Report: Trump Was ‘Riled Up’ by Gen. Kelly’s Claim President ‘Evolved’ on Border Wall

President Trump was “riled up” by comments made by White House Chief of Staff Gen. John Kelly, who claimed that the president had “evolved” on his demand for a U.S.-Mexico border wall.

According to the New York Times, Trump had become angry that Kelly said in an interview this week that the president’s views on immigration and border security had somehow softened.

Kelly said of Trump’s supposed “evolutionary process:”

“There’s been an evolutionary process that this president has gone through,” Kelly said in an interview with Fox News host Bret Baier, pointing out that Trump had “very definitely changed his attitude” towards DACA recipients and the wall.

“He has evolved in the way he’s looked at things,” 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.”

After hearing the comments, the New York Times says Trump was “initially calm,” but that after speaking with colleagues and friends, he became “riled up” that Kelly had undermined him publicly on his staunch pro-American immigration reform agenda.

The New York Times reported:

Yet early Wednesday evening, after learning from a White House aide that his chief of staff, John F. Kelly, had described his views about his signature campaign pledge to build a wall on the Mexico border as “not informed,” and his thinking as “evolving,” the president was initially calm.

It did not last. By Wednesday night, Mr. Trump had become convinced by a string of allies and friends he had talked to on the phone that Mr. Kelly had undermined him, according to people familiar with the conversations. And by Thursday morning, after digesting accounts of Mr. Kelly’s comments on cable news, the president was riled up.

As the television blared, he typed out a series of tweets that rebutted Mr. Kelly without actually naming him. “The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it,” Mr. Trump wrote at 6:15 a.m. Later in the morning, the president spoke to his chief of staff, and made his displeasure clear, according to two people familiar with the conversation.

As mentioned by the New York Times report, Trump refuted Kelly’s statements online, without mentioning his Chief of Staff.

In exchange for giving amnesty to nearly 800,000 illegal aliens shielded from deportation by the President Obama-created Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, Trump has demanded the Republican-controlled Congress pass legislation that would end the process known as “chain migration,” which allows newly naturalized citizens to bring an unlimited number of foreign relatives to the U.S., and end the Diversity Visa Lottery program, which gives out 50,000 visas to foreign nationals every year in a random lottery process.

If not ended, chain migration is expected to import seven to eight million foreign-born voters to the U.S. in the next two decades, as Breitbart News reported. Five years of chain migration to the U.S. has exceeded one year of all American births: about about million U.S. babies are born every year, Breitbart News reported.