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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It has been one of those days as a political commentator where you have to chuck out what you've been working on and start all over again. While I had three-fourths of a column written about new election-interference indictments handed down in Michigan today, late in the day (East Coast time) Special Counsel Jack Smith's federal grand jury indicted Donald Trump on four felony counts, all having to do with Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election had somehow been stolen from him.

I just finished listening to Smith give his brief statement to the press and then sat down and read all 45 pages of the indictment -- which I urge everyone to take the time to do. I will doubtlessly have much more to say about it all in the coming days, but wanted to write down a few snap reactions and then indulge in a bit of speculation -- on a mystery that will likely be solved by the rest of the political journalistic world by the time the sun goes down (if they're worth their salt at all, that is): who are the six unindicted (as of yet) co-conspirators?

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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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As the ghost of Richard Nixon might have warned Donald Trump: "It's not the crime, it's the cover up." While the political world was all breathlessly awaiting a new Trump indictment over the failed January 6th insurrection attempt, the special counsel surprised everyone by superseding his first indictment instead -- the one dealing with Trump's refusal to return national security documents which were not his. And it was a bombshell.

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Forget about term limits -- what American politicians need is a mandatory retirement age. Once they hit that age, they would no longer be eligible to be elected to any federal office. This is a radical proposal that would likely require a constitutional amendment, I fully admit, but I still feel the effort would be worth it.

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I begin today by apologizing for getting ahead of the calendar, as the official "Silly Season" hasn't quite kicked off in Washington yet. Congress has yet to scarper off on their annual five- or six-week vacation (with full pay, courtesy of American taxpayers), so we have yet to hit the real dog days of summer in D.C.

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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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Due to technical reasons (and not having a full-time staff to do this stuff the way big media organizations do), I wasn't able to post photos with all the stories from the Democratic National Convention. Instead, I'm just going to present them all together in this "album." A lot of these were mentioned in my previous coverage, but some of them are just random convention shots.

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