A communications director for former Vice President Kamala Harris created a so-called ‘death-pool roster’ of federal judges appointed by a Republican that could swear in Harris as president – in the event that President Joe Biden suddenly died, according to a new book.

The book, ‘Fight: Inside the Wildest Battle for the White House,’ published Tuesday by William Morrow and Company, claims that Harris’ White House communications director Jamal Simmons crafted an entire communications strategy to employ in the event of Biden’s death. 

The book, authored by political journalists Jonathan Allen of NBC News and Amie Parnes of the Hill, said Simmons imagined that losing Biden unexpectedly would be akin to when Lyndon B. Johnson was sworn in on Air Force One following John F. Kennedy’s assassination in 1963. 

But he worried people would question her legitimacy as president, and was specifically concerned that ‘Trump people’ would go ‘apes—‘ if Harris became president, the book claims. 

‘Simmons believed Harris would be strengthened by an institutional stamp of approval if she were sworn in hurriedly because Biden had died unexpectedly,’ Allen and Parnes wrote. ‘Her legitimacy might be questioned, he worried, recalling the January 6 effort to stop Biden from being certified as president.’

As a result, Simmons created a spreadsheet of various judges nominated by a Republican who might be equipped to help bolster her legitimacy. 

‘The strongest validator, he believed, would be a federal judge who had been appointed by a Republican other than Trump,’ Allen and Parnes wrote. ‘He compiled a spreadsheet of those jurists across the country, down to a city-by-city breakdown, and carried it with him when he traveled with Harris.’ 

Simmons said he never told Harris about the so-called ‘death-pool roster’ before his departure with her communications team in January 2023, however he instructed colleagues to notify him immediately if something did happen to Biden so he could implement the communications strategy. Ultimately, Simmons left the spreadsheet with another Harris staffer, according to the book. 

The book did not specify which judges were included on the list. 

Harris, who previously served as a senator from California, is now a speaker with CAA Speakers, which represents high-profile celebrities. CAA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.

The book also includes details revealing how former President Barack Obama remained hesitant to back Harris in the 2024 election to replace Biden, amid concerns about his mental fitness, while also doubting Biden and Harris’ political abilities. 

According to the book, Obama didn’t believe Harris could beat now-President Donald Trump in the November 2024 race – an issue that frustrated Harris.

‘Fight’ chronicles how Trump secured the White House for a second term and the ramifications of his victory on the Democratic Party. Allen and Parnes conducted interviews with more than 150 political insiders for the book, according to the book’s description.

Thousands of United States Agency for International Development (USAID) employees will be terminated by September as the Trump administration restructures the agency to fall in line with the president’s ‘America First’ policy, Fox News Digital learned.  

‘President Trump and Secretary Rubio are effectively stewarding taxpayer dollars while ensuring that foreign aid programs align with America’s national interests,’ White House spokesperson Anna Kelly told Fox Digital Monday. ‘That includes eliminating staff positions that do not advance the President’s foreign policy goals to put America First.’ 

USAID is an independent U.S. agency that was established under the Kennedy administration to administer economic aid to foreign nations. It was one of the first agencies investigated by the Department of Government Efficiency back in early February for alleged mismanagement and government overspending, with DOGE’s leader Elon Musk slamming the agency as ‘a viper’s nest of radical-left marxists who hate America.’ 

The administration had already gutted the agency of U.S.-based workers back in February as DOGE investigated the office. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has served as the agency’s acting administrator since February.

USAID firings are back in the headlines after viral news reports claimed that the Trump administration fired three USAID workers operating in Myanmar while they were assisting with damage from a 7.7 earthquake that hit the nation in March. A senior State Department official told the Washington Reporter that the report was not accurate, as ‘no one was fired,’ adding that ‘our team leads on the ground in Burma have reported back that the response is going well and they are able to execute their assignment.’

‘Per the notice sent out last week,’ the official added in comment to the outlet. ‘All USAID personnel were either given a 1-July or 2-September termination date.’

‘There have been no changes to that plan. Any assertion otherwise was likely based on a deliberate leak by someone trying to spread a fake narrative for their own political agenda.’

An administration official told Fox Digital that the State Department official’s comments to the outlet were an accurate characterization of the earthquake situation in the Southeast Asian country. 

All in, Fox Digital learned, roughly 4,600 USAID personnel in both the foreign and civil service will be impacted by the latest reduction in force directive. There were more than 10,000 USAID employees across the world ahead of Trump’s inauguration. 

The staffers will have a final separation date of either July 1, 2025 or Sept. 2, 2025, consistent with regulatory and other requirements, an administration official told Fox Digital.

USAID historically has fallen under the State Department’s operational umbrella. 

