Georgia Republican Rep. Andrew Clyde, who earlier this month announced he was drafting articles of impeachment against a Rhode Island judge overseeing one of President Donald Trump’s legal challenges, condemned judges who continue to bar Trump’s agenda from being implemented. 

Clyde is working in conjunction with Rep. Eli Crane, R-Ariz., who is also preparing impeachment articles against U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer. The Georgia Republican said the real victims of judicial pushback against Trump’s policies are the American people. 

‘You’re not just hurting the president,’ Clyde told Fox News Digital. ‘You’re hurting the American people because they’re the ones who elected him, and they’re the ones who want him to do this – to exercise these specific authorities. And these judges are really denying the American people their rights.’

Clyde threatened to file articles of impeachment against District Judge John McConnell who, at the time, filed a motion ordering the Trump administration to comply with a previous restraining order. The order temporarily blocked the administration’s efforts to pause federal grants and loans. 

McConnell has since come under fire from Trump supporters and conservatives who have accused him of being a liberal activist after a 2021 video of him saying courts must ‘stand and enforce the rule of law, that is, against arbitrary and capricious actions by what could be a tyrant or could be whatnot’ resurfaced online.  

‘You have to take a moment and realize that this, you know, middle-class, White, male, privileged person needs to understand the human being that comes before us that may be a woman, may be Black, may be transgender, may be poor, may be rich, may be – whatever,’ McConnell said in the video, according to WPRI.

Clyde acknowledged that judges have their own opinions and ‘they’re certainly entitled to them, but they’re not overt and political in mentioning them,’ saying ‘they don’t want to be seen as potentially having a conflict of interest.’

‘And I think that’s very, very much the case when it comes to both Judge Engelmayer and Judge McConnell,’ the lawmaker said. 

Since taking office in January, activist and legal groups, along with elected officials, local jurisdictions and individuals, have launched more than 70 lawsuits against the administration. The legal challenges cover Trump’s executive order on birthright citizenship, the Department of Government Efficiency’s (DOGE) efforts to slash unnecessary government spending, and Trump’s removal of various federal employees. 

With regard to the specific suits over DOGE’s actions, Clyde told Fox News Digital he expects the president to ‘prevail on the merits of his case.’

‘I think the president will certainly prevail on the merits of his case. He has the authority under Article II of the Constitution,’ Clyde said. ‘But yet for the entire time of the restraining order, the judge will have prevented this duly elected authority from being exercised by the president. And also, they will have prevented the American people from dealing with waste, fraud and abuse in their government.’

Clyde said he hopes other members of Congress join his and Crane’s efforts to continue holding judges accountable, saying those barring Trump’s agenda from being implemented ‘need to understand that they’re not going to get away with it.’

‘They can’t just stop the president from doing what the Constitution gives him the authority to do, and the people have given him the authority to do,’ Clyde said. 

Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind and Diana Stancy contributed to this report. 

The Trump administration’s Friday evening shakeup at the Pentagon saw the firing of six senior officers as Secretary Pete Hegseth made good on promises to upend the agency’s leadership. 

President Donald Trump and Hegseth fired the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. C.Q. Brown, and replaced him with a relatively unknown figure in Lt. Gen. Dan Caine. 

The choice of Caine shows the president’s preference for irregular warfare and special operations: Caine was among a group of military leaders who met with the president in December 2018 at the Al Asad airbase in Iraq. Trump was there to deliver a Christmas message and hear from commanders on the ground, and there Caine told Trump they could defeat ISIS quickly with a surge of resources and a lifting of restrictions on engagement. 

”We’re only hitting them from a temporary base in Syria,” Trump said Caine told him. ”But if you gave us permission, we could hit them from the back, from the side, from all over – from the base that you’re right on, right now, sir. They won’t know what the hell hit them.” 

‘It was a different message than [Trump] had gotten from leadership at the Pentagon, and I think that really made an impression,’ according to Rob Greenway, a former National Security Council official who was on the trip and has known Caine since they graduated from Virginia Military Institute together. 

Trump, on picking Caine Friday, lauded him as ‘an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.’

He’d plucked the retired general from relative obscurity to serve as his senior military adviser after accusing his predecessor, C.Q. Brown of pushing a ‘woke’ agenda at the Pentagon. Brown had been behind a 2022 memo laying out diversity goals for the Air Force. 

