Back in October, two senior Republican officials told the Hive’s Gabriel Sherman that Chief of Staff John Kelly was “miserable” in his role at the White House, adding that the retired four-star general was only sticking around to keep the president from doing something truly unhinged. Kelly, of course, pushed back, promising that he had no plans to leave, and Trump himself predicted Kelly would stay “in my opinion, for the entire seven remaining years.” But much like the recently excommunicated Steve Bannon, Kelly may have thrown his relationship with the president into jeopardy by publicly framing himself as the one person who can keep Donald Trump in check.

This week, both The New York Times and The Washington Post reported that Kelly told members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, who were concerned that Trump would not meet them on a bipartisan immigration compromise, that the president had not been “fully informed” when he made a campaign promise to build a wall along the Mexican border. Specifically, Rep. Luis V. Gutiérrez recalled Kelly as saying that “there were statements made about the wall [during the campaign] that were not informed statements.” According to Rep. Raúl Grijalva, Kelly told the group that “he was the one who tempered [Trump] on the issue of the wall, on the issue of DACA.”

Both Trump and Kelly may have been able to dismiss those recollections as fake news, had Kelly not made the fatal mistake of repeating the claims on Fox News—an outlet all but guaranteed to draw the attention of its Oval Office assignment editor. Just a few hours after the Times story was published, Kelly told host Bret Baier that the president had “evolved” on the topic of the border wall, and giving himself a portion of the credit: