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As President Donald Trump gets back on the road to host political rallies across the country, he is running into a "new, very embarrassing problem," and according to a new piece from The i Paper, it is an issue that also foretells the death of his MAGA movement sooner than expected.

In recent weeks, Trump has been making numerous rally appearances in safe red states, hoping to stave off the worst-case scenario for Republican losses in a midterm blue wave blowout, where Democrats appear to have serious momentum in states where they are not normally competitive. Despite passing through red states that he won handily in 2024, such is Trump's diminished popularity that he is being met with a problem that cuts straight to his attention-staved ego: a noticeable number of empty seats at his rally venues.

Writing for The i Paper on Monday, columnist James Ball dug deeper into this growing new issue for Trump, noting that his boasts about the venues being packed to the rafters are looking increasingly pitiful in the face of reality.

"As the camera panned around the San Antonio’s Freeman Coliseum as Trump spoke earlier this month, anyone looking at the crowd would see the upper tier was sparsely populated," Ball wrote. "Trump himself noticed from the podium, blustering to explain away the gaps like a schoolchild claiming they really did have a girlfriend, only she goes to another school. In Canada... Even this was better than Trump’s rally in Kentucky, a state he won by 30 points, on Saturday, where the entire upper level of the arena was left completely empty, leading the New York Times to note a comment from an anonymous staffer, who 'said they had expected a larger audience than was on hand.'"

He added: "Rallies are not attended by floating voters or people who vote for the lesser of two evils – the people who go to these events know that they will be queuing up for hours, will have to go through security screening and then will have to wait again for Trump to start speaking. Given Trump’s meandering speaking style, that might take hours, too."

Ball argued that these thinning rally crowds seem to back up the idea that has emerged in certain polls, that a notable segment of Trump's MAGA base is starting to abandon him. The trend is certain to hit Trump's ego, as he has in the past boasted about selling out massive venues with the same passion that he usually reserved for boasting about his ability to pull TV ratings.

Beyond just his ego, though, Ball suggested that the trend sends a chilling message to the GOP about the sturdiness and longevity of the MAGA movement overall.

"Few things will hit Trump harder than the idea that he can’t thrill a crowd of his supporters any more," he concluded. "But those who wish to succeed him as president will be taking notice: if Trump can’t pack out an arena any more, perhaps the MAGA coalition won’t outlive the Trump presidency, after all."

Biographer Michael Wolff recalled in a new post an exchange with Steve Bannon, the former campaign manager and strategist for President Donald Trump, who now hosts his own streaming show, in which the two men tried to figure out how Trump was so easily controlled by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

In his latest column, Wolff observed that Trump continues to excuse Putin regardless of his behavior, with no real understanding of why. He added that it's a puzzle even for his close advisors, like Bannon. Wolff said that he and Bannon watched Trump's 2018 news conference with Putin in Helsinki, in which Trump had his private meeting and then announced that Putin said he had nothing to do with the 2016 election.

According to Bannon, Trump looked like "a beaten dog" as he stood next to Trump.

"Bannon often ran through all the scenarios, financial and sexual, that might have put Trump’s b—s in Putin’s grip, but always concluding that, this being Trump, there was no grift or deviancy that he couldn’t wave away," Wolff wrote. "Were the pee tape to have actually surfaced, Trump, with practiced innocence, would merely say: 'I don’t know who that is. It isn’t me. Look at that, not me at all. Fake news.'"

Bannon even joked to Wolff that Putin might have the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School transcripts and was threatening to go public. Wolff called it "one humiliation" Trump may not be able to handle.

Yet, Trump continues to take every opportunity to defer to Putin. The latest is an effort to buy a tiny amount of diesel fuel from Russia and fork over $4 billion for Putin's ongoing war, despite sanctions on Russia.

Wolff thinks some of it is Trump's payback for the Russia investigation during his first term. Trump was never investigated, but 34 people and three companies were convicted after that investigation. Trump and his allies demanded a special counsel investigate the investigators of the Russia probe. There was nothing they could do other than get one low-level FBI lawyer to admit to a single count of making a false statement. Special counsel John Durham could not secure any other convictions for crimes in Mueller's Russia probe.

Wolff thinks that even revenge is secondary to his real goal: money.

