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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President Donald Trump’s performance on Sunday’s “Meet the Press” — where he cut the interview short and blasted the moderator as “crooked” — was widely criticized, with many noticing his habit of attacking women reporters.

Among those who noticed was a resident in deep red Trump country: Florida’s The Villages, known as the “largest retirement community in the world,” where nearly seven out of 10 county residents voted for Trump in 2024. One resident recently told BBC News, “we’re as red as red gets.” Indeed, many residents travel in golf carts, often with Trump flags flying behind them.

In a letter to the editor in the Villages News, Edward McGinty wrote that he watched the president on “Meet the Press” and concluded that he is “a total embarrassment to this country.”

McGinty said that “Meet the Press” moderator Kristen Welker is “a very intelligent woman who is very fair,” while “Trump is in the habit of calling people he disagrees with dumb and stupid, especially women reporters.”

McGinty asked: “When will they have the gumption to say back to him, ‘Hey buddy, there is a stupid person in this conversation and I am looking at him right now’?” He lamented that “they are afraid of losing their jobs or being banned from the White House press club.”

“It’s been 10 years since this low-IQ idiot, this con man, came down the golden escalator,” McGinty said of Trump. “That is plenty of time to know—even if you are the most dedicated Republican voter—that this guy is a con man who has no manners and no morals. The whole world is looking at the USA and thinking we have lost our minds, electing the man who tried to overthrow our democracy on Jan. 6, 2021.”

Indeed, as The Daily Beast reported in April, a “Gallup poll conducted in 2025 across more than 130 countries found median approval of U.S. leadership dropped from 39 percent in 2024 to 31 percent in 2025. At the same time, disapproval rose to a record-high 48 percent.” That poll was conducted before Trump’s war in Iran.

It also found that approval of American leadership “declined by 10 points or more in 44 countries between 2024 and 2025, with the steepest declines concentrated among U.S. allies, including many members of NATO,” according to The Daily Beast.

“I have said this many times before,” McGinty concluded. “If Donald had run as a Democrat or Independent, I would still be calling him a filthy pig just like his father. Of course, the MAGA voters will take his side. Why? Because they are exactly like him. People with no morals.”

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