for the ultra-wealthy and big corporations,’ he added at the time. 

Fox News Digital’s Anders Hagstrom contributed to this report. 

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.

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.

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. 

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.’

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. 

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.

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.