The State Department and USAID, however, notified Congress on March 28 that officials intend to reorganize ‘certain USAID functions to the Department by July 1, 2025.’ USAID functions that are not absorbed by the State Department will be discontinued. 

‘USAID and State previously served duplicative functions, with no accountability for the billions of dollars doled out abroad by USAID,’ an administration official told Fox Digital of the USAID shakeup. 

The admin official added that USAID’s top priority amid the restricting effort is ‘the continued safety of all personnel and the orderly repatriation of colleagues posted overseas,’ and that the administration is working ‘with overseas personnel to ensure any specific circumstances are considered to ensure a safe and orderly drawdown.’

President Donald Trump announced on Monday that he plans to undergo a physical examination on Friday, marking his first annual physical in his second administration.

Trump announced the plans in a Truth Social post, noting that the exam would take place at Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C. Trump was treated for COVID-19 at the same hospital in 2020.

‘I am pleased to report that my long scheduled Annual Physical Examination will be done at Walter Reed Army Medical Center on Friday of this week,’ the Republican wrote. ‘I have never felt better, but nevertheless, these things must be done!’

Trump’s stamina and physical health have been a center of attention since his July 13 assassination attempt, which he miraculously survived. At the time, Dr. Marc Siegel noted that Trump showed an ‘adroitness.’

‘I’ve been talking to emergency room doctors, vascular surgeons and trauma surgeons all over the country this morning, and nobody can remember a case like this,’ he said. 

Months later, in November, Florida neurosurgeon Dr. Brett Osborn told Fox News Digital that Trump remained in good health.

‘The fact that he attended 120 events in seven months, often multiple rallies in a single day in different states, is proof-positive that Trump has a tremendous amount of stamina, mentally and physically,’ Osborn noted.

But Democrats have disputed Trump’s health in the past, and members of the medical community have demanded Trump release his medical records. In an open letter from Oct. 13, over 230 doctors, nurses and other healthcare professionals asked for a record release.

‘On August 20, Donald Trump said he would ‘very gladly’ release his medical records. In the 55 days since, he has yet to do so,’ reads the letter, signed largely by supporters of former Vice President Kamala Harris. ‘With no recent disclosure of health information from Donald Trump, we are left to extrapolate from public appearances.’

‘And on that front, Trump is falling concerningly short of any standard of fitness for office and displaying alarming characteristics of declining acuity,’ the petition claimed.

Fox News Digital’s Melissa Rudy and Chris Pandolfo contributed to this report.

The Senate voted Monday to invoke cloture on Elbridge Colby’s nomination, moving the national security strategist one step closer to confirmation as undersecretary of defense for policy, the Pentagon’s No. 3 post. 

The procedural vote, which limits debate and tees up a final confirmation vote, passed by a margin of 53 to 49. Colby’s nomination advanced out of the Armed Services Committee last month, overcoming skepticism from hawkish Republicans like Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., during a closed-door vote.

Colby, a co-founder of the Marathon Initiative and a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Strategy and Force Development under the Trump administration, is best known for his role in authoring the 2018 National Defense Strategy, which reoriented long-term military strategy toward a great power competition with China. 

He has long argued the U.S. military needs to limit its resources in the Middle East in a pivot to the Indo-Pacific region. 

Colby has scored staunch backing from a number of figures in Trump world, increasing the pressure on GOP skeptics to get on board with his nomination. 

Vice President J.D. Vance paid a visit to Capitol Hill last month to offer support for his ‘friend’ Colby. 

‘In so many ways, Bridge predicted what we would be talking about four years down the road, five years down the road, 10 years down the road. He saw around corners that very few other people were seeing around,’ Vance said at the time. 

‘If you look at his long career in defense policy, he has said things that, you know, frankly, alienated Democrats and Republicans. He’s also said things that I think both Democrats and Republicans would agree with.’ 

During the hearing, Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., questioned Colby on his previously stated position, ‘America has a strong interest in defending Taiwan, but Americans can survive without it.’ 

‘Your views on Taiwan’s importance to the United States seems to have softened considerably,’ Wicker told Colby. 

Colby disputed that point, arguing he had been sounding the alarm that the U.S.’ ‘military balance has declined’ in relation to China.

‘What I have been trying to shoot a signal flare over is that it is vital for us to focus and enable our own forces for an effective and reasonable defense of Taiwan and for the Taiwanese, as well as the Japanese, to do more,’ said Colby.  

When pressed by Cotton during the hearing, Colby said he believes Iran to be an ‘existential’ threat to the U.S. 

‘Yes, a nuclear-armed Iran – especially, Senator, given that … we know they’ve worked on ICBM-range capabilities and other capabilities that would pose an existential danger to the United States,’ Colby said.

He promised to provide ‘credible good military options’ to the president if diplomacy with Iran fails. 

It was a different tune than he’d sung in years past. 

‘The only thing worse than the prospect of an Iran armed with nuclear weapons would be consequences of using force to try to stop them,’ Colby had said in 2012. 

‘I would say a lot of what I was arguing against at the time, these conversations 15 years ago, a lot of the opponents I felt had a casual or in some cases even flippant attitude towards the employment of military force,’ Colby said. ‘That’s a lot of what I was arguing against. Was my wording always appropriate, was my precise framing always appropriate? No.’

Two key bills backed by President Donald Trump are set to get a vote this week after advancing through the House Rules Committee on Monday evening.

The No Rogue Rulings Act (NORRA Act) by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., would limit district court judges’ ability to issue orders blocking Trump policies nationwide. The Safeguarding American Voter Eligibility (SAVE) Act by Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, is aimed at requiring proof of citizenship in the voting registration process.

The former legislation is a response to Trump’s ongoing standoff with judges paralyzing his agenda, while the latter is a bill that the president and his allies have long pushed for.

Issa’s bill is slated to get a vote on Tuesday afternoon, while Roy’s is expected on the House floor Thursday morning.

That’s provided they pass a procedural hurdle known as a ‘rule vote.’ A simple majority of House lawmakers is needed to pass a ‘rule’ to allow for debate and eventual House-wide votes on legislation.

The House Rules Committee, the final gatekeeper before most legislation reaches the entire chamber, advanced a ‘rule’ combining Issa and Roy’s bills with two financial regulatory measures that are also due for a vote this week if the rule passes.

Both pieces of legislation were slated to get House votes last week, but a showdown over an unrelated measure on proxy voting for new parents in Congress wound up paralyzing the chamber floor on Tuesday afternoon, less than 24 hours after the House’s first votes of the week.

‘The Committee on Rules made efforts to protect this body from a take-it-or-leave-it, all-or-nothing proposal to impose proxy voting, which, while limited, would take us down the slippery slope and return us to the rampant abuse of unlimited proxy voting for members on both sides of the aisle that we witnessed when the Democrats imposed the practice during the COVID era, yet the body felt otherwise,’ House Rules Committee Chair Virginia Foxx, R-N.C., said at the outset of Monday’s meeting.

Rep. Jim McGovern, D-Mass., the top Democrat on the committee, said during his opening statement, ‘A supposedly pro-family party worked to block a simple, commonsense policy that supports working moms in Congress. It was a move that was unprecedented, and thankfully, a majority of members in our chamber pushed back.’

‘When he lost the vote, Speaker Johnson sent everyone home, blaming the few Republicans who had the guts to take a stand for family values,’ McGovern said.

With the matter resolved, both the rule vote and both measures themselves are expected to pass with little drama.

It’s likely a different matter in the Senate, however, where both bills would need help from at least some Democrats to meet the body’s 60-vote threshold for advancement.

The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) and the State Department called out practices under the Biden administration that required diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) efforts to account for 20% of performance evaluations for foreign service officers.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio called the reforms of the Biden administration’s DEI policies ‘important and historic.’

‘Now our incredible Foreign Service Officers will be evaluated on true merit, not on arbitrary immutable characteristics,’ he wrote on X.

Rubio shared a post from DOGE, which noted that under the policy, diplomats were assessed on whether they avoided ‘gendered adjectives’ or ‘faint praise.’

The department shared PowerPoint slides providing examples of phrases to avoid.

One of the slides gave descriptive phrases that can unintentionally influence a reader. It then gave examples of gendered adjectives like, ‘Dr. Sarah Gray is a caring compassionate physician’ vs. ‘Dr. Joel Gray has been very successful with his patients.’

Faint praise was also discouraged. One example the slide provided was, ‘S/he worked hard on projects that s/he was assigned’ or ‘S/he has never had temper tantrums.’

The slides discouraged using first names for women or minorities and titles for men, as well.

Additionally, as DOGE pointed out in its post, the slides asked local organizations to promote diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility (DEIA) programs, training and lectures as well as annual DEIA awards ceremonies.

The foreign service officers were also encouraged to set race and gender quotas on embassy speaking panels and other diplomatic events.

‘Working with DOGE, [Secretary Rubio] has ended this discrimination and restored merit to the foreign service,’ DOGE wrote.

The elimination of the DEIA requirement on performance evaluations for foreign service officers comes a week after the Trump administration slashed $15 million from the Institute of Museum and Library Services in the form of DEI grants to align with DOGE and President Donald Trump’s executive orders aimed at eliminating DEI from the federal government.

The grants include $6.7 million to the California State Library to enhance equitable library programs and $4 million to the Washington State Library for diverse staff development and incarcerated support. 

