Heading into tonight's speechifying, I was convinced that Ted Cruz would emerge afterwards as the heir apparent to the Republican nomination in 2020, should Donald Trump fail to win in November. Now, I'm not so sure.

But before we get to the big story of the night, let's start at the beginning. Today, the realization finally dawned in the Trump camp that they had to do something to stop the bleeding over the plagiarism storyline. A staffer was summarily dragged out who offered to fall on her own sword, and magnanimous Donald pardoned her, saying "everyone makes mistakes." So they likely successfully prevented the story from continuing for another day. But it would have been overshadowed anyway (obviously) by the end of the night.

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We have to admit, we don't know where we heard that subtitle, and we certainly can't claim original credit for it. We think we read it in a comment to a Washington Post article, but we're not certain. In any case, as the stream of Republicans fleeing the Donald Trump candidacy becomes a flood, it does seem the appropriate metaphor to use -- the ships are leaving the sinking rat this time, not the other way 'round. We'll get to all of these amusing developments in the talking points this week, because we're devoting the entire section to the "Dump Trump" theme this week.

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To begin with, Great Britain is part of Europe. This is a cartological fact which anyone with a grade-school grasp of geography knows. One is a subset of the other. Three countries (England, Wales, and Scotland) make up the island of Great Britain, and when you add in Northern Ireland (more on them in a moment), you get the United Kingdom. All are located on islands, but those islands are undoubtedly part of the continent of Europe. While Britain may leave the European Union political federation, they will always remain European.

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Newt Gingrich is a smart guy, Washington insiders will tell you. He's certainly smarter than Donald Trump, based on nothing more than vocabulary and the complexity of ideas he is able to comprehend. Newt is currently on Trump's vice-presidential shortlist, which makes sense if you believe what Trump's been saying about his veep pick for months now -- he wants someone with experience dealing with Congress. Newt, being a former Speaker of the House, certainly fits that bill better than most.

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Whither the fabled "Party of Lincoln"? That was the question on the minds of many Republicans this week, at least based on how often they used the phrase. Now, we're used to scathing attacks on character being hurled in the frenzy of a presidential campaign. Indeed, it's woven into the fabric of American politics. It's just that in normal years, these attacks are flung across the aisle, at the other party's nominee. It is extraordinary that all of the vicious attacks we're going to feature in our talking points section this week came from Republicans, all aimed squarely at their own party's presidential nominee. Seriously, when in the past have you ever heard the term "unendorse" used? We haven't checked, but we believe it just got coined and added to the political lexicon. It hasn't existed before because the concept hasn't ever existed before (again, in our own memory, at the very least). But we're going to get to all this in great detail later, so let's just move along for now.

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Has Paul Ryan become so disaffected with Donald Trump that he quietly changed political parties, when no one was looking? The Washington Post, in an unrelated story, ran a photo of Orrin Hatch standing next to Ryan with the caption (emphasis added):

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This column was written from bottom to top today. The reason we started with the end and worked our way back up is that we were inspired to go off on a rant (rather than our usual talking points for Democrats). This was due to unusually high levels of panic in the media this week (actually it's not that rare that mainstream media panic causes us to go off on a rant, just in general). But because we started with this extended rant, we're going to have to summarize the week in lightning fashion here in this intro, because we are way behind schedule now. So without much extraneous commentary, here are the stories we noticed during the week.

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Today, let's just start with some silliness. It just seems appropriate, somehow. Maybe because it's Friday the 13th? For whatever reason, silliness seems like the place to begin (and end) this week. Because, after this silly start, we're going to end this column with a contest to come up with the best playground taunt to call Donald Trump -- and you can't get much sillier than that!

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Another week of presidential primary season has slouched by, which means we personally have been watching way too many debates and staying up way too late watching election results come in, once again. Well, actually, that last one was really just a taunt, since living on the Left Coast means we don't have to stay up nearly as late to find out what happened in Hawai'i as everyone to our east. Heh. Every once in a while, being three hours behind works to our advantage!

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It's not often during a presidential election season that the campaigns get shoved aside in the political universe because something bigger happened, but that is what took place last week with the unexpected death of sitting Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia. The implications for the future of America run deep, which is why it has already become a monumental and historical political fight.

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