January 18, 2018

After White House Chief of Staff John Kelly told Fox News that Trump has "evolved" on many of his positions including the border wall, Trump tweeted out this morning that his views on the wall have never evolved.

On Wednesday, Gen. Kelly was interviewed by Fox News' Bret Baier and seemed very candid on a number of stressing issues the administration faces at the moment.

Some important highlights:

Kelly said, "This president, if you've seen what he's done, he has changed the way he's looked at a number of things."

“In one way or another, it's possible that we could get the revenue from Mexico but not directly from their government.”

Kelly said, “Campaign to governing are two different things and this president has been very, very flexible in terms of what is within the realm of the possible.”

On his meeting with the Hispanic Caucus, Kelly said, “There's been an evolutionary process that this president has gone through... and I pointed out to all the members that were in the room that they all say things during the course of campaigns that may or may not be fully informed,” Kelly said.

Trump has “adjusted the way he's looked at” a number of issues, including his strategy in Afghanistan and toward DACA, the Obama-era program that shields illegal immigrants brought to the United States as children from deportation."

As for the wall, Kelly said experts talked to Trump about how there “are places where, geographically, a wall would not be realistic.”

Clearly Trump views learning and adjusting one's strategy as a weakness and will never admit that he's willing to learn anything. which he's done for his entire career.

On CNN, White House reporter Kaitlan Collins told John Berman and Poppy Harlow how angry Trump was.

"President Trump spent last night fuming after his Chief of Staff was on Fox News saying his views on the wall and immigration had evolved since he was on the campaign now that he has taken office."

She continued, "I'm told by sources inside the White House that the president hated John Kelly's interview last night where he said his views on the wall evolved after he made similar remarks during those meetings with Democratic lawmakers on Capitol Hill yesterday where he said the president's views on the wall and on immigration had been misinformed during the campaign but now had changed since he was in office."

"We're certainly seeing the backlash of that. Now this surprising because we don't often see the president often contradict John Kelly. He always says he has great respect for him, hopes he stays as chief of staff for quite some time. Though he's contradicted his SOS, he rarely does so with John Kelly," she said.

"We're clearly seeing a break in that right now."

Gen. Kelly has made his bed and now he can sleep in it with the rest of Trump's enablers.

UPDATE: On Trump, Digby writes:

Personally, I never bought the idea that there was ever a more intelligent Trump and it's just age that's made him incapable. People point to his older videos and show that he sounded more fluent and had a better vocabulary. I don't see it. He looked more normal, he sounded younger, but if you stop to actually listen to what he is saying rather than the sound of his younger voice, you'll see that he was just as much of an imbecile then.

In fact, he said exactly the same things. He has never evolved even a tiny bit from what he thought back in the 1980s. He was shallow and arrogant and completely full of shit, blathering on stupidly about crime, foreigners (who are always "laughing at America") under-funding the military yadda, yadda. In recent years he got on the Muslim and immigration train but that's just an extension of his inherent xenophobia and racism.

He hasn't changed. He's always been a f*cking moron.

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