A $1.5M DEI grant to the Connecticut State Library system to ‘integrate social justice, diversity, equity, and inclusion’ into their daily operations is also being cut along with $700,000 for a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit to study ‘post-pandemic DEI practices’ in American children’s museums that would formulate ‘enhanced equity-focused strategies.’

Trump’s DOGE efforts have saved the American taxpayer $140 billion, according to its website, which represents about $870 saved per taxpayer.

The Trump administration says it has slashed hundreds of millions of dollars in DEI contracts, including at least $100 million at the Department of Education.

Fox News Digital’s Andrew Mark Miller contributed to this report.

Hamish McKenzie, the co-founder of Substack, is suddenly speaking out.

‘We are living through the most significant media disruption since the printing press, and it explains everything from why you can’t stand your neighbor to our current political tumult.’

Today, he says on his site, ‘we live in a more chaotic environment, where the narrative frenzy of social media has given rise to political movements that gain power through exploiting attention of any kind, positive or negative, from moral panics to fulminating podium-thumpers. We’ve gone from ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’ to dunk tweets and death-by-emoji.’

Obviously, it’s in McKenzie’s interest to portray a media revolution with him as the chief rebel. When Substack launched in 2017, it was viewed as an intriguing experiment, an outlet largely for those who didn’t have one.

But in the Trump era, with his constant cable appearances and Truth Social posts, there’s little question that we’re submerged in a toxic environment. The president gets this, which is why he’s done a number of podcast interviews. 

He went on Joe Rogan and Kamala, uh, did not. 

Now, with big-name journalists giving up prime television gigs in favor of the site’s independence, we are living in the Substack Era. What was once viewed as the Holy Grail – an anchoring or hosting job on a major network – is now dismissed as old-school legacy media with too many corporate constraints.

Take my former Fox colleague Chris Wallace. He left for CNN (actually CNN-plus, which was euthanized in three weeks) and then launched a Saturday talk show. But Chris recently announced he’s leaving the network to go independent, which undoubtedly includes Substack.

Another ex-Fox colleague, Megyn Kelly, had a similar experience. Having been dropped by NBC after a bad experience there, she started a daily show and video podcast on Sirius XM, and now has 3.2 million subscribers on YouTube.

Chuck Todd, having been eased out of his ‘Meet the Press’ job, was given an online streaming show. But not long ago he announced he was leaving NBC to go independent. 

When Dan Abrams gave up his NewsNation show after three years, he said: ‘As much as I love this show and the mission of this network, I just can’t continue to give this show the attention it needs and deserves with all of my other professional commitments.’ The Mediaite founder later announced that he is concentrating on creating a YouTube channel for the site, working with other media folks.

McKenzie’s great insight is that he could connect writers and podcasters directly to their audience, with Substack taking a cut. They can opt for a revenue-sharing agreement. Now you might ask, what if you’re not a famous former anchor or commentator?

Turns out that niche sites do really well. They can work at other jobs at the same time. Many users report a six-figure income. 

This is especially striking in that most Substack people let you read their sites for free, or a shortened version, with the full column and special features available only for paying subscribers. The hope is that some of the freeloaders will become subscribers over time.

Not everyone winds up at Substack voluntarily. Chris Cillizza, the former Washington Post columnist, is quite candid in saying he came to Substack after being laid off at CNN. He found himself with little to do after dropping the kids at school.

‘I started this Substack — selfishly — to help me grapple with my changed life. To give me a platform where I could express myself — hopefully to an audience — about the world of politics, yes, but also how I was navigating a new reality.’

He has slowly built a following and chats with Todd once a week, which is something that Substackers do.

Casandra Campbell of Really Good Business Ideas analyzed the 29 most popular Substacks.

The first two are Letters from an American (hundreds of thousands of paid subscribers for political history) and Broken Palate. Michael Moore was No. 3, and the only other names I recognized were former candidate Allen West, the Bulwark, and ex-Labor Secretary Robert Reich.

The others had names like Dr. Mercola’s Censored Library, DeLa Soul, The Pragmatic Engineer and The Cryptonite Weekly Rap.

‘Our political culture now mirrors chaos media culture,’ McKenzie says. ‘Opponents are not just to be argued against, but humiliated.’ Good luck changing that.

Look, I subscribe to several Substack accounts. I’d like to subscribe to more but, with fees ranging from $5 to $40 a month, it gets expensive. So I read others for free and ponder whether to upgrade.

I don’t agree that this is the biggest deal since the Gutenberg press, around 1440, but it’s having an impact on the media and political culture. Substack is hot, and there are competitors, mainly because journalists and politicos crave a connection that goes beyond the craziness of the Trump age.