Caine does not meet the position’s prerequisites, such as being a combatant commander or service chief, and will require a waiver to be confirmed to the position. 

But the choice leaves Pentagon watchers curious on what direction Caine will take at his new high-level post. 

‘Caine hasn’t written much, we’re sort of trying to read the tea leaves here,’ said Mark Cancian, a senior defense advisor at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. 

Greenway called Caine ‘an absolutely inspired pick, a tremendous officer with a remarkable background, and he has the confidence in the president.’ 

Trump was undoubtedly attracted to his reputation as an aggressive fighter pilot that earned him the nickname ‘Razin’ Caine. But Caine’s nontraditional path throughout the military ranks and the business world was surely a selling point, according to Greenway.

‘It’s a priority of the president to have the Pentagon pass an audit, to have someone who knows what a balance sheet looks like, and can hopefully help the department get to the right side of it.’

The Pentagon has failed seven straight audits and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has set its sights on budget cuts at DOD. 

Caine, an F-16 pilot by background, spent time as the top military liaison to the CIA, an Air National Guard officer and regional airline founder in Texas. He was a White House fellow at the Agriculture Department and a counterterrorism specialist on the White House’s Homeland Security Council.

From 2018-19, he was deputy commander of Special Operations Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve, which has been fighting the Islamic State since 2014, though little is publicly known about his role in that operation. The role of airstrikes, however, grew during that time, including clandestine ones, and Trump designated airstrike approval to commanders rather than the White House. 

But critics say Caine, like Hegseth, does not have the command experience for the role as Trump’s top military advisor. 

‘Trump sees [the role] as somebody who has the ability to move forces and direct funding, and it just doesn’t work that way. That’s not what the role is. So now you have a president who has people around him who are his principal advisors, [Hegseth] and this new chairman, who really have limited qualifications at the more senior levels,’ said Gene Moran, former advisor to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and founder of lobbying firm Capitol Integration. 

The administration also relieved Adm. Lisa Franchetti, chief of naval operations – who Hegseth believed had been given the job because she was a woman – Gen. Jim Slife, Air Force vice chief of staff, and the judge advocates general of the Army, Navy and Air Force. 

‘If naval operations suffer, at least we can hold our heads high. Because at least we have another first! The first female member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff – hooray,’ Hegseth wrote in his 2024 book, ‘The War on Warriors.’ 

‘The Navy, in particular, has been unable to complete a procurement program on time and on budget and notoriously has decommissioned more ships than it’s made,’ said Greenway. ‘So I think the message there was accountability has to be restored.’ 

The switch-up of judge advocates general could be the biggest signal of policy change, where Hegseth has looked to grant greater authority to forces on the ground without having to worry about legal constraints. 

The judge advocates general, the top uniformed attorneys of the Army, Air Force and Navy, oversee the legal advisors for each branch and the defense counsel and prosecutors for courts-martial. 

Hegseth has spoken out against what he sees as an ‘obsessive’ prosecution of war crimes. ‘He wants to give the benefit of the doubt to the warfighter, if there’s not, you know, an absolute massacre,’ one source familiar with the defense secretary’s thinking said.  

‘Ultimately, we want lawyers who give sound constitutional advice and don’t exist to attempt to be roadblocks to anything that happens,’ the Pentagon chief told Fox News on Sunday. 

‘Hegseth has said the troops should do what they need to achieve victory and not feel constrained by the lawyers,’ said Cancian. ‘But then you could have some actions that are contrary to international law or treaties, that could make a huge controversy, both domestically and with our allies.’

But the advancement of Caine, with his covert operations background, and the removal of the top lawyers would signal a new focus on covert operations – a push that would line up with new terrorism designations for cartels in Latin America – and could set the military up for covert counter-narcotics strikes south of the border. 

‘We could definitely see a change in troop postures in some of these regions we’ve been in for too long, and new missions in Mexico going after the cartels,’ another Hegseth ally said. 

Among the critics who posted on X Sunday after my Fox News show was one who made an argument that surprised me.

Don’t pay attention to what President Trump says, this person wrote. Pay attention to what he does.

Now that’s a novel idea. What the President of the United States says is unimportant and should be ignored. I doubt that this person applied the same standard to President Joe Biden.

