Over the nine months of his presidential campaign, Donald Trump has yet to step to a podium and read from a script. That changes Monday, when he is set to address more than 18,000 people attending the annual American Israel Public Affairs Committee conference in Washington.

He’s also looking to surprise the crowd with something else: substance.


“He has taken input from a number of very significant Jewish influences who have reaffirmed to him the importance of this particular speech,” according to a source close to Trump’s campaign. “He is taking it very seriously.”

As he closes in on the Republican nomination, the unconventional and controversial candidate is taking steps to address concerns about his seriousness and whether he has the policy chops and intellectual curiosity to be commander in chief.

The anti-establishment firebrand is spending the entire day in Washington, D.C. on Monday. He’ll meet with two-dozen influential Republican lawmakers and lobbyists and hold a press conference ahead of his speech to AIPAC that evening. The speech, prepared over the last week and finalized last week, will “outline his depth of knowledge about the U.S.-Israel relationship and his 30 years of supporting Israeli causes,” the source continued.

But, like most of the raucous, off-the-cuff speeches he delivers at his rallies, Trump’s remarks at AIPAC Monday are likely to be marred by various forms of protest from attendees unwilling to let him turn the page on months of controversial statements.

Ted Cruz, John Kasich and Hillary Clinton are also scheduled to speak Monday at AIPAC, the annual policy conference of the country's foremost pro-Israel organization, an influential bipartisan group with members from all 50 states. But the other candidates’ planned appearances have not generated anywhere near the controversy of Trump’s. Many members argued that he not be invited at all. And groups who oppose him are planning to make their voices heard.

There will be a walkout by rabbis who plan to study passages of the Torah focused on tolerance while Trump is speaking. Others are planning to wear buttons signaling their opposition to Trump. Some are mobilizing via social media and urging attendees to sit silently through Trump’s speech without reacting at all.

“We didn’t want to walk out or be disruptive — his campaign thrives on that — but we did want to make a statement about our discomfort with his campaign,” said Rabbi Adam Raskin of Potomac, Maryland, who will be among 300 rabbis wearing “Rabbis Against Trump" buttons because his campaign, Raskin continued, “is at odds with Jewish values and American values.”

In early December, Trump took a lighter approach when addressing the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Washington. “I’m a negotiator like you folks,” he joked.

“Is there anyone in this room who doesn’t negotiate deals? Probably more than any room I’ve ever spoken.” The Catskills comedy routine brought guffaws and gasps from the crowd — as did Trump’s blunt refusal to suck up to the donors who were mostly supporting other candidates and his casual statement questioning Israel’s commitment to the peace process.

That won’t work at AIPAC, even with those who are open to hearing what Trump has to say.

"He’s said a wide variety of things over the years in public life, most of it favorable, and some statements are more ambiguous,” said Josh Block, President and CEO of The Israel Project and a former AIPAC spokesman. "Clearly the audience is looking to hear from him — and from the other candidates — the specific details of their views about these issues.”

But it’s not Trump’s comments or his opaque policy positions on Israel and the Middle East that bother many of the Jewish leaders who plan on protesting him Monday. It’s the general demagogic tone and tenor of a campaign and candidate who, they believe, is dividing the country.

“When he belittles his opponents, refers to ethnic groups as a monolithic group, the way he speaks about immigrants with disdain, the way he encourages violence, those are things that have been turned against Jews and used against Jews in the not-so-distant past. So there is a real sensitivity to that in our community,” Raskin said. “Those are issues we feel a responsibility to respond to as people who are teachers of religion.”

“What Donald Trump has engaged in is something significantly different than any other candidate in political history. For obvious reasons, the challenge to those who are somehow ‘the other,’ and the use of inflammatory language, the rhetoric of hate and division, we think is unbecoming not only of a presidential candidate but anybody in American political discourse,” said Rabbi Irwin Zeplowitz of Port Washington, New York, whose newly formed group, “Come Together Against Hate,” plans to sit through Trump’s speech in silent protest.

Michael Koplow, the policy director for the Israel Policy Forum based in Washington, wrote last week about the importance of sending a message to Trump.

“AIPAC cannot be seen as legitimizing Trump, even if it provides him with a pulpit,” he wrote on the IPF’s ‘Matzav’ blog. “If this means allowing the crowd to boo, or multiple anonymous quotes to journalists from AIPAC grandees about how odious they find Trump, or some other way of signaling that Trump is outside the boundaries of what is acceptable in the American political arena, it must be done. … Trump must be rejected not on the basis of his approach to Israel; he must be rejected on the basis of everything else. What he does or does not think about Israel is ancillary to the conversation, because American Jews and the state of Israel do not need a friend who looks like this.”

While many attendees have their minds made up about Trump, the speech before the high-profile group still offers an opportunity to demonstrate more clarity in his commitment to Israel — he has drawn heavy criticism for saying he wouldn’t take the country’s side per se in negotiations with Palestinians — and greater seriousness in his overall approach to a broader audience of American Jews and the electorate as a whole.

And Trump’s team is pushing back hard at the notion that Trump and his campaign aren’t in line with Jewish values. Michael Cohen, the son of a Holocaust survivor and Trump’s closest Jewish confidant, blasted the protesting rabbis on Twitter last week and questioned their knowledge of Trump in an interview Friday.

"They’re completely propagandized if that’s their belief as to Mr. Trump,” he said Friday. “I know for a fact that no other candidate, Republican or Democrat, has a greater relationship today or in the past with the Jewish community.

“The notion that his values are antithetical to Judaic principles is laughable. His daughter is Orthodox Jewish, many of his executives, some who go back with him 40 years as well as close friends are Jewish. Mr. Trump’s father, Fred Trump, was a staple in the Brooklyn/Queens Jewish communities and taught these standards to his children. The above should be more than enough to satisfy these Rabbis of Mr. Trump’s commitment to Israel and the Jewish people.”

Michael Crowley contributed to this report.