President Trump on Thursday heaped praise on White House chief of staff John Kelly, seeking to heal a rift over the top aide’s description of the president’s views on immigration.
“He is great. I think he is doing a great job,” Trump told reporters in Pennsylvania when asked about Kelly. “He is a very special guy.”
It was the president’s first in-person response to the chief of staff’s remark that Trump’s campaign pledge to build a wall along the entire length of the U.S.-Mexico border may have been uninformed.
{mosads}Kelly said in a Fox News interview Wednesday that he told members of Congress that the president has “evolved in the way he’s looked at things” and that all politicians “say things during the course of campaigns that may or may not be fully informed.”
“Campaigning 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,” Kelly added.
Trump said Kelly did not call his beliefs “uninformed” and accused the media of taking his comments out of context.
“No, he did not say that. He didn’t say it the way you would like him to say it,” Trump said Thursday.
Trump, however, was reportedly irate at Kelly on Wednesday night, believing the chief of staff’s comments cast him in a childish light and as a leader who does not understand his own policy agenda.
The president’s frustration burst into public view early Thursday morning, when he tweeted, “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it.”
Trump did not mention Kelly by name in a series of tweets on the wall.
The president added that “parts will be, of necessity, see through” and that the barrier “was never intended to be built in areas where there is natural protection such as mountains, wastelands or tough rivers or water.”
The exchanged marked a rare public break between Trump and Kelly, whom the president tapped as chief of staff last summer to bring stability to a White House that had been wracked by chaos.
But Trump has chafed at advisers who have been framed as wise men keeping him on the right path, including former chief strategist Stephen Bannon and Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.
The White House disputed the notion of a Trump-Kelly split.
Spokesman Raj Shah said that media reports, and not Kelly’s comments, caused Trump’s frustration on Wednesday.
“His only frustration is with the media, and that’s what that tweet was about,” Shah told reporters traveling aboard Air Force One with the president to Pennsylvania. “
“The president is upset with the media coverage about the interview and taking the chief’s comments out of context,” he added.
Shah said Trump and Kelly spent much of the morning together, meeting in the Oval Office and in a secure room at the Pentagon with senior military brass.
“They have a great relationship, and that continues,” the spokesman said. 