Bye, Felicia Cruz.
"Bye, Felicia Cruz." a katz / Shutterstock.com

So here we are, in the same place that we were two months ago: it's going to be Trump versus Hillary in the general election.

And before you get too excited about Hillary devouring Donald in the coming debates, just remember: smugly dismissing Trump is what got Republicans into this mess.

For now, it's looking pretty good. In a head-to-head race, Hillary beats Trump by 54 to 41 percent. Of course, popular votes don't matter; it's the electoral college votes that win the general election. And polling in May doesn't always reflect November. Donald's spent the last few months meticulously eviscerating his Republican rivals, and we can probably safely assume he has an even more diabolical torture chamber prepared for Hillary. And the nation.

Trump's attacks on Hillary will be as bad as you can possibly imagine, and worse. When she said, "I have a lot of experience dealing with men who sometimes get off the reservation in the way they behave and how they speak," Trump responded with a dog-whistle for misogynists who are terrified of being on equal footing with women: "It was almost as though she’s going to tell us what to do, tell men what to do ... It was a real put-down."

Yeah, can you imagine? She may be one of the most powerful women in the world, but the idea that she might tell men what to do? The nerve. It's unthinkable.

And it'll only get worse. Trump just had lunch with Ed Klein, a conspiracy fabulist whose main body of work consists of wild gossip tales about Democrats based on conveniently anonymous sources.

Among Klein's claims: Chelsea was conceived when Bill raped Hillary; Hillary has brain damage that causes frequent fainting; Bill and Obama once physically fought. He's entirely comfortable making up stories, then changing them, then making up new ones — and now he's taking lunches and writing approving columns about Trump's tactics.

(ThinkProgress called Klein a "disgraced writer," but he's really neither of those things—he never shown the least bit of shame, so I don't think you can call him disgraced. And his gossip columns show no love of language; print may be his medium, but cruelty is his craft.)

And yeah, Cruz was bad. Everyone around him was bad. Right before he dropped out, one of his surrogates said "Ted Cruz is going to do very well tonight," and added that the party would never back Trump because "we're never going to nominate Hillary Clinton with a penis." (I recommend watching, just for the horrified look from the guy's friend at 1:30.)

But boy oh boy, just you wait until Trump sinks his teeth into Hillary. Donald's a walking permission slip for everyone's worst selves to boil to the surface.