Political strategist Steve Schmidt tore into Donald Trump ahead of the president’s 80th birthday on Sunday — the same day Trump hosts a UFC cage match in an “Octagon” built on the White House’s South Lawn to open the nation’s 250th birthday celebration.

Schmidt, the co-founder of The Lincoln Project and a Never Trump Republican who became a Democrat in 2020, described the president as “Hated And Alone at 80,” an invective on his Substack newsletter.

He notes the “irony” of Trump’s 80th birthday against the nation’s 250th: “At the very moment Trump seeks to place himself at the center of America’s 250th year, he appears smaller than ever. More isolated, aggrieved, obsessed and alone.”

“One story is about a man,” says Schmidt. “The other is about an idea. One story is about vanity. The other is about liberty. One story is about self. The other is about sacrifice.”

Schmidt observed that much of Trump’s life “has been devoted to denying the reality that every human being must eventually confront: time wins.”

“No amount of money can buy another year,” he noted. “No amount of power can stop the clock. No amount of cosmetic surgery, gold plating, self-promotion, propaganda, or flattery can alter the simple fact that every life is measured, finite, and judged.”

He went on to explain that “Trump has spent his life constructing monuments to himself,” and that his buildings, airplanes, golf courses, steaks, university, casinos, “cryptocurrency schemes,” and merchandise all bear his name.

Trump is the project, says Schmidt, yet the “tragedy of his life is that after 80 years he has accumulated power without wisdom, wealth without dignity, fame without honor, and followers without friendship.”

He asks, “where are the genuine relationships that mark a life well-lived?” The “lifelong companions,” “trusted confidants” and “people capable of telling him the truth.” Absent, Schmidt observes.

“The tyrant is always alone,” Schmidt charges. “The narcissist is always isolated. The man who demands loyalty from everyone eventually discovers that loyalty and love aren’t the same thing.”

The American experiment has “endured,” Schmidt notes. “It has survived worse men than Donald Trump. It has survived corruption, demagogues, traitors, cowards, and fools. And it will survive Donald Trump.”

In the end, Schmidt says, “There will only be the answer to a simple question: did this man enlarge the meaning of America, or diminish it?”

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Hard-right groups have expanded their influence inside the Trump administration, a new report on hate and extremism by the Southern Poverty Law Center finds, according to The Guardian. A federal grand jury indicted the SPLC, a civil rights organization, on federal fraud charges earlier this year — months before the report’s publication.

“2025 was a turbulent year marked by injustice, social upheaval and stark new threats from a hard-right movement rapidly establishing its power across institutions,” reads the director’s note to the SPLC’s “2025 Year in Hate and Extremism” series. “The hard right effectively seized the power of government as a messenger for extremist rhetoric and a tool to dictate policies affecting the everyday lives of millions of people.”

The Trump administration “radically” shifted policy to favor the hard-right and extremists, reads the SPLC’s report titled “Empowering Extremists,” which was published Tuesday as part of the series.

The report found that the Trump administration has “shifted the focus of federal law enforcement away from violent crime investigations to sweeping immigration raids through American communities, targeting undocumented people as well as Black and Brown people — often regardless of immigration status and absent any suspicion of a violent offense.”

It states that on Sept. 22, 2025, “Trump issued an overly broad, vague executive order designating ‘antifa’ — a term often applied to people and community-based organizations opposing white supremacy, racism and the far right more generally — as a domestic terrorist organization.”

The Guardian noted that the SPLC report “pointed to conservative influencer Andy Ngo, who told Trump during a roundtable in October that ‘perhaps the state department should designate Antifa … a foreign terrorist organization.'”

“Would you like to see it done?” Trump replied. “You think it would help? I’d be glad to do it. I think it’s the kind of thing I’d like to do. Does everybody agree? If you agree, I agree. Let’s get it done.”

Trump “kept his promise,” the SPLC noted. “In November 2025, the State Department named four left-wing militant groups as foreign terrorist organizations.”

The report stated that the Trump administration’s “law enforcement shifts make Americans less safe,” and its actions increase the “threat posed by far-right extremism.”

“The administration gutted efforts to tackle hard-right extremism and downplayed — and even defended — the threat of right-wing extremist violence,” the report alleges. For example, the DOJ “removed a June 2024 peer-reviewed study from its website that concluded that far-right attacks continue ‘to outpace all other types of terrorism and domestic violent extremism.'”

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President Donald Trump keeps insisting that gas prices aren’t especially high. What many Americans see at the pump tells a different story, and CNN fact-checker Daniel Dale has the numbers to prove it.

As recently as Tuesday, Trump claimed that the price of gas is “not very high, relatively speaking. I mean, it’s lower than during the Biden administration.”

Trump was not especially specific, but Dale is.

According to AAA, today’s average gas price is $4.16. That is lower than the peak number during the Biden administration, $5.02, which occurred after Russia attacked Ukraine in 2022.

“But the current $4.16 per gallon national average is significantly higher than the national average when Biden left office in January 2025, which was $3.12 per gallon,” Dale explains. “And it’s higher than the national average was on 1,334 of Biden’s 1,460 full days as president, figures provided by AAA show.”

Dale reports that today’s price is higher than the price during 91 percent of the Biden presidency, and higher than any day during his final 29 months.

Today’s price is also “much higher” than it was one year ago: $3.12. It’s higher than on the day Trump launched his attack against Iran: $2.98.

The good news is today’s price is lower than the price from one month ago ($4.53) and lower than last week ($4.29).

Trump has repeatedly promised lower prices once the Iran war ends.

Just last week he told reporters, “when it’s all straightened out, you’re going to have oil prices drop down to maybe even lower than they were.”

During his explosive “Meet the Press” interview on Sunday, Trump claimed that as soon as the Iran war is settled, “gasoline prices are going to drop like a rock.”

In May, he claimed the price of gas was “peanuts.” And in mid-April, Trump declared that the price of gas “hasn’t gone up as much as I thought.”

Just weeks after the Iran war started, in March, Trump said that gas prices “are gonna come tumbling down along with everything else” once the war is over.

Dale also found Trump frequently claims he saw the price of gas in Iowa hit $1.85.

“I was in Iowa, another place I like a lot, and it was just before we started the excursion to Iran. And we passed gas stations; it was $1.85 a gallon. And we’re going to get them down to those numbers again very quickly,” Trump said.

That trip to Iowa was in January, Dale notes, when the average price in the state was $2.57. Only a niche blend that is not for use in all cars hit $1.85.

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