When Donald Trump needed a list of potential Supreme Court nominees, he borrowed one from The Heritage Foundation. His proposals on reforming the nation’s tax code and improving services for veterans appear to have been lifted almost verbatim from those of primary rival Jeb Bush. And in 39 minutes of remarks Thursday, he lifted education proposals core to Mitt Romney’s 2012 platform and a plan that bears notable resemblance to a 2014 bill introduced by Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.).

The speech, given in the cafeteria of a low-performing, for-profit Cleveland charter school run by a politically active donor named Ron Packard, is the latest example of Trump’s haphazard, cut-and-paste approach to policy — and his campaign’s eleventh-hour blitz of speeches, delivered via teleprompter, attempting to mask the candidate’s reluctance to invest in a real policy shop.


“They’re faking it and they’re doing a good job faking it,” said Tim Miller, who was a communications adviser to Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, which invested heavily in a policy shop. “They realize people weren’t taking him seriously and he has to do better with college-educated white voters. He doesn’t know anything about it. I would be stunned if he could name a single person on his Supreme Court list.”

During NBC News’ “Commander-in-Chief Forum” on Wednesday night, Trump told moderator Matt Lauer that he has his own policy to defeat the Islamic State even though he will not say what it is and said recently that he plans to ask his generals to devise a policy in the first 30 days of his term (in the same forum, he asserted that the country’s generals “have been reduced to rubble” and hinted that he might replace most of them).

“Partisanship aside, as I listen to him over a long period, it’s clear there’s not a policy there. There’s not a strategy there,” said Michael McFaul, a former U.S. ambassador to Russia under President Barack Obama who was deeply bothered by Trump’s praise of Russian president Vladimir Putin for his strength as a leader and high approval ratings.

“Saying, ‘If Putin says nice things about me, I’ll say nice things about him,’ is not diplomacy,” McFaul continued. “It’s not a national security strategy; and to the extent it signals how he might handle the job, it’s frightening. At the end of the day, our conflict with Russia today is not about Putin and his personal relationship with Obama, it’s about him annexing Crimea and supporting separatists in Ukraine. I just don’t get the sense that he’s thought about these foreign policy issues much at all.”

After bulldozing past his primary rivals largely on the strength of his tough-sounding immigration policy and promises to build a border wall and deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants, Trump’s campaign took several weeks last month to determine how to slightly recalibrate his stance in order to market it to the general electorate. Although he called last Wednesday for a beefed up Immigration and Customs Enforcement deportation force, Trump’s call to begin by deporting undocumented immigrants with criminal records and his openness to some future path to legal status put him more in line with GOP rivals like Bush, Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz and even President Barack Obama, all of whom he had criticized for being “pro-amnesty.”

Back in December 2015, when Trump released his veterans plan, it was virtually identical to the veterans plan Bush had released in October. John Noonan, Bush’s top national security adviser, remembers reading of Trump’s plan on his cellphone while celebrating his birthday with his wife. “I just burst out laughing because it was so identical,” Noonan recalled. “They didn’t even try to mask it.”

Both proposals called for “modernizing” the Department of Veterans Affairs, ending “waste, fraud and abuse” and allowing veterans to be reimbursed for receiving care from doctors outside the VA system. But the tipoff was Trump’s “better support for women veterans” plank, a more esoteric proposal Bush’s team had come up with.

“It was galling. Trump kind of gleefully made fun of Jeb for being an academic, cerebral guy,” Noonan said. “And here’s Trump leaning over his shoulder and copying his homework.”

Trump, who has eschewed most of the trappings of traditional presidential campaigns — he’s invested little in organizational infrastructure, a serious surrogate operation or television advertising — appeared to launch a policy shop in Alexandria, Virginia, in April that was headed by Rick Dearborn, chief of staff for Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.), Trump’s closest congressional ally.

Two people familiar with the operation told POLITICO on Thursday it has suffered from unsteady staffing and little attention from the New York headquarters, as The Washington Post detailed in a Thursday story.

One source said morale in the campaign's policy office in Alexandria was low in part because staff weren't getting paid, despite an understanding on the behalf of at least some policy advisers that they would begin collecting paychecks after the Republican National Convention.

“As far as I know, most people who work in the Washington office were not collecting a paycheck,” the source said.

The source said the policy shop felt “disconnected” from the rest of the campaign.

Another person said of the campaign’s policy team: “It’s pretty ad hoc.”

Stephen Moore, a Trump policy adviser, told POLITICO on Thursday that the Alexandria office “was never much of an operation to begin with. It was maybe four or five or six people and a few research assistants.”

As The Washington Post first reported, there have been several departures among the campaign’s foreign policy advisers. A source close to the campaign said that Pratik Chougule, J.D. Gordon, Ying Ma and William Triplet left the campaign in recent months, as the Post first reported.

Chougule confirmed his departure to POLITICO, while Ma and Triplet did not respond to requests for comment. Gordon, who led the campaign’s national security work, told POLITICO he is joining Trump’s transition team. Ma is a top official at a pro-Trump super PAC.

“The transition thing is getting off the ground,” Moore said. “People are pumped up.”

Stephen Miller, another former Sessions staffer who is now ensconced in Trump’s inner circle, is charged with writing the bulk of Trump’s policy speeches, along with newly hired campaign CEO Steve Bannon, who is on leave as publisher of Breitbart News.

The campaign did not respond to an inquiry about who is advising Trump on education policy.

Prior to his remarks, which began with a scripted attack on Hillary Clinton and a lengthy rebuttal to media reports that he is mischaracterizing his pre-war position on the invasion of Iraq, Trump spent 13 minutes in a classroom talking with students and staffers at Cleveland Arts and Sciences Academy as cameras were allowed in.

Trump proposed a $20 billion block grant program that would redirect existing federal funds and leave it up to states to decide whether the dollars would follow children to public, private, charter or magnet schools. He didn’t specify which existing federal programs would lose funding to pay for this new initiative. The notion of portable funding to expand school choice has been backed by conservatives like former Republican nominee Romney, who made it a big part of his education platform in 2012.

Trump’s proposal bears resemblance to a 2014 bill introduced by Alexander, a leading Republican senator on education issues. That legislation would have redirected federal funding to millions of poor children, which they could use to attend private or public schools of their choice.

After a state lawmaker described laws that restrict the expansion of charter schools across Ohio, Trump expressed hope that those restrictions will be eased, according to a pool report.

“If you look at our school systems all over the country, the sort of, I guess you would say, traditional way, it’s not working out so well,” Trump said. “There’s tremendous opposition, as you know. But the opposition has to break down, and it’s starting to break down, I think, I really believe it, because your results are so incredible.”

The school’s results, however, were given an F grade for student growth over the past year. By comparison, Cleveland’s public school system was graded a C in that category.

“I think one of the most insulting things about the Trump candidacy is just how little regard he has for the demands of the office,” Noonan said. “Trump can go out and read 2,000 words off a teleprompter that were written for him by a policy expert. But until he has the discipline and curiosity to get smart on all these issues, he is going to continue to be seen as a dunce.”

Andrew Restuccia, Caitlin Emma and Darren Samuelsohn contributed to this report.