Donald Trump has made hard-line immigration policy a centerpiece of his political agenda, staking his legacy in part on a brutal border-wall fight with Congress. He emerged from that fight largely worse off, bested by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who called the wall “immoral, expensive, [and] unwise”—a characterization supported by economists. And apparently, she’s not the only one who thinks so.

In an interview on stage at Duke University Wednesday, former White House chief of staff John Kelly, who left the administration in January, tore into his former boss’s immigration platform, calling the wall a “waste of money” and breaking with the president’s characterization of immigrants from Mexico and Central America as violent and dangerous to Americans. “They’re overwhelmingly not criminals,” Kelly said. “They’re people coming up here for economic purposes. I don’t blame them for that.”

“We don’t need a wall from sea to shining sea,” the retired general added.

Kelly not only bashed Trump’s signature issue, he also seemed to take a dig at Trump himself, calling his year and a half as chief of staff “the least enjoyable job” he’s ever had, and telling the crowd that he saw his role as a civic duty—one he would have likely carried out if Hillary Clinton, Trump’s mortal enemy, had won the 2016 election and asked him to fill it instead.

Throughout his White House tenure, Kelly was sometimes regarded as one of the “adults in the room,” a kind of frustrated dad to Trump’s screaming toddler. Of course, that characterization has always been flawed. Kelly, at times, enabled some of Trump’s worst tendencies, including in 2017 when he launched a vicious, false attack on Rep. Frederica Wilson, the congresswoman who’d criticized the president’s comments to the widow of soldier La David Johnson. He also dismissed and papered over horrifying abuse allegations against former White House staff secretary Rob Porter. And, naturally, his mandate to contain Trump did not go quite as planned.

Still, Kelly represented a faction of the administration that maintained at least some independence from Trump, however small. That cadre is mostly gone, forced out and replaced by what seems to be evermore sycophantic Trump devotees. That Kelly is publicly breaking with the president after the fact may bolster his image as a one-time moderating influence on Trump, albeit one that, like so many others, ultimately proved unsuccessful.

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