President Biden is now hunkering down at his home in Rehoboth Beach, Delaware, on Friday after holding only one public event this week. 

Biden arrived there late Thursday night and remains away from the White House following a tumultuous week around the globe and on Wall Street. He has no events scheduled for today. 

On Friday, the threat of an Iranian counterattack on Israel was still looming large following last week’s killings of top Hezbollah and Hamas officials in Lebanon and Iran. 

Russia also has declared a “federal-level” emergency in its Kursk region bordering Ukraine, according to The Associated Press, where Kyiv has launched one of the largest surprise attacks on Russia since the war began over two years ago. 

BIDEN HOSTS TEXAS RANGERS AT WHITE HOUSE 

Around 1,000 Ukrainian troops are reported to have poured into Russia, where fighting is ongoing. 

Wall Street also has had a shaky week.  

Following a global market sell-off on Monday — which caused the Dow to plunge 2.6%, Nasdaq Composite 3.43% and S&P 500 3% — the jobless claims report out Thursday eased some concerns of a downturn. 

However, one U.S. economist is cautioning that this may be just the beginning of a “reckoning.” 

“There’s a lot of pain ahead of us, both for the economy and this reckoning for the markets that have been really behind the curve, like the Fed,” Macromavens President Stephanie Pomboy said Thursday on FOX Business’ “Mornings with Maria.” 

PELOSI ADMITS BIDEN CAMPAIGN WASN’T ON ‘PATH TO VICTORY’ 

US President Joe Biden speaks as he welcomes the Texas Rangers to celebrate their 2023 World Series championship in the East Room of the White House on Thursday, Aug. 8. It was his only public event of the week. (MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images)

Biden held his lone public event of the week on Thursday when he hosted MLB’s reigning World Series champion Texas Rangers at the White House. 

After Biden gave a few remarks about the Rangers’ championship season, manager Bruce Bochy presented him with a customized jersey. Biden then held up the jersey and posed for a photo. Bochy also gave the president a pair of cowboy boots. 

President Joe Biden arrives at Dover Air Force Base on his way to his Rehoboth Beach home on Thursday night. (AP/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

Moments later, Biden asked, “All right, what am I doing now?” as the guests and players laughed. 

Fox News’ Caitlin McFall and Chantz Martin, and FOX Business’ Kristen Altus contributed to this report. 

Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s new book about major events of her two decades as House speaker or Democratic leader is titled “The Art of Power” — an unintended, she insisted to me, echo of Donald Trump’s “The Art of the Deal.” She writes of the actual, consequential deals she helped deliver, like the Affordable Care Act and rescue packages after the global financial crash, and of the deals that Trump failed to make on infrastructure and so much more.

And Pelosi also tells of her amazement that, of the four presidents she served alongside as House leader, people only want to know about Trump, or “What’s-his-name,” as she calls him.

That should be a small wonder, however, given Trump’s outsized impact and ongoing threat, and her famed forte: standing up to him like no one else. Pelosi provides some behind-the-curtain stuff, including about Trump’s “whiny” call to her in 2019 begging her not to impeach him over his “perfect” call to Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky, and how she corrected him when he opened his first White House meeting with congressional leaders by lying, “You know I won the popular vote.”

“I’ve had a lot of conversations with this man,” she writes, “and at the end of nearly all of them, I think, Either you are stupid, or you think that the rest of us are.”

Yet as Pelosi hit the book-promotion circuit this week, there’s been a shift: Now she is asked mostly about another president: Joe Biden. And specifically, about her latest power play, one too recent to be included in the book: Her role in nudging the struggling Biden, her (former?) friend of four decades, to end his bid for reelection.

Pelosi, ever cagey, won’t go there, though she leaves much to read between her carefully chosen lines.

Her book rollout, with TV appearances and interviews, and nondisclosure agreements to control it all, is competing for attention with the new Harris-Walz Democratic presidential ticket she greatly helped into being.

“Look at the response they are getting!” she exclaimed to me and several other journalists at a roundtable on Wednesday. But she resists any credit for the excitement: “At some point I will come to … peace with my own role in this.”

Though “hundreds” of panicky Democrats called her after Biden’s calamitous debate with Trump, she said she spoke to few and told them to direct their concerns to the president’s circle. “I didn’t make one call,” to build outside pressure on Biden, she said, and repeated for emphasis. Yet she was the obvious emissary to the president himself, given their relationship, similar age — at 82 in 2022, she’d stepped down as Democratic leader — and, yes, her artful exercise of power.

As Biden stood fast, some of Pelosi’s closest allies, including California Reps. Adam B. Schiff and Zoe Lofgren, urged him to retire. “I had nothing to do with that,” she insisted on CNN. And she adamantly denies reports that on a call with Biden she demanded that he put a top advisor on the phone when the president said his staff had more encouraging polling data.

Pelosi does acknowledge she spoke to Biden: “I was really asking for a better campaign. We did not have a campaign that was on a path to victory.”

She wouldn’t take Biden’s public no for his final decision, she told us.

Referring to Trump, and slamming the table with each word, she added: “My goal in life was that that man would never step foot in the White House again.” Yet Democrats seemed to be throwing “rose petals” in his path, and endangering their other down-ballot candidates as well. Then what of Biden’s legacy, and hers?

Since Biden quit the race July 21, Pelosi says she hasn’t spoken with him. Perhaps to foster a rapprochement, she extols him in each interview. He’s “a Mount Rushmore kind of president,” she said on “CBS Sunday Morning.”

Trump, who in 2020 actually tweeted a photo of himself on Mount Rushmore, of course gets no such elevation in Pelosi’s book.

Despite Biden’s debate performance, Pelosi says she’s seen no mental decline in him. Trump is another case, literally. Pelosi writes of attending a memorial service for an eminent psychiatrist and being a magnet for the many doctors there, expressing concern to her for Trump’s mental health. His family and staff “should have staged an intervention,” she writes.

“I knew Donald Trump’s mental imbalance. I had seen it up close. His denial and then delays when the Covid pandemic struck, his penchant for repeatedly stomping out of meetings, his foul mouth, his pounding on tables, his temper tantrums, his disrespect for our nation’s patriots, and his total separation from reality and actual events. His repeated, ridiculous insistence that he was the greatest of all time.”

Take it from a true GOAT, Trump is not one.

Trump did succeed in keeping Pelosi in Congress. She’d planned to retire after 2016, once Hillary Clinton was elected. When that didn’t happen, Pelosi stayed mainly to prevent Trump from repealing Obamacare. Arizona Sen. John McCain confided to her that he’d oppose repeal, so she wasn’t surprised, as Mitch McConnell and so many Republicans were, when McCain’s thumbs-down doomed the effort. “Every day, I wish he were still here,” Pelosi writes.

She is explicit that her book isn’t a memoir. Pelosi focuses at length on four tortuous debates: Iraq and Afghanistan; China’s trade and human abuses; the financial crisis and recovery efforts; and Obamacare. Bookending those chapters are accounts of the near-fatal bludgeoning of her husband, Paul, in 2022 and the Jan. 6 assault on the Capitol. In both, the pro-Trump attackers yelled “Where’s Nancy? Where’s Nancy?”

She’s still here, running for a 20th term representing San Francisco. And she might write another book, she suggested. It might even deal with what might have been among the most artful and consequential uses of her power, the one of past weeks.

@jackiekcalmes

Several progressive women’s groups were silent when asked by Fox News Digital about how second gentleman Doug Emhoff’s affair when he was married to his ex-wife could affect his image as a leader championing their cause.

Fox News Digital sent an inquiry for comment to EMILYs List, the League of Women Voters, the Progressive Women’s Alliance of West Michigan, the National Organization for Women, the National Women’s Political Caucus, the Feminist Majority Foundation, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, the Women’s Liberation Front and the International Center for Research on Women. None of the groups returned a request for comment about whether Emhoff should face heightened scrutiny as potentially the next first gentleman by press deadline.

13 DAYS: KAMALA HARRIS HAS NOT HELD A PRESS CONFERENCE SINCE EMERGING AS PRESUMPTIVE DEMOCRATIC NOMINEE

As the Democratic Party’s standard-bearer husband, Emhoff has been involved in a number of left-wing causes and has encouraged men to advocate for abortion in the aftermath of the summer 2022 decision to overturn Roe v. Wade. Earlier this year, he teamed up with Men4Choice to tour Florida, Arizona and North Carolina to campaign for abortion rights. Meanwhile, his wife was making press stops at abortion clinics.

“This is an issue of fairness to women. Women are dying,” Emhoff said in an NBC interview in May. “It’s affecting man’s ability to plan their lives. And it’s also an issue of what’s next, what other freedoms are at risk. And these freedoms are affecting all Americans, not just women.”

Emhoff, Vice President Harris’ husband, admitted to having an affair with a nanny shortly after the Daily Mail published a report last week that the second gentleman had an affair with his daughter’s nanny and got her pregnant. The nanny’s close friend told the outlet that she did not keep the baby but did not elaborate further.

“During my first marriage, Kerstin and I went through some tough times on account of my actions. I took responsibility, and in the years since, we worked through things as a family and have come out stronger on the other side,” Emhoff told CNN last week of the affair.

KAMALA HARRIS’ HUSBAND DOUG EMHOFF ADMITS TO EXTRAMARITAL AFFAIR THAT LED TO BREAKUP OF FIRST MARRIAGE

Vice President Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, head toward Air Force Two at Joint Base Andrews in Maryland on Aug. 6, 2024. (Brendan Smialowski/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Emhoff and his first wife were married from 1992 to 2008 and share two adult children. Harris married Emhoff in 2014 and helped co-parent his children, who call their stepmother “Mommala.”

The divorce cited “irreconcilable differences” as the motivation behind parting ways, the New York Post reported. 

Harris knew about the affair before they married, and the Biden 2020 campaign knew about it when it was vetting her for Biden’s vice presidential pick, CNN reported. 

KAMALA HARRIS’ HUSBAND DOUG EMHOFF RESPONDS TO TRUMP’S ATTACKS ON HER: ‘THAT’S ALL HE’S GOT?’

Second gentleman Doug Emhoff (Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images/File)

Kerstin Emhoff defended her ex in a statement to the Washington Post on Saturday. 

“Doug and I decided to end our marriage for a variety of reasons, many years ago,” she wrote. “He is a great father to our kids, continues to be a great friend to me and I am really proud of the warm and supportive blended family Doug, Kamala, and I have built together.”

Despite the affair and divorce, Kerstin Emhoff has posted supportive messages about her ex-husband’s second wife and has endorsed Harris on social media.

Get the latest updates from the 2024 campaign trail, exclusive interviews and more at our Fox News Digital election hub.

Fox News Digital’s Emma Colton contributed to this report.