Donald Trump will finally be forced to sit in a courtroom to answer criminal charges against him in a trial before a jury of his peers. This trial will begin on March 25th, the judge overseeing the case ruled today. This was the originally-scheduled date for the courtroom drama to begin, which Trump's lawyers tried unsuccessfully to push back as far as they possibly could. The judge just flat-out rejected their pleas for delay, so jury selection will begin late next month.

Just to be clear, this is the New York state-level trial over charges that Trump illegally tried to hide hush-money payments to a porn star and broke campaign finance laws by doing so. Trump is facing 34 felony counts in this trial, which carry a total maximum penalty of 136 years in prison. While that certainly sounds serious, it is in fact the least serious of the four criminal trials Trump is currently facing. It also may be the hardest case to make, at least in the court of public opinion, as it involves legal niceties that aren't immediately apparent to the layman. And even if Trump is convicted in this trial, it is doubtful whether he would even be sentenced to any prison time at all (since he will be a first-time offender in a very white-collar crime).

The other three criminal cases against Trump are all much more serious and much easier for the public to understand, so it is kind of a shame that the porn-star case will be the first one heard in court. These other three trials are all slogging through various roadblocks, which has made even coming up with a firm scheduling date for them impossible so far.

If the scheduling of these court cases were up to the prosecutors (rather than the various judges), they would probably choose the federal classified documents case to go first. This case is the simplest one and the easiest to prove. It is, in fact, going to be somewhat of a slam-dunk before a jury. Here's a one-sentence summation of the case: Trump illegally took national security documents with him when he left the White House, he kept them in unsecure locations at his various residences, he shared them with people who weren't cleared to see classified information, he refused to hand them back when the government demanded them, he lied about whether he had them at all, after getting a subpoena that demanded their return he still held most of them back, he lied about having turned all of them over, so the feds eventually had to get and serve a search warrant to retrieve the hundreds of classified documents back. That is all pretty cut and dried, and the various defenses Trump has attempted to make in public don't even address the actual crimes he is charged with. It does not matter whether the documents were declassified by Trump or not, for instance, since they were still national security documents (the identification in the law that Trump is accused of breaking). The closing argument against Trump would be pretty simple to make: "He took national security documents he wasn't allowed to have. He didn't give them back, even when subpoenaed. He lied about it. This was all against the law. The prosecution rests."

Unfortunately for us all (except Trump), by the luck of the draw, this case was assigned to the most Trump-friendly judge one can imagine -- a judge Trump himself named to the federal bench in the final days of his presidency, in fact. This judge has been bending over backwards to make every favorable ruling she possibly can for Trump's side, and this is doubtlessly going to include a huge delay in the scheduling date -- which is currently set for May 20th but which will likely get pushed back until at least "after the election is over." The only chance we will see this case go to trial before the election is if the prosecutor successfully makes a motion to the appellate court to reassign the case to a different judge for reasons of judicial bias. This is not as far-fetched as it may sound, since the judge has been making some rather bizarre rulings in the case (all of which favor Trump). But even if that were to happen quickly, a new judge would have to take some time to get up and running on the case, meaning the earliest it could possibly be tried might be this summer. And that's only if it gets a new judge -- if the current judge keeps the case, the delays will no doubt endlessly continue.

The other two cases both deal with the same underlying accusations, one at the federal level and one at the state level in Georgia. These are the most important of all of Trump's cases, since they deal with not just the January 6th insurrection but also with Trump trying to subvert the election in subtler ways (such as sending slates of "fake electors" to Washington, so that Mike Pence could overturn the will of the people in a presidential election). These cases both deal with election interference (to use Trump's favorite term) on a grand scale, and at least one of them should really be tried before Trump appears on the ballot this November. Voters deserve to know whether Trump is guilty of trying to overthrow the last presidential election before we have the next one, to put it plainly.

Both of these trials are currently on hold. The federal trial was originally scheduled to begin March 4th, but this date has already been tossed out (and a new date has not been set). This was due to Trump filling a pre-trial appeal that claimed he had absolute executive immunity for all criminal acts he may have done while he was president. Trump lost this rather ridiculous argument in court, and then he lost again at the appellate level. This week he filed with the Supreme Court in the hopes that they will now take up his appeal, all of which has frozen the timeline for when the case will actually be heard in a courtroom. The Supreme Court could either refuse to hear his appeal -- which would put the case back on track with minimal delay -- or, conversely, it could consume so much time with his appeal that it would make it impossible to hear the case in court before the November election. If the Supreme Court moves quickly, the trial would likely be scheduled immediately after the porn-star case finishes (or the porn-star case could even be delayed to allow the January 6th case to go first, but that's a longshot at best).

The Georgia case is also on hold, for different reasons. The prosecutors in the federal and state cases took very different approaches in charging Trump. The feds zeroed in on Trump alone and kept their charges very focused and specific. The Georgia prosecutor went in the other direction, charging Trump and over a dozen co-conspirators with sweeping violations of the RICO laws (which are usually used against organized crime figures). This is going to mean a sprawling trial that will take many months to conduct, no matter the outcome. Even sitting a jury is likely to take many weeks. And it hasn't even gotten a tentative scheduling date yet (the prosecutor asked for one in early August, but that's probably not going to happen). Today, a hearing was held which might end up with the prosecutor being kicked off the case for having an intimate relationship with one of her own team, which (obviously) has complicated the entire prosecution effort. So the odds are that even if this case begins before the election, it likely won't end before then (the prosecutor even already talks about it continuing "into 2025").

These are all just the trials where Trump has been personally accused of felonies, and not the full extent of the court cases which might also impact the election. The Supreme Court just heard a case where certain states are trying to bar Trump from even appearing on ballots, due to him violating the Fourteenth Amendment by giving aid and comfort to an insurrection. A decision in this case is expected on an expedited basis. There is another Supreme Court case unrelated to Trump where one of the January 6th insurrectionists is challenging the law he was charged under, saying it does not apply to his actions. If the high court agrees, this could undermine the January 6th charges against Trump, since he has been charged using the same federal law.

Then there is one big civil trial as well, which could be decided as soon as tomorrow. Trump is being sued in New York for committing massive amounts of fraud in running his real estate empire. He's already essentially been found guilty of doing so, and the only thing the judge has to decide in the case is what penalties he will levy on Trump for his actions. This could include a whopping multi-hundred-million-dollar fine as well as barring him from operating any business in the state of New York ever again. This will be a big news story when the ruling is handed down (tomorrow?), but because it is a civil case it won't involve the prospect of any jail time whatsoever -- at most, it will be a crushing blow to Trump's self-identity of a successful businessman.

Whenever we do get that ruling though, it still will only be a civil penalty. Donald Trump won't be in jeopardy of a prison sentence until he is tried and convicted in one or more of his criminal trials. After over three years of waiting, the American public is finally going to see at least one of these take place, beginning in a little over a month's time. It will be the tawdriest of the charges against Trump, so it will no doubt be fodder for lots of late-night comedians' joke-writers. The other three cases are much less of a laughing matter, though. And the question of whether we'll see Donald Trump answering for any of those charges before a jury of his peers before the November election is still very much an open one, at least for now.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant