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.

A new New York Times poll put Trump up a whopping 37 points over his closest challenger (Ron DeSantis, at 17 percent to Trump's 54 percent). No other candidate did better than three percent. The Times led off one article on the poll results with the following:

In the half century of modern presidential primaries, no candidate who led his or her nearest rival by at least 20 points at this stage has ever lost a party nomination.

Trump's lead is almost twice that gap. And this isn't any sort of outlier -- when you check the Real Clear Politics list of current polls, a 37-point lead is right in the middle of the pack (which ranges from a 25-point lead in the oldest poll in their current aggregate to a 44-point lead in Trump's best showing). In every poll but that earliest one, Trump's support hits over 50 percent.

DeSantis, meanwhile, is crumbling. He just laid off a third of his campaign staff and his own poll numbers are headed downwards. The only way Trump might have been less inevitable at this point would have been if DeSantis (or any other challenger) were climbing in the polls right now, but instead the opposite is true. And that polling graph might get worse for DeSantis very soon. None of the most recent five polls in the list had DeSantis above 20 percent. He ranged from 12 to 18 percent instead. These five polls average out to 15.2 percent, which is a lot lower than the 18.3 percent he's currently charting. DeSantis is headed in the wrong direction, obviously. And after the fall of DeSantis as the Great Non-Trump Hope, there doesn't seem to be much of anyone to take his place as a plausible Trump-slayer. All the other candidates in the race have slipped below five percent -- none has risen to capitalize on the fall of DeSantis.

DeSantis may go down in political history as the return of Jeb Bush. Remember Jeb? Popular Florida governor? He even had a famous politically-dynastic last name. None of it did him any good when he hit the chainsaw that was Donald Trump's campaign. Both Bush and DeSantis seem remarkably lacking in charisma for being successful politicians, which is probably a big reason the GOP electorate yawns.

Trump is entertaining. That's his biggest value, to his MAGA base. DeSantis is not. DeSantis tried to run on being "Trump without the baggage" or even "a competent Trump, who actually gets stuff done," but no one would ever look at DeSantis and mistake him for a carnival barker. It doesn't matter how many anti-woke laws DeSantis passes or how many fights he picks with big corporations, it is instead how he fights these battles. Imagine just for one minute Trump picking a fight with Disney. Trump would rip into the company on a daily basis, using the most scathingly insulting language he could think up. He would lie about them. He would call for boycotts. He would probably demand Disney re-release the Song Of The South, just for good measure. He would taunt them and personally pick a fight with the C.E.O. Trump would come up with some derogatory label for the company (probably mouse-based) and use it so many times everyone else started using it too.

It's not the fight he picks, it's how the fighter fights it. DeSantis has used a complacent legislature to change some laws and has also harassed Disney in various bureaucratic ways. But he's never come up with an insult that gets the crowds cheering at a rally. Trump does the opposite -- actual results don't matter so much as selling the fight to his adoring crowds. And DeSantis (and virtually all the other Republican contenders) just don't seem to understand this.

Trump is currently almost impossible to beat even if there were a perfect candidate with lots of charisma and a big following. The Times breaks down their polling to show that Trump has a "floor" of 37 percent of the GOP electorate. Over one-third of Republicans are going to vote for Trump come Hell or high water. There is nothing anyone can say to them to change their minds. Here is how that article describes this demographic:

Zero percent -- not a single one of the 319 respondents in this MAGA category -- said [Donald Trump] had committed serious federal crimes. A mere 2 percent said he "did something wrong" in his handling of classified documents. More than 90 percent said Republicans needed to stand behind him in the face of the investigations.

There is another 37 percent of the GOP electorate described as "persuadable" -- they might vote for Trump, but they could be persuaded to vote for someone else. Of this 37 percent, 17 percent currently lean towards Trump. The remainder of the GOP electorate -- 25 percent -- are never-Trumpers, some of whom will not even support Trump in the general election (they would likely stay home and not vote instead). Support for DeSantis draws from both the persuadables and the never-Trumpers, but only to the tune of 17 percent.

Even if Trump only does manage to pull just his floor of 37 percent in the primaries, he will still likely win. He did exactly this in his 2016 run, please remember. And this time around his campaign has learned a few lessons. They are getting state-level Republican Party organizations to change their primary and caucus rules in various ways, in order to allow Trump to amass delegates even earlier in the process. Such a rule change was just passed in California, and it may mean no other Republican even bothers to spend campaign money there -- even though California is the biggest haul of delegates there is. Republicans had previously set their system up to anoint a victor as early in the process as possible (mostly by using "winner-takes-all" rules), but this will be even more pronounced in 2024 -- meaning any challenger to Trump is going to have a very small window of time in which to catch fire.

Trump's legal problems haven't hurt him yet, and while they eventually may convince Republican voters that someone else is a safer bet (more electable), he'll still likely hold onto that 37-percent floor, which will be incredibly hard to beat. Even getting indicted twice (in D.C. and in Georgia) in the near future is probably not going to budge the needle one inch -- unless it serves to make Trump even more popular with the GOP base. And none of his criminal trials will take place before the primaries begin. Not only would another candidate have to catch fire (in a debate, or elsewhere), but all the other candidates in the field would probably have to gracefully bow out too, to clear the field down to only two. That is not likely to happen.

So I end where I began. It should be way too early to be making such sweeping predictions in any electoral cycle, I do realize. But barring some unforeseen major and dramatic change to the race, Donald Trump is looking more and more like the inevitable Republican nominee as time goes by.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant