Senior aide [to Donald Trump] Paul Manafort said last week that he’d met people at a number of think tanks and members of Congress to talk about bulking up the team’s policy component, which is smaller than that of leading campaigns in the past.
“We’re finding there’s a lot of interest in working with him, coming on board,” he told reporters.
Manafort spent about an hour at the Heritage Foundation headquarters in Washington last week meeting policy experts at the conservative think tank. Heritage officials cast the meeting as part of an ongoing series of briefings for candidates and their advisers.
Today, Donald Trump is giving a major foreign policy address that is being hosted by the think tank Center for the National Interest (CNI).
In conjunction with the speech, Trump is expected to announce new members to his foreign policy team, and many of them will likely come from the think tank community. After steering clear of Trump, many conservative think tanks appear to be slowly warming up to him.