President Donald Trump's tweets Thursday come amid tense negotiations over issues tied to key government funding legislation that must pass in order to avoid a shutdown by Friday. | Nicholas Kamm/AFP/Getty Images Trump contradicts Kelly, says border wall stance 'never changed'

President Donald Trump insisted Thursday that his position on his long-promised border wall “has never changed or evolved” and that Mexico will end up paying for it, apparently responding to and contradicting his chief of staff's comments a day earlier.

“The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it,” the president wrote online in the first of two posts. “Parts will be, of necessity, see through and it was never intended to be built in areas where there is natural protection such as mountains, wastelands or tough rivers or water.”


“The Wall will be paid for, directly or indirectly, or through longer term reimbursement, by Mexico, which has a ridiculous $71 billion dollar trade surplus with the U.S.,” he continued in the second post. “The $20 billion dollar Wall is ‘peanuts’ compared to what Mexico makes from the U.S. NAFTA is a bad joke!”

Trump promised throughout his 2016 presidential campaign that he would build a wall at the U.S.' southern border and that Mexico would fund it. But at a meeting with Democratic lawmakers on Wednesday, White House chief of staff John Kelly said some of Trump’s campaign promises on immigration issues had been “not fully informed,” according to a statement from Rep. Luis Gutiérrez (D-Ill.).

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The chief of staff said that “a concrete wall from sea to shining sea” would not be built and that Mexico would not pay for it, The Washington Post reported.

Kelly, in an interview Wednesday with Fox News' Brett Baier, also said the president "has changed the way he's looked at a number of things" and that experts had shown Trump that along the U.S.-Mexico border, there “are places where, geographically, a wall would not be realistic.”

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

White House deputy press secretary Raj Shah told reporters abroad Air Force One Thursday that Trump was venting frustration with how the press handled Kelly's remarks in his tweet. “The president is upset with the media coverage about the interview and taking the chief’s comments out of context,” he said according to a press pool report.

Trump told reporters during a visit to a Pennsylvania manufacturing plant on Thursday that Kelly "has done a really great job."

Still, the president’s apparent pushback against his chief of staff, who has sought to keep Trump on track and bring discipline to the West Wing, comes amid tense negotiations over immigration and border security that have become tied to key government funding legislation, which must pass in order to keep the government open beyond Friday.

Democrats say protections for so-called Dreamers — undocumented immigrants brought to the U.S. as children — must be addressed as a condition for funding the government, and they are threatening to oppose a short-term funding extension Republican leaders have crafted that would not address the immigration issue.

Trump and Republicans on Capitol Hill counter that any deal for the Dreamers, who are set to lose a set of Obama-era protections including work permits, must be paired with immigration reforms and border security measures, including money for the president’s proposed wall. Negotiators on Capitol Hill have at times seemed close to a deal, only to have preliminary agreements struck down by Trump.



Trump’s statement that the wall need not stretch contiguously and unbroken along the entire U.S.-Mexico border is consistent with his rhetoric for months, although an executive order signed by the president just days after his inauguration on border security and immigration enforcement calls for a “contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier” along “the contiguous land border between the United States and Mexico.”

Kelly, a Marine general who served as secretary of homeland security before joining the White House, has refashioned the chief of staff's job into one aimed at damage control. But he has had a difficult relationship with Capitol Hill, and some in the White House say he has tried to maintain too much control over the president.

Cristiano Lima contributed to this report.

