In his first week in office, President Donald Trump has charged ahead with a series of executive actions, fulfilling a key campaign promise to challenge ‘gender ideology’ in American institutions and promote ‘biological truth’ rooted in ‘fundamental and incontrovertible reality.’ 

Meanwhile, the Supreme Court is poised to rule on two significant gender-related cases this year, and Trump’s new executive action could spell further controversy in the higher court.

Last week, SCOTUS agreed to hear Mahmoud v. Taylor, which would determine whether schools can force teachers to read LGBTQ books to elementary-age children despite parental objections. At issue is whether parents will have the right to opt their children out of such instructions.

‘If the Supreme Court’s doing its job, it shouldn’t impact [the case decisions] at all,’ Heritage Foundation senior legal fellow Sarah Marshall Perry told Fox News Digital in an interview. ‘What Trump’s executive order was is a statement of really what the policies are going to be for the executives going forward into the new administration. And he did exactly what [former President Joe] Biden did with his executive order expanding sex to include gender identity.’

Perry noted the separation of powers between the executive and judiciary branches, adding that while the executive is mostly a political entity, the judiciary is non-political. 

SCOTUS will be obligated to focus solely on the facts presented in the cases before them, she said, which ‘will include questions relative to the parameters of the parental rights guidance on school curriculums and exactly what constitutes curriculum for purposes of opt-out, whether gender medicine and age and medical-based restrictions that happen to impact individuals who are transgender is a violation of the Equal Protection Clause.’ 

She also pointed out that the executive order should not influence the Supreme Court’s decision-making, adding, ‘The executive order should have absolutely no bearing on what the Supreme Court decides going forward.’

In another case that already had their oral arguments heard last year, Skrmetti v. U.S., the higher court is weighing whether the equal protection clause, which guarantees equal treatment under the law for individuals in similar circumstances, prevents states from banning medical providers from offering puberty blockers and hormone treatments to children seeking transgender surgical procedures. 

The Biden administration joined the lawsuit by filing a petition to the Supreme Court in November 2023.

‘I think the American people are gratified that they’ve got a president who is common sensical, who recognizes biological reality, who recognizes the text of civil rights law and the rule of law itself, and now they’re going to say we have someone who was willing to stand in the gap for us, including through the Department of Justice, if the cases get all the way to the Supreme Court,’ Perry said. ‘But parents should, and I think will, be involved to be able to bring more legal challenges.’

‘I think this election really sort of rises to shift, not just politically, but for many people philosophically as well, because we recognize that America was sort of pulled back from the perilous brink on even understanding what it meant to be male and female, even understanding what it meant to live amicably in a pluralistic society,’ Perry said. ‘We are now, I think, thankfully, seeing a rebirth of those long-standing beneficial ideas.’

Trump’s executive order, signed on Inauguration Day and titled, ‘Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,’ declares that the U.S. will recognize only two sexes — male and female — based on immutable biological characteristics. 

It prohibits the use of gender identity in legal and administrative contexts, mandates that federal agencies, including those overseeing housing, prisons, and education, adhere to this definition when enforcing laws and issuing regulations. The order directs changes to government-issued identification documents, bans the promotion of ‘gender ideology’ in federal programs, rescinds previous executive actions that promoted gender identity inclusion and instructs federal agencies to eliminate guidance or regulations that conflict with the new policy.

Trump’s executive order reverses the Biden administration’s executive order titled ‘Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation,’ signed in 2021, which directed federal agencies to interpret and enforce civil rights laws to prohibit discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation.

The Senate will hold votes over the weekend to accelerate the confirmation of one of President Donald Trump’s key Cabinet nominees.

Lawmakers will meet for a rare Saturday session to hold a vote on whether to confirm South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Homeland Security, to the top Cabinet position. 

Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., indicated earlier in the week that the Senate would stay over the weekend to push through the confirmation process if Democrats blocked voting efforts.

‘Do we want a vote on these folks on Tuesday or vote on them on Friday, Saturday and Sunday? Because that’s what we’re going to do,’ Thune said after Democrats blocked a confirmation vote for Trump’s CIA director nominee, John Ratcliffe, who has bipartisan support. ‘This can be easy or this can be hard.’  

‘This is about America’s national security interests, and we’re stalling, so that’s not going to happen,’ Thune said.

Noem was questioned by lawmakers on the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee during her confirmation hearing earlier in the week.  

The Department of Homeland Security deals with national security and immigration issues, making Noem’s confirmation top of mind for Trump as he makes the crisis at the southern border a priority during his second term.

Several of Trump’s nominees remain unconfirmed after the 47th president’s first week in office. But Thune promised while speaking on the Senate floor on Friday that he ‘will continue to ensure that the Senate works as quickly as possible to get President Trump’s team in place.’

Fox News’ Elizabeth Pritchett contributed to this report.

Pete Hegseth squeaked through his Senate confirmation on Friday and became America’s new secretary of defense, but he needn’t thank Republican senators Mitch McConnell, Lisa Murkowski, and Susan Collins.

For all three long-time establishment and anti-Trump senators, the main objection to Hegseth stepping into the top Pentagon job was that they believe he lacks the prerequisite experience to run the mammoth organization. Here is how Murkowski put it in an X post: ‘Managing the Department of Defense requires vast experience and expertise as the department is one of the most complex and powerful organizations in the world, and Mr. Hegseth’s prior roles in his career do not demonstrate to me that he is prepared for such immense responsibility.’

Never mind that Hegseth was educated at Princeton and Harvard and served more than a decade in the U.S. Army infantry. Forget that he rose to the rank of major while serving tours in Afghanistan. And disregard that he is a published author who has led veteran advocacy organizations. The problem for these senators was that Hegseth lacks the traditional credential of having worked for a defense contractor, the very type that have been captured over the past two decades by the woke agenda Hegseth has vowed to eliminate.

Let’s take Trump’s last Defense Secretary, the eminently qualified Mark Esper. Like Hegseth, Esper served in the military, but upon leaving active service, he held a menagerie of high-profile jobs with legislators, the Chamber of Commerce, and eventually as a vice president for defense company Raytheon.

This is exactly the kind of resume that McConnell, Murkowski and Collins were looking for. Esper is the kind of guy who gets 90 votes in favor of confirmation, as he did in 2019, but in building that corporate CV he looked the other way as the institutions he served embraced wokeness and DEI.

Here is what Shanda Hinton, Raytheon Technologies’ chief diversity officer, had to say in 2023: ‘Advancing diversity, equity and inclusion is more than a goal – it’s our duty and a critical element of our . This recognition only encourages us to keep pushing to create generational change.’

This was the gentle cowardice of the old Republican Party, always scared of being called names by the left if they didn’t pretend men can become women and America is a deeply racist country.

I’m not trying to argue that Esper is some kind of Ibram X Kendi when it comes to things like critical race theory. But he clearly looked the other way as these perverse progressive mindsets took hold.

This was the gentle cowardice of the old Republican Party, always scared of being called names by the left if they didn’t pretend men can become women and America is a deeply racist country. But now is time for courage. This is why Hegseth is the right man for this moment. While the Mark Espers of the world stood by as DEI programs and wokeness infected the military and defense industry, Hegseth was writing books about the leftist institutional capture of our armed forces and schools.

The former ‘Fox & Friends’ weekend anchor may never have been a C-suiter at a massive corporation, but all of those companies have been complicit in the anti-merit based policies that Hegseth promised to pull the plug on during his Senate confirmation hearings.

In a very real sense, Hegseth is qualified because he isn’t ‘qualified.’ Almost anybody who checked the boxes that McConnell, Murkowski and Collins demand would be coming from the same groupthink swamp that has made our military weaker in the name of diversity.

The American people voted for Trump in large part because they know that Democrats have lost their minds in the culture war. We don’t want men in women’s sports and we do want a military focused on being lethal, not politically correct.

If Hegseth winds up in over his head we will know it pretty fast, and I will gladly apologize to his twin detractors on the Republican side of the senate aisle, but that is very unlikely to happen, and how high is the bar really when Biden’s DefSec Lloyd Austin just went missing for a few days and nobody cared?

Hegseth has a chance to fix the military the way Trump wants him to because the American people elected Trump to get that exact thing done. 

Elections, they say, have consequences and a Hegseth-led Department of Defense is a great consequence for those who want merit, fairness, and competence in the military. It is a shame, but maybe not surprising that Collins, McConnell, and Murkowski could not see this. Fortunately, Vance made sure their misguided opinions didn’t get in the way of real change at the Pentagon. 

The global climate movement is already feeling the sting of the ‘Trump effect’ after green energy policies were a target of President Donald Trump’s first executive orders, according to energy experts who reacted to the president’s first week in office.

Trump was sworn in as the 47th president of the United States Monday, signing numerous executive orders aimed at unraveling former President Joe Biden’s climate agenda.  

‘President Trump has not wasted any time to undo Biden’s many climate policies designed to make energy more expensive and less affordable. America and the world can look forward to a brighter future because of the actions that President Trump has started on his first day in office,’ Myron Ebell, chairman of the American Lands Council, said in a statement.

But Ebell added that ‘it’s going to be a long, hard fight because of ferocious opposition’ from climate groups.

This week, Trump signed an executive order to ax the U.S. climate standards, which aimed to reduce emissions 61-66% by 2035. 

Additionally, the president ended the electric vehicle (EV) mandate and withdrew from the Paris Climate Agreement, a legally binding treaty among more than 190 parties committed to international cooperation on climate change.

‘President Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Accords is a victory for American workers and families, rejecting policies that prioritize the Chinese Communist Party’s interests over our own,’ said Jason Isaac, CEO of the American Energy Institute and a former Texas state representative.

‘The Paris framework does nothing to mitigate a changing climate but drives up energy costs and burdens Americans with decarbonization mandates rooted in the climate hoax. By making American energy more affordable and accessible, President Trump is benefiting not only our nation but the world.’

Marc Morano, publisher of Climate Depot, a communication platform for climate issues designed by the Committee For a Constructive Tomorrow, a D.C.-based public policy group, said that Trump’s second term ‘could become one of our lifetimes’ most consequential presidencies.’

‘Trump is poised to, once and for all, put a stake through the heart of the U.N. globalist climate change scam,’ Morano said in a statement shared with Fox. ‘The Trump effect is already derailing the U.N. climate summits, canceling EV mandates, disintegrating the Wall Street climate group and Net Zero goals. Trump’s policies could have the effect of collapsing the entire climate house of cards.’

Trump’s executive orders were not accepted by many Democratic lawmakers and climate groups, who criticized the president’s executive orders. 

‘It’s the second day of the second Trump presidency, and there are three things we know for sure: there is no energy emergency; there is a climate emergency; and the policies rolled out in these past 24 hours will make the climate crisis worse,’ said Manish Bapna, president and CEO of the Natural Resources Defense Council.

Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress plan on going even deeper on reversing green energy policies enacted over the past four years. Republicans in the House have already introduced legislation to block Biden’s climate standards on household appliances.

More than 200,000 children have been abducted by Russia since the start of its invasion of Ukraine, Chairman Emeritus of the House Foreign Affairs Committee Michael McCaul, R-Texas, said, citing U.S. estimates.

‘If a foreign adversary took 260,000 of our kids, and they were in indoctrination camps, I mean, how would we feel about that?’ McCaul asked Fox News Digital.

The Texas Republican was recently term-limited in his time as chairman of the foreign affairs panel, but he is continuing to work on the world stage, in part by raising awareness about Russia’s atrocities in Ukraine. Among the most egregious is the relocation of thousands of Ukrainian children into Russia, the vast majority of whom have not been returned.

Some parents would be coerced into giving up their children because Russian forces were threatening to bomb their city, McCaul said, while other times ‘they just invade and capture the children.’

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants in February 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin and Russia’s commissioner for children’s rights, Maria Lvova-Belova, ‘for the war crime of unlawful deportation of [children] and that of unlawful transfer of [children] from occupied areas of Ukraine.’

Lvova-Belova was sanctioned last year by the U.S. over her part in the scheme, which has been widely condemned by western governments.

However, the Kremlin has denied war crime allegations and maintained it is doing humanitarian work facilitating homes for Ukrainian children, NPR reported.

Existing accounts from returned children and elsewhere paint a picture of forced indoctrination within Russia’s borders, however. Some of those children are given military training, according to the Yale Humanitarian Research Lab, likely in preparation to fight on Russia’s front lines.

Estimates on how many children have been taken to Russia vary between 20,000 to upwards of 250,000.

Part of McCaul’s work raising awareness about Russia’s treatment of Ukrainian children will include a screening of a documentary titled, ‘Children in the Fire: Ukraine’s War Through the Children’s Eyes’ by filmmaker Evgeny Afineevsky, at the Munich Security Conference next month.

He has also worked with the nonprofit Save Ukraine, which is working to return children.

‘In the documentary, the child’s brought into this prison where it looks like adults are being— basically they’re using electrodes to shock them, you know, under their fingernails and their genitals, and it’s just very, very barbaric,’ McCaul said.

He also held a hearing last year on the issue while leading the foreign affairs committee.

McCaul said Russia’s abduction of children is among the most vile of its alleged violations of the Geneva Conventions. He compared it to infamous Nazi physician Josef Mengele’s experiments on Jewish children and adults.

‘It’s just evil. I mean, any civilization that would capture— I mean, it’s one thing if you’re on the battlefield killing the enemy, from their point of view,’ McCaul said. ‘But to capture the children to re-indoctrinate them is sort of reminiscent of, you know, Mengele’s experiments on kids…And I don’t think we’ve seen anything like this in recent society.’

The House passed a resolution last year condemning Russia’s abduction of Ukrainian children in a bipartisan 390 to 9 vote.

‘It’s just horrific. I can’t imagine, as a father, my children being, you know, taken away by the Russian Federation and then not knowing where they are or what’s happening to them,’ McCaul said. ‘But this is all part of Putin’s game, is to try to indoctrinate the children in Ukraine to go against their own country and belief system.’

The terrorist group Hamas released four additional hostages from Gaza on Saturday after a ceasefire deal with Israel took effect nearly a week ago.

Karina Ariev, Daniella Gilboa, Naama Levy and Liri Albag — all of whom are members of the Israeli Defense Forces —were freed on Saturday in the second round of hostage releases.

In exchange, Israel was expected to free 200 Palestinian prisoners or detainees, including 120 militants serving life sentences after being convicted of deadly attacks.

The first round of hostage releases on Sunday freed Romi Gonen, Emily Demari, and Doron Steinbrecher.

Video from Palestine Square in Gaza shows the four newly released women hostages being taken from the cars. They are alive and walking, wearing uniforms.

‘The Red Cross has communicated that four Israeli hostages were transferred to them and are on their way toward IDF and ISA forces in the Gaza Strip,’ the IDF and Israeli Securities Authority said in a joint statement.

The four female soldiers were believed to have been, at least at one time, held all together.

Under the ceasefire deal, a total of 33 hostages are to be set free over the course of six weeks, including those already released, in exchange for hundreds of Palestinians imprisoned by Israel.

Hamas agreed to release three female hostages on the first day of the deal, four on the seventh day and the remaining 26 over the next five weeks.

This is the second cease-fire achieved during the war that began more than a year ago.

The 15-month-long war in Gaza started when Hamas launched a surprise attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, prompting military retaliation from Israeli forces. Nearly 100 hostages remain captive in Gaza.

This is a developing story. Check back for updates.