After the Iowa Caucus Monday night, and with polling in New Hampshire showing Donald Trump with a commanding lead, the most recent couple of surveys collected by Real Clear Politics having the former President 14 and 16 points, respectively, over Nikki Haley, the GOP presidential primary cake looks pretty baked.

One of the ways you can tell it’s basically over is how not just voices in regime media are reacting, but how world elites are hitting the panic button over a possible second Trump term. In Davos, Switzerland, this week, the annual gathering of SPECTRE took place, and all the talk, you will find surprising, was not about climate change. It was about potential political change coming, and what must be done to stop it.

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EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen implored the world’s elites to force a collaboration between private sector companies and governments to tackle misinformation and disinformation.

Any clue to whom might be the motivating actor out there on the horizon for which she is concerned? Harvard University, yes, the same college that seems to have a problem with Jews, yet doesn’t seem too concerned about academic frauds as long as they’re reliably left-wing and check off several boxes on the identity politics list, sent a representative to Davos. Naomi Oreskes, an American history professor, was not nearly as opaque as von der Leyen. She openly called for the private sector globally to be dragooned into service to stop Trump disinformation.

The insufferable and interminable John Forbes Kerry made this astonishing pronouncement to calm the fears of his fellow private jet-setting colleagues.

Don’t worry, there are still very serious charges coming on insurrection, Kerry proclaims. The problem with that, of course, is that Kerry is himself peddling in disinformation. If only there were 57 varieties of condiment manufacturers out there to chip in order to assist in the stoppage of this sort of rhetoric. There are no legal charges of insurrection against Donald Trump. There just aren’t. There of course is an endless cacophony of insurrection charges within the realm of the fever swamp on the left, including the Maine Secretary of State, Shenna Bellows, and the Colorado Supreme Court. They, without any due process whatsoever, have concluded unconstitutionally that Trump committed insurrection and tossed him from the ballot as punishment.

Jack Smith, the Department of Justice-appointed Special Counsel, did not include as one of his four counts in the August 1st indictment of Donald Trump a charge of insurrection, or even an incitement of insurrection. It simply did not happen. Kerry is either gaslighting the world, or he’s telegraphing that there’s more banana republicesque legal mud to be flung against the wall in the near future in at attempt to stop Trump.

Even the former director of MI6 in the United Kingdom, their version of our CIA, Richard Dearlove, spoke on Sky News about Donald Trump as a national security threat to the UK.

So it seems as if it’s a fait accompli that November will be Biden V. Trump II, Geriatric Boogaloo. Can Trump win? Sure. Will he? That’s an entirely different proposition.

Joe Biden in 2020 represented, to suburban voters, independents, and seniors as the safe alternative to the exhaustion of processing the daily id outbursts of Donald Trump. What’s happened in the three years since? Utter incompetence and disaster on every conceivable measure – inflation this country has not seen in two generations, crime exploding in many of the nation’s most populous cities, anti-Semitism rearing its ugly head, premeditated surrender in Afghanistan, followed by premeditated surrender of our southern border. Everywhere you look, you’d be hard-pressed to find an administration that has done the republic more damage with less competence than the Biden-Harris team. Biden’s job approval is in the mid-30s. Over three-quarters of the country think Biden is too old to try for another term. 76%. The problem of Biden’s age is by far the most unifying issue in American politics today, regardless of partisan affiliation. So why isn’t Trump a lock with that kind of fecklessness he’s facing?

Trump’s response and leadership during the pandemic hurt him in 2020, and hurt him badly. It wasn’t just the economic results of shutting down the economy for way too long a period of time. Suburban women, seniors, and independents just got tired of the shtick and couldn’t do it again for four more years. Trump’s poor reaction to the 2020 Election results cost him a lot more votes he once had. Many of them that voted for Trump twice will never come back. The post-election antics, the rhetoric, Trump’s age, it’s just too big a lift for a lot of people that would otherwise love to vote for anyone besides Joe Biden in 2024. The task for Team Trump at this point is simple. They have to make the pragmatic case for another term without alienating voters further. It sounds like a simple prescription. It’s a Herculean task for Donald Trump and his surrogates.

I lit myself on fire a bit on Twitter this week when I essentially turned the thrust of this column into one tweet, saying women historically are not the most pragmatic of voters, and the President will need to make a sustained pragmatic case to suburbanites in order to pull off the win. Over-generalizing and stereotyping any bloc of voters is usually not the best idea, to be certain. But Donald Trump has a black swan event-like ability to turn voters, both for him and against him, into emotional voters, not pragmatic ones. The emotional voters are locked in stone. People that love him will vote for him. There are a ton of them in the American electorate. Those that hate Trump, again, almost half the country, will crawl through broken glass to vote against him. To the few but decisive undecided or earnable voters, Trump will have to make his case pragmatically.

The most recent stats available about the U.S. population and divorce is staggering. In 1920, less than 1% of adult women in the United States had gone through a divorce. A century later, that number has grown to 15%. 25% of all Americans 18 years and older have gone through a marital split. That’s tens of millions of people. To a whole lot of them, Donald Trump embodies everything they don’t like in their ex-husband. How does Trump overcome that narrative?

First, with any chronic problem, the first step is admitting that you have a problem. The former President has characteristically not admitted any mistakes at all, but nevertheless, his rhetoric has softened as of late. He seems to be at least thinking about what his words sound like to general election voters since the Iowa results Monday night. He no longer refers to Nikki Haley as Bird Brain. He is focusing on crime, the border, and education reform in all of his rallies. He is calling for uniting as Americans to make the country better. All of these issues are hot button issues for women and independents. He’s also trying to regain his momentum with seniors by promising to protect Social Security and Medicare.

Suburban voters were the driving factor in Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s election in 2022. He was a very disciplined campaigner, and stayed focused on the issues suburbia care about, and did so in a way that was winsome, positive, and forward-looking. That may be too much to ask from a Donald Trump campaign, but the more he can adapt to the Youngkin model, the better off his chances in November will be.

Polling indicates that the former President is gradually making inroads with African-Americans and Hispanics. That alone should give Democratic political strategists night sweats. But if Donald Trump can tone down the turn-off factor and gradually, over time, demonstrate to suburban voters from center-left to center-right that he learned his lessons from what didn’t work last time, and will restore what did work, which he can point to on a lot of issues, many, not all, will probably come home in November. If that happens, not only can Donald Trump win, but he probably will.

A friend of mine and I came up this week with a tongue-in-cheek, pragmatic argument to make to Never Trumpers about the choice of Trump V. Biden. If you’re in the Never Trump camp, you almost have to come just about full-circle by this point, where a vote for Trump is probably the easiest and quickest way to be done with him once and for all. If he loses, he’ll return again in four years, and we’ll have to deal Trump candidacies endlessly. If he wins, he’ll serve his term and we’ll finally be done with him in four years. There’s closure on the horizon. If you’re a conservative Never Trumper, you believe that regardless of who wins, Biden or Trump, the country will be a disaster and run by a clown show administration. So the quickest and best path to freedom from Trump, if that’s your desire, is to treat him as the over-amorous dog on your leg. Maybe the smartest play is to just let him finish what he started and then clean up from there.