Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump gives the thumbs-up during the evening session of the Republican National Convention at the Quicken Loans arena in Cleveland, Ohio on July 18. | Getty Adviser: Trump 'actually operates now almost like a president'

The general election may be 84 days away, but Donald Trump is already acting like the president he is working to be, according to one of the Republican nominee's top foreign policy advisers.

Talking up Trump's proposal of "extreme vetting" immigrants to the United States, foreign policy adviser Walid Phares on Tuesday said the Republican nominee's speech Monday represented an evolution rather than an outright change in policy from his original position of banning all Muslim immigration.


“That exactly shows the evolution, a mature evolution, based on input, on information. He actually operates now almost like a president listening to advisers, people in the intelligence or [who] worked in the intelligence, defense, diplomacy," Phares said on "Fox & Friends."

Trump's position "is very normal," Phares continued, explaining that the candidate "made the initial statement because we didn’t know. We didn’t know a part. Now that we know better, the response is extreme vetting.

"The response is an alliance with Arab moderates and most of the moderates around the world," Phares said. "So that shows that basically there is a strategy, not just a static position.”

Although Trump in December initially called for a complete ban on Muslims entering the U.S., he has since offered multiple alterations and variations in the months leading up to his latest announcement Monday in Youngstown, Ohio. Trump said last month that his proposed ban on foreigners would affect those from "territories" compromised by terrorism, telling NBC's "Meet the Press" at the time that the change represented "an expansion."