Former President Joe Biden’s disastrous presidential debate with now-President Donald Trump one year ago Friday changed the course of the 2024 election.

The octogenarian Delawarean appeared on-stage tired and with a raspy voice, while some of his responses were at times unintelligible, leading to Trump landing several wisecracks in response.

While giving a response about wealthy Americans paying sufficient taxes, Biden said there are at least 1,000 billionaires – first muttering ‘1,000 trillionaires’ – in the U.S. and that they purportedly pay only 8.2% in taxes.

‘If they just paid 24%; 25%, either one of those numbers, they’d raise $500 million – billion I should say in a 10-year period. We’d be able to wipe out the debt,’ and ‘all those things we need to do [with] child care, elder care.’

His response went on for several more seconds, transitioning into a sidewinder about making every person eligible for ‘what I’ve been able to do with COVID,’ before mumbling for several seconds and declaring, ‘We finally beat Medicare.’

When moderator Jake Tapper turned to Trump for a response, he said:

‘Well, he’s right, he did beat Medicare, he beat it to death.’

Biden also claimed to have reduced illegal immigration at the southern border by 40% over the course of his term.

‘It’s better than when [Trump] left office. And I’m going to continue to move until we get the total ban on the total initiative relative to what we can do with more Border Patrol and more asylum officers,’ Biden said.

‘I really don’t know what he said at the end of that sentence. I don’t think he knows what he said either,’ Trump replied.

Trump also sharply criticized Biden for ‘destroy[ing] our country,’ and that he came out with a ‘nothing’ border plan to score a few political points.

The current president also labeled Biden ‘a Palestinian’ – a title he also bestowed on Sen. Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., who is Jewish – in relation to how they have responded to the Israel-Gaza conflict, after Biden accused him of disrespecting the military.

Biden said his late son, former Delaware Attorney General Joseph Beau Biden III, contracted glioblastoma from being stationed near burn pits in Iraq. He went on to accuse Trump of the widely-debunked ‘suckers and losers’ line about World War I casualties buried in a French cemetery.

‘My son was not a loser, he was not a sucker – you’re the sucker, you’re the loser,’ Biden fumed, speaking sternly through gritted teeth.

‘First of all, that was a made-up quote – suckers and losers – they made it up; it was in a third-rate magazine,’ Trump replied. 

The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg cited multiple anonymous sources in publishing the bombshell allegations in September 2020.

Fox News Digital’s Kiera McDonald, Emma Woodhead and Paul Steinhauser contributed to this report.

President Trump exerted ‘maximum pressure’ on Israel and Iran in an effort to ‘deliver peace’ after his historic and decisive strikes decimated the Islamic Republic’s nuclear facilities.

The president vowed throughout his 2024 campaign to reach ‘peace through strength,’ and he has taken steps in recent days to do just that, with an added pressure campaign on both Israel and Iran.

‘President Trump directing the perfect execution of the most secretive and successful military strikes in history – and then negotiating a ceasefire to the war within 48 hours – is the epitome of peace through strength,’ White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Fox News Digital. ‘Nobody knows how to exert maximum pressure to deliver peace better than Donald Trump.’

Trump, this week, participated in the NATO Summit in the Netherlands, where he was praised by allies for his decision to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities.

NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte praised Trump as a ‘man of strength’ and a ‘man of peace.’

‘I just want to recognize your decisive action on Iran,’ Rutte said at the start of his joint remarks with the president. ‘You are a man of strength, but you are also a man of peace. And the fact that you are now also successful in getting this ceasefire done between Israel and Iran – I really want to commend you for that. I think this is important for the whole world.’

Rutte, on his social media, also congratulated the president for his ‘extraordinary’ action in Iran, saying it was ‘something no one else dared to do.’

‘It makes us all safer,’ Rutte said.

The president also brokered a ceasefire between Israel and Iran, announcing Monday that the ’12-Day War’ was coming to an end – just over a week after Israel launched a preemptive strike, citing fears that Tehran was dangerously close to obtaining a nuclear weapon.

The two countries subsequently traded rocket fire over the following days, and over the weekend, the U.S. launched its own airstrikes on three of Iran’s key nuclear facilities.

Iran responded by shooting rockets at a U.S. air base in Qatar on Monday, but not without giving advance notice to U.S. and Qatari officials. No injuries were reported in that attack.

The ceasefire had gotten off to an uncertain start, with the president unleashing frustration with both countries.

‘I’m not happy with Israel. You know, when I say, OK, now you have 12 hours, you don’t go out in the first hour and just drop everything you have on them. So I’m not happy with them. I’m not happy with Iran either, but I’m really unhappy if Israel is going out this morning,’ Trump said on Tuesday.

He continued, ‘We basically have two countries that have been fighting for so long and so hard that they don’t know what the f— they’re doing.’ 

‘I’m gonna see if I can stop it,’ he added.

‘ISRAEL. DO NOT DROP THOSE BOMBS. IF YOU DO IT IS A MAJOR VIOLATION. BRING YOUR PILOTS HOME, NOW!’ Trump wrote on Truth Social shortly after boarding Marine One.

Minutes later, he announced that Israel was canceling its plans for an attack on Tuesday morning.

‘ISRAEL is not going to attack Iran. All planes will turn around and head home, while doing a friendly ‘Plane Wave’ to Iran. Nobody will be hurt, the Ceasefire is in effect! Thank you for your attention to this matter!’ he wrote.

Israel did not attack.

From the NATO summit, the president warned that the U.S. will strike Iran again if it attempts to rebuild its nuclear program.

And Trump’s historic strikes in Iran have the Islamic Republic admitting that their nuclear facilities were decimated.

Assessments from the U.S., Israel and Iran agree the strikes were successful.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi admitted in an interview on state TV that the U.S.’s strikes caused serious damage to Tehran’s nuclear facilities, despite Ayatollah Ali Khamenei’s insistence that there was minimal impact.

Araghchi said in the interview that ‘the level of damage is high, and it’s serious damage,’ according to the Associated Press.

Post-strike assessments have shown that Iran’s nuclear sites suffered damage in both U.S. and Israeli attacks. All three countries — Iran, Israel and the U.S. — have reached similar conclusions about the extent of the damage, despite what a leaked intel report indicated.

The only leader who seemingly does not agree with the assessments is Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, who said that ‘the Americans failed to achieve anything significant in their attack on nuclear facilities,’ according to reports. 

Khamenei appears to be more focused on projecting strength than reflecting reality. He described Iran’s attack on Al-Udeid, the American airbase in Qatar, as a ‘heavy slap to the U.S.’s face.’ While President Donald Trump dismissed it as a ‘very weak response’ and thanked Iran for giving the U.S. ‘early notice.’

International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Director General Rafael Grossi said in a statement on Tuesday that the agency had ‘seen extensive damage at several nuclear sites in Iran, including its uranium conversion and enrichment facilities.’

In addition to discussing the damage done to Iran’s nuclear sites, Araghchi also addressed the possibility of resuming talks with the U.S. He said that the American strikes ‘made it more complicated and more difficult’ for Iran to come to the table, but did not rule out the possibility that negotiations could resume.

Nuclear talks with the U.S. might not be entirely off the table for Iran after last week’s strikes—even if Tehran is not interested in reentering negotiations right away.

The possibility of negotiations was already in question prior to Operation Midnight Hammer, as Tehran viewed the U.S. as being ‘complicit’ in Israel’s Operation Rising Lion, according to Reuters, citing Iranian U.N. Ambassador Ali Bahreini.

Trump on Wednesday expressed optimism in the U.S.’s ability to resume nuclear talks with Iran.

‘We’re going to talk to them next week, with Iran. We may sign an agreement, I don’t know. To me, I don’t think it’s that necessary. I mean, they had a war. They fought. Now they’re going back to their world. I don’t care if I have an agreement or not. The only thing we would be asking for is what we’re asking for before about, we want no nuclear [program]. But we destroyed the nuclear,’ Trump said. 

Despite Trump’s statement, there is still no clear indication that the countries have plans to meet in the near future.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

President Donald Trump celebrated after the Supreme Court moved to block lower courts from issuing universal injunctions, something that had impacted his executive orders.

