As you know, this morning ex-President Trump announced that he’d received a target letter from prosecutor Jack Smith. While nothing is certain, this means there’s a strong likelihood that Trump will be indicted for his attempted coup in late 2020, culminating on January 6th, 2021. Yesterday Georgia’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected Trump’s Hail Mary bid to shut down Fulton County (Atlanta) DA Fani Willis’ investigation into Trump’s election tampering in Georgia. Indictments there seem likely as well. Trump has of course already been indicted for his theft and refusal to return classified documents in federal court in Florida as well as fraud in New York City. It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself.

Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.

Trump says he got a target letter from Jack Smith in the J6 probe. Normally that means an indictment is quite likely. And with the pattern of the letter followed by the indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, even more so. Nothing’s for certain. But we should now operate on the assumption that Trump will be indicted for the January 6th coup, which of course involves acts going back a couple months before the violence on January 6th. Josh Kovensky has our first report.