And yet there’s an interesting thought exercise here. Trump says a lot of things, especially since he talks to journalists at length virtually every day. Not everything rises to the same level of seriousness. I say this as someone who has interviewed him many times over the years, including our sitdown two weeks before the election.

Sometimes the president says things just to rile up the press. Sometimes he says things that aren’t true, or are exaggerations or taken out of context.

But more often he says the quiet part out loud, signaling what he plans to do or insulting those with whom he disagrees, the kind of stuff that reporters used to have to attribute to unnamed aides, and he does it in front of the cameras.

At the top of the list right now would be Ukraine. Donald Trump is a smart guy, he knows that Russia invaded its much smaller sovereign neighbor with the aim of wiping it off the map and putting it under Moscow’s control. But he has chosen to blame Ukraine for starting the war, and to insult Volodomyr Zelenskyy as a dictator when everyone knows that label perfectly describes Vladimir Putin.

The most charitable interpretation is that Trump believes the only way to end the war is through an alliance with Putin for a settlement that could then be sold to Ukraine. (The United States voted with Russia yesterday against a U.N. resolution condemning the invasion.) 

Of course, Trump has cozied up to Putin for a long time. During their Helsinki summit in the first term, the president accepted Putin’s denial that the Kremlin had hacked into Democratic emails, despite the evidence gathered by his own intelligence agencies.

Trump has repeated again and again that Zelenskyy bears responsibility for the war that just marked its three-year anniversary. Is this aimed at the American public or at Moscow or Kyiv (to put pressure on Ukraine)?  

Journalists keep asking Trump aides and Republican supporters if they agree with the president’s blame-Ukraine approach, and many have simply tried to deflect the question.

In my ‘Media Buzz’ interview with Jason Miller, the longtime Trump confidante and senior adviser to the Trump transition team, he deftly avoided contradicting the president.

‘What President Trump has done,’ he said, ‘is he has forced the sides to the table to actually stop the killing and come up with a peace deal. For the last several years. Joe Biden has sat there completely incompetent, doing nothing but fueling and funding more killing and more death.’ 

When I tried again, Miller said of his boss that ‘his legacy really will be as a peacemaker.’

I came back a third time, quoting conservative radio host Mark Levin as saying, ‘This is sick. Ukraine didn’t start this war. What were they supposed to do? Roll over and play dead? They’re just trying to survive.’ 

And I asked: ‘Why is President Trump blaming Zelenskyy for the beginning of the war?’

‘Well, Zelenskyy has a lot of blame. I think that would go to this as well. But again, you want to look into the past, I want to look into the future, what we do to save lives.’ 

Jason Miller was doing his job. A similar scenario played out on the other Sunday shows.

On ‘Fox News Sunday,’ my colleague Shannon Bream asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth whether it was fair to say that Russia was unprovoked when it attacked Ukraine. He replied that it was ‘fair to say it’s a very complicated situation.’

Stressing that Trump wants to end the war, Hegseth said: ‘‘You’re good, you’re bad; you’re a dictator, you’re not a dictator; you invaded, you didn’t.’ It’s not useful. It’s not productive.’

Another part of my Sunday interview also shed light on Trump’s use of language.

The president had told reporters: ‘I think we should govern the District of Columbia, make it absolutely flawlessly beautiful.’ 

The District has enjoyed home rule for 50 years, although Congress retains the power to overturn its laws. The capital, like most cities, grapples with crime, poverty and other urban ills.

I asked point blank: Is the president ready to end home rule in D.C.?

Miller said Mayor Muriel Bowser is largely doing a good job, adding: ‘I think part of the reason why President Trump won is because he said he was going to clean up our cities to make them safe. Of course he’s going to put pressure on the District of Columbia.’

So Trump’s words in this instance had a different meaning, as a warning signal to the District.

Oh, I also wondered why Trump keeps referring to Canada as the 51st state when that’s not going to happen.

‘The president’s having a little bit of fun with it. But he’s also making some very serious points.’

My online detractor was wrong. It’s important to pay attention to the president’s words, especially for the media, which have a tendency to overreact to some of his language. The challenge is deciphering when he’s dead serious, when he’s sending signals, and when he’s just trolling.