WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) – The making of a president 2016 has already begun.

Republican frontrunner Donald Trump gave a major foreign policy address this week with all the trappings of a commander in chief — American flags in the background, dark suit with the stars-and-stripes lapel pin, white shirt, red tie, and, wonder of wonders, a teleprompter to stay on script.

Trump, who is nothing if not a good performer, mostly pulled it off, prompting MarketWatch Washington bureau chief Steve Goldstein to comment, “Squint and you can almost see Trump speaking from the Oval Office.”

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The makeover that began with Trump’s uncharacteristically short and concise victory speech after the New York primary is in full swing, with the aim of transforming the rowdy, rambling brawler of the primaries into a distinguished statesman capable of taking on the most powerful political office in the world.

It could work.

After all, Theodore White’s best-selling “Making of the President” series, which began with his chronicle of John Kennedy’s successful 1960 run, soon became Joe McGinnis’s “The Selling of the President” about the equally successful packaging and marketing of candidate Richard Nixon in 1968.

And who is better at marketing and branding than Donald Trump?

The Democrats are in more trouble than they realize proceeding with their rigged effort to crown Hillary Clinton as their nominee.

Who really thinks it’s a good idea to field a candidate with that much baggage and with a 56% unfavorable rating?

The Democratic Party bosses take comfort that Trump’s negatives are even higher, thus logically pointing to a Clinton victory in this war of attrition.

But, as Clinton herself constantly proclaims, she is the battle-scarred veteran of the trenches, and her favorability ratings are likely to move much more sluggishly.

Trump is new to this game and his ratings are more fluid. There is every reason to expect that as he pivots to a new look and demeanor, his favorability rating will improve.

As for the content of that foreign-policy speech, the mainstream media predictably found it “incoherent” and full of “paradoxes.” As if the foreign policy followed by President Barack Obama and his erstwhile secretary of state, Hillary Clinton, was a resounding example of coherence.

There is actually a good deal of internal coherence in Trump’s analysis of America’s place in the world and his policies, and it fits in well with the general themes of his campaign. Read the speech and judge for yourself.

“America First,” like “Make America Great Again,” has considerable resonance with a wide swath of voters through any number of swing states that Trump could well move into his column in a general election. (Sorry, pundits, no one really cares if the expression was first used by Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh in the 1930s.)

And let’s look at the widely touted impact on the down ticket — that aversion to Trump will swing a number of contested Senate seats to the Democrats and enable them to regain control of the Senate while making considerable gains in the House.

That may be too optimistic, especially considering that the trend under Obama has been for the party to lose ground.

Data from University of Virginia analyst Larry Sabato published this week in the Washington Post showed that Obama set new standards in this regard.

Democrats have lost a net 11 governorships during his tenure, as well as 13 Senate seats, 69 House seats, and control of 32 (!) state legislative chambers — far more in every case than Republicans under that party’s presidents and mostly more than other Democrats have lost.

Why should Democrats gain under Clinton’s standard after she has wrapped herself in the “success” of the Obama administration?

The Democratic Party leadership is for the most part geriatric and sclerotic, and even the feisty independent trying to win a new generation to progressive policies is 74.

Conceivably, Hillary Clinton could do a pivot of her own and wholeheartedly embrace the policies championed by Bernie Sanders, which have generated so much of the energy and enthusiasm in the Democratic primaries.

No matter how convincingly Sanders endorses Clinton once she has actually won the nomination, it is not his responsibility to keep that enthusiasm alive.

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The ability to generate enthusiasm is nontransferable and if Clinton wants to keep those voters, especially young people who would be voting for the first time, it is up to her to motivate them to go to the polls.

She has shown little inclination so far to do that, apparently confident that she has the “Obama coalition” well enough in hand to win the election and that organization will do the rest.

But it won’t be fear and loathing of Trump that gets these young people to the polls. It is Trump who is making the more successful opening to the center, with his support for Medicare and Social Security and his opposition to trade pacts.

He, too, could promise some relief for student debt along with his raising hopes of more and better jobs.

These young voters aren’t bogged down in the past. They don’t care if someone calls himself a socialist, and they certainly won’t care that Charles Lindbergh was the first to use the expression “America First.”

Hillary Clinton, as Wall Street Journal columnist Daniel Henninger noted this week, is much likelier to pivot now to the halcyon days of President Bill Clinton, perhaps throwing Obama under the bus now that he has served his purpose of winning her the nomination.

But for many of these young voters, the first Clinton administration is something they read about in history books, and it would be hard to overestimate the degree of Clinton fatigue among older voters.

We’ll see who does a better job of packaging and selling, but it would be premature to count on seeing a second President Clinton.