As Slate’s Jim Newell pointed out on Tuesday, Donald Trump doesn’t have an immigration policy, but instead only adverbs and adjectives. Trump says he’ll be fair, but also firm; he’s open to “softening” his position on mass deportations, but yet promises it will somehow remain as hard-line as it ever was. All of that makes it impossible for reporters to say with even the slightest specificity what Trump is promising—which is no coincidence given it leaves it to his supporters to color in whatever particular details they want to see.

Still, having to weigh in on a policy that doesn’t exist is proving to be an awkward proposition for the role players on Team Trump, as the Washington Post’s Aaron Blake noted on Wednesday. Consider this telling snippet from an exchange between CNN’s Anderson Cooper and Trump campaign manager Kellyanne Conway on Tuesday night shortly after Trump suggested “there certainly can be a softening” in his immigration positions. As Cooper repeatedly pressed Conway over whether Trump is now backing off his oft-repeated promise to deport all 11 million undocumented immigrants in the United States, the best explanation she could muster was this:

Conway: I am saying what he said there, which is there could be a way to figure out how to do it so to you’re—we’re not here to harm people. And I think that’s a very important phrase out here.

Cooper: So, deportation force, we’re not going to be hearing Donald Trump talking about a deportation force for 11 million undocumented?

Conway: He has not said that for a while.

Oh, OK, then. Say no more!

Conway’s flailing continued as the CNN anchor pointed out that the current talking point coming from Trump Tower—that mass deportations may or may not be part of Trump’s immigration plan—differs significantly from Trump’s original position that put them front and center. “We’re going to look at what he said tonight with respect to that,” Conway told Cooper. She added, “He said that he wants to—he’s not flip-flopping on immigration—and he wants to find a way to execute on his principles, Anderson, without hurting people.”

CBS News’ Sopan Deb, as Blake noted, spotted similar word salad from Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, an immigration hard-liner and early Trump supporter. Sessions was on hand for Trump’s Fox News town hall on Tuesday, during which the GOP nominee made his latest confusing comments about immigration. He appeared to be in the dark on what was clearly the biggest buzzword of the night. “I didn’t hear all of what he said because I was behind the stage,” Sessions told inquisitive reporters, adding: “Did he use the word soften?” Informed the man he has endorsed for president did indeed, the Alabama senator conceded little more than that, “Donald Trump is wrestling with that issue.”

We’ve seen similar dynamics play out earlier this summer as Donald Trump tweaked the wording of his Muslim ban while his team simultaneously implied that he was and was not changing its intent, and this spring when his campaign allies couldn’t decide whether he was or wasn’t going to rework his tax plan.

Again: the only thing Trump is actually promising when it comes to immigration—or pretty much any issue for that matter—is that he isn’t promising anything at all. That, though, is obviously not something his surrogates are going to say. And so instead they speak a bunch of words and say nothing at all.

Read more Slate coverage of the 2016 campaign.