He recalled speaking with Jeffrey Epstein, the trafficker and former friend of Trump's, who died in prison in 2019. Trump was notorious for filing for bankruptcy over failed business ventures. He filed for bankruptcy six times for five companies. So Trump reached a point where few banks were willing to lend him money anymore.

“Here was the advent of the parallel, unbanked economy,” Epstein said in a discussion with Wolff.

“Donald and I,” Wolff recalled Epstein laughing, “certainly understand the opportunity.”

"Remember, nobody wanted to deal with Donald. Why would you? My God," Epstein told Wolff.

Wolff explained that "all this sketchy money—and the sketchy money was suddenly rivaling the legit money—needed people who weren’t asking questions. Sketchy money needed sketchy partners."

So, Trump tried to snag a piece of the Putin empire.

So far, Trump has profited between $2 and $4 billion in his second term. Wolff said White House officials told him Trump is aiming for $20 billion by the time he leaves office.

"And he’d probably like to put in place deals that, when he returns to Mar-a-Lago, can generate for the Trump family $100 million," Wolff said.

It might be why his sons created a new crypto bank, World Liberty Financial.

A Republican election official says she is being threatened with investigation and criminal liability after defying the Trump administration's demands, warning that threats to American elections are now coming from inside the federal government.

Lieutenant Governor of Utah, Deidre Henderson, who oversees elections in the heavily Republican state, revealed the extraordinary pressure she has faced to give up sensitive voter information during an interview with CBS News' 60 Minutes.

Henderson states that election officials are usually threatened with attacks on election integrity coming from non-governmental actors and cyber criminals, but is now receiving pressure from the President Donald Trump administration.

"In the past two elections that I oversaw as lieutenant governor, the threats were all external: non-state actors, cyber security threats and other things," she said to correspondent Lesley Stahl before adding, “But now we also have threats coming from within our own government."

She said the Justice Department unlawfully demanded that states surrender their complete voter registration lists, including confidential information which is protected under state law.

Henderson said officials were asked to provide Social Security numbers, full dates of birth and driver's license numbers. She said federal authorities did not offer any reasonable explanation for their demands or how they planned to use the information. Henderson and 29 other states from both parties refused to give in to the demands.

After the refusal, she received a September letter from the DOJ's Civil Rights Division stating she was under investigation and involved in ongoing litigation over compliance with federal election laws. The department also threatened her with potential criminal or civil liability if she did not preserve the voting records. The dispute came after the DOJ filed a federal lawsuit seeking Utah's voter data.

The Republican Utah Gov. Spencer Cox defended Henderson after the letter became public.

"It is wrong for the DOJ to investigate or threaten the lieutenant governor for carrying out her responsibilities under Utah law," Cox wrote at the time.

Trump administration officials have argued the voter records are necessary to identify noncitizens improperly registered to vote. Harmeet Dhillon, who heads the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, told CBS that there are potentially thousands of cases under investigation.

But Henderson said Utah's own review found just 52 questionable registrations out of more than 2 million voters. The administration has sued states that refused to provide complete voter lists, even as officials say privacy laws protect the data they seek.

This warning comes at a time when a broader federal campaign is underway, including the seizure of 2020 ballots in Georgia and legal action against California over alleged noncitizen voting. The California secretary of state has challenged the government's evidence and said it is threatening eligible voters.

Henderson has no plans to back down from the threats and said she will continue to resist the DOJ’s requests.

"I have to tell myself it doesn't matter what the consequences are, as long as I feel like I'm doing what's right," she said, continuing: "I think this is an important thing for me to do, holding these guardrails, holding the line. Someone has to."

Attorney General Todd Blanche had a profanity-laced reaction, according to information acquired by The Daily Beast, after realizing he had fired a Justice Department lawyer involved with a major MAGA-friendly actor's gun rights case.

The Daily Beast reported on Monday — via its sister Substack, PunchUp — that Blanche cursed after firing pardon attorney Elizabeth Oyer last March. Her dismissal was "part of a wider clear-out of career DOJ officials with links to the Biden administration" that took place upon Trump's return to office, but Blanche realized too late that firing Oyer might give the public the wrong idea.