The president held a news conference just over an hour after the ruling was issued and said the Supreme Court had stopped a ‘colossal abuse of power.’ 

‘I was elected on a historic mandate, but in recent months, we’ve seen a handful of radical left judges effectively try to overrule the rightful powers of the president to stop the American people from getting the policies that they voted for in record numbers,’ Trump said on Friday.

Trump also accused lower court judges of trying to ‘dictate the law for the entire nation’ rather than ruling on the cases before them.

On Friday, Supreme Court Justices ruled 6-3 to allow the lower courts to issue injunctions only in limited instances, though the ruling leaves open the question of how the ruling will apply to the birthright citizenship order at the heart of the case.

The Supreme Court agreed this year to take up a trio of consolidated cases involving so-called universal injunctions handed down by federal district judges in Maryland, Massachusetts and Washington state. Judges in those districts had blocked Trump’s ban on birthright citizenship from taking force nationwide – which the Trump administration argued in their appeal to the Supreme Court was overly broad.

The Supreme Court’s arguments in May focused little on the merits of those universal injunctions – and on Friday, the court made clear that it is not ruling on whether the birthright citizenship orders are constitutional.

‘The applications do not raise – and thus we do not address – the question whether the Executive Order violates the Citizenship Clause or Nationality Act,’ Justice Amy Coney Barrett said, writing for the majority. ‘The issue before us is one of remedy: whether, under the Judiciary Act of 1789, federal courts have equitable authority to issue universal injunctions.’

‘A universal injunction can be justified only as an exercise of equitable authority, yet Congress has granted federal courts no such power,’ she added.

Coney Barrett took a swipe at Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, saying that her argument was ‘ at odds with more than two centuries’ worth of precedent, not to mention the Constitution itself. We observe only this: [Jackson] decries an imperial Executive while embracing an imperial Judiciary.’

In her dissent, Jackson warned that the ruling allowed the president to ‘violate the Constitution’ and presented ‘an existentia threat to the rule of law.’

A provision inside President Donald Trump’s ‘big, beautiful bill’ that would have lessened regulations on certain firearms was one of many stripped policies that did not pass muster with Senate rules.

The Senate parliamentarian ruled late Thursday night that policy changes that would delist short-barrel rifles, shotguns and suppressors from the National Firearms Act (NFA) would have to be scrubbed from the Senate Finance Committee’s portion of the mammoth bill.

The provision would have allowed for those particular guns and accessories to no longer be subject to a $200 federal tax. They would also no longer have needed to be registered with the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.

Changes to the NFA were part of the Stop Harassing Owners of Rifles Today (SHORT) Act, a bill pushed by Sen. Roger Marshall, R-Kan., in the upper chamber, and Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Ga., in the House.

‘This is a setback, but we are committed to working with the parliamentarian to protect the Second Amendment in any way we can through reconciliation,’ Marshall told Fox News Digital in a statement. ‘‘Shall not be infringed’ is crystal clear and the rights of gun owners must be respected.’

Indeed, lawmakers do have the opportunity to rewrite the provision to comport with the Byrd Rule, which governs the budget reconciliation process and allows either party in power to skirt the 60-vote filibuster threshold in the Senate.

Clyde told Fox News Digital in a statement that he disagreed with the ruling, ‘as the taxation and registration of firearms under the draconian NFA are inextricably linked.’ 

‘I’m working with my Senate Republican colleagues to rewrite the language so we can retain our 2A wins and deliver the best possible outcome for the American people,’ he said. ‘We must seize this rare opportunity to restore our Second Amendment rights.’

Arguments before the parliamentarian, who many Republicans lashed out at on Thursday following rulings that stripped key, yet divisive, Medicaid tweaks from the ‘big, beautiful bill,’ are expected to continue throughout Friday and likely until the last few minutes before the final bill is revealed.

The gun provision was one of many tax-related items stripped from the package. Others included subsidies for private schools and carve-outs for religious colleges from the endowments tax, among others.

There are other provisions still under consideration, including ‘Trump Accounts,’ which would have set aside $1,000 in taxpayer money for newborns, requiring Social Securities numbers for a slew of tax credits, and making tax benefits for those who invest in opportunity zones permanent.