While it is certainly now going to be a one-subject week, I thought it'd be worth it to take a little pause between Trump's new federal criminal indictment and his impending arrest and arraignment tomorrow to take a look into an aspect of all of this that is (at least, for the moment) being overshadowed by Trump's new felony charges: what is happening at the state level. I will admit that I am partly doing this because I had at least three-quarters of yesterday's pre-indictment article already written, and it seems a shame to just toss it out. But now I have a larger point to make about six other states as well, which I'll get to at the end.

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Nothing is ever completely inevitable in politics, because there is always the possibility of some outside event completely turning the political world on its head. But it's getting harder and harder to use any other word to describe Donald Trump's run for the Republican presidential nomination. The only real big chance this has of changing will come during the debates, but even that has to be seen as a real longshot, at this point. After all, Trump may not even show up for the debates, since he has such an enormous and very comfortable lead in the polls and since precisely zero of his challengers has made any sort of splash with the Republican electorate to date. And if he does show up and debate his opponents, Trump will use the same playground-bully style he always does, and the crowd will eat it up with a spoon. Trump is perhaps not completely inevitable, but he is certainly approaching inevitability.

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One month from now, the first Republican presidential debate will take place. What will happen there is anyone's guess at the moment, but what is already assuredly true is that every candidate not named "Donald Trump" has to see the first debate (and the ones that will follow) as absolutely critical for their chances of success. Bottling lighting at a debate is likely going to be the only way any of them can stand out in any way, and the only chance any of them (excepting perhaps Ron DeSantis) will have of creating a surge of support in the polls.

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We do try to resist the urge (we really do!), but this week it was impossible to focus on just about anything else in politics other than the tsunami of bad legal news for Donald Trump. Remember how Trump dominated each and every news cycle for over four years? Those days are back, sadly enough, and will likely continue (at some degree of intensity or another) for the foreseeable future. He is the quintessential car wreck towards which we all must dutifully rubberneck, so here we go....

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Donald Trump might need a bigger henhouse soon, as more and more of his legal chickens keep coming home to roost. After a very long two years of a whole lot of nothing happening (at least publicly), all of a sudden there is so much prosecutorial news it's hard to even keep track of it all. So I thought it'd be worth doing a rundown of all Trump's legal woes, as things stand right now (barring any further breaking news today).

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I have to begin by immediately offering my apologies to Rodgers and Hammerstein for that title, but the lyrics from The Sound Of Music's "Maria" have indeed been running through my head -- as I contemplate what all the other Republican candidates are going to do in the debate tomorrow night to differentiate themselves from their party's frontrunner, Donald Trump. Especially the ever-so descriptive line: "A flibbertigibbet... A will o' the wisp... A clown."

How do you solve a problem like The Donald, when he's standing center stage and everyone's eyes are on him? How do you deal with whatever Trump says from the podium? How do you stand out from the pack and make an impression on all the voters watching?

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Yes, it's true. This past weekend, I joined 11,000 other people in Phoenix to "feel the Bern," as the supporters of Bernie Sanders would put it. Sanders held a rally in the city immediately after the Netroots Nation conference concluded, which made it pretty easy for me to attend (and take a few photos). Netroots routinely draws a crowd of around 3,000, so even if everyone from the conference went to the Bernie rally (actually, not everyone did), the conference crowd could only roughly have been about a quarter of the people there to see Bernie. The rest were locals from a very red state. All there to feel the Bern, as it were.

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It's time to think about what has previously been in the realm of the unthinkable: Donald Trump might just become the Republican nominee for president. Two months ago, that statement would have elicited nothing but a big old belly laugh from just about anyone who pays any attention to politics. Nowadays, though, nobody's laughing. The very concept has moved from the surreal to the possible. So it's time to actually think about what it would mean for the country and for the Republican Party.

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It has long been a Hollywood maxim: "There is no such thing as bad press." To movie stars, it doesn't really matter why you get your name in the papers, because it puts your name in front of the public, whether for good or bad. The worst tragedy for a Hollywood star is being forgotten by the public, to put this another way. So it doesn't matter what gets you in the news -- a scandal, a real stinkeroo of a movie, whatever -- it reminds everyone who you are and creates the magical "buzz," which means you stand a higher chance of getting better roles in the future.

We seem now to have reached the point where this maxim is true in politics as well, at least for some people. News that would previously have been not just bad but downright disqualifying in the past now boosts your name recognition and actually builds support among your party's base. This is becoming more and more frequent in the age of Trump, as more and more politicians learn how to capitalize on the phenomenon.

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It is "Supreme Court Decision Week" in the world of politics, and while a few earlier SCOTUS decisions of this term turned out surprisingly liberal, the court saved its most radically-restrictive rulings for the very end. Three big rulings this week will have the effect of: (1) removing race from college admissions processes and all but killing affirmative action, (2) halting President Joe Biden's student loan forgiveness program before it starts, and (3) making it allowable -- as long as you cite religious reasons -- for businesses to discriminate against and refuse to serve gay people. This was a pretty grim end to the court's legal term, obviously.

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