Oyer was specifically "involved in an internal Justice Department dispute over Trumpy movie star Mel Gibson’s gun rights," the outlet noted. The pardon attorney was reportedly in conflict with others in the DOJ about Gibson, the conservative actor and filmmaker, having his right to own firearms restored. He had previously lost those after being convicted of domestic abuse.

After learning what Oyer was involved in a few days after firing her, anonymous insider sources told PunchUp that Blanche had a heated reaction to the realization, worrying that her dismissal would be interpreted as retaliation for her role in the Gibson case.

“F——! She’s going to think that’s why I fired her," Blanche said, according to sources with direct knowledge of the conversation.

"It is the latest twist in an extraordinary and increasingly bitter fallout at the heart of the DOJ, with department officials furiously disputing Oyer’s account of the events surrounding her removal," The Daily Beast explained. "A spokesperson for Oyer said she repeatedly asked the DOJ for an official explanation for her firing, but they repeatedly refused."

"What they say at this point has zero credibility,” her team added.

The report added further: "Oyer has maintained that she was fired because she refused to recommend that Gibson, 70, have his gun rights reinstated. The Braveheart actor lost that privilege after pleading no contest to misdemeanor spousal battery involving his former girlfriend Oksana Grigorieva in 2011. Oyer has said then-Associate Deputy Attorney General Paul Perkins instructed her to add Gibson to a shortlist of nine other candidates for firearms rights restoration and pressed her when she resisted, alleging that Perkins told her Gibson’s relationship with Donald Trump, 80, should be sufficient reason to recommend him."

Perkins, having since left the DOJ, told PunchUp in a previous report that Oyer's allegations were "categorically false" and "denied ever saying the rules governing restoration needed to accommodate Gibson."

The morning session of court in the East Potomac Golf Course lawsuit with President Donald Trump's administration welcomed Department of the Interior chief of staff Greg Wischer.

Wischer couldn't be found last Monday when Judge Ana Reyes demanded that National Park Service and DOI staff come to court to testify about what was going on. Last week, the judge was furious that her orders were being ignored. By Monday, it was clear she was just as annoyed with the government lawyers. However, she didn't yell at them in the way that she had during last week's hearing.

Wischer's testimony began, and Stanley Woodward, associate attorney general of the United States, objected to several questions from both the plaintiffs and the judge, saying the discussion was covered by attorney-client privilege.

A lawyer was ultimately added to several email exchanges, Lawfare's Roger Parloff revealed in his reporting on the Monday hearing.

"We are asserting privilege," Woodward said after everyone returned from a short break. He said that the matter was under litigation when the email exchanges and meetings took place.

"So, it was DOJ made the decision to notify the court about the tree plan on timing it did; not Interior?" the judge asked.

"I don't know. I can find out," Woodward responded.

"I do want to know," the judge said.

"So there was an understanding that [Tree Management Plan] TMP might be relevant to litigation?" the judge asked.

"Absolutely," Woodward replied. "Also the deliberative process privilege. There is a decision on Oct. 9. All decisions that lead up to that are deliberative. It's my understanding his testimony will be he was going fast and hard on all projects."

"Just a massive coincidence that all this happened?" the judge asked.

Woodward claimed both could be true.

"No, both can't be true. We're not dealing with quantum physics here," the judge said.

"There's an email that does not have attorneys on them. I don't know if that will satisfy counsel. He's not going to say TMP was to execute some broader golf course plan," Woodward said.

"There's no universe where all this happens [that way] ... there just isn't. If you're okay with him answering that question," the judge continued.

Woodward said he wanted to confer with the Justice Department counsel to make sure he's OK with having privileged discussions that he just had with the judge, explained Parloff.

Longtime lawyer Abbe Lowell explained that it's his understanding that "on the deliberative process privilege" that "privilege disappears if there is any reason to believe that government conduct has occurred."

Typically, attorney-client privilege would be between an attorney and their client. If the client is the American government, the question is whether that side-steps open-records laws meant to ensure government transparency.

The judge asked about it, but Lowell said he was only beginning to sort through the research. He thinks it's much broader than that.

Over the weekend, the Trump administration attempted to have the judge recuse herself from the case, saying that she was too overly emotional. It didn't go over well. In her response, she rebutted the argument line by line and refused to step down.