During his presidential campaign, Donald Trump had always been clear on what his promised wall between the U.S. and Mexico would look like. It would be a beautiful wall, made of hardened concrete and rebar steel, he told a little boy; it would be anywhere between 30 and 65 feet high, depending on what he felt like saying during his events; and as the G.O.P. declared in its official platform that year, it would cover the entirety of the nearly 2,000-mile-long border. That campaign vision diminished once Trump took office, shrinking in size, scale, and even building materials, consisting, at times, of posts, levees, fences, solar panels, and, at one point, “invisible” technology. And as of Wednesday, Trump may have surrendered his most valuable bargaining chip, the promise to enact legal protections for DACA recipients, by striking a deal with Democratic leadership that did not wring a concession for wall funding. “The wall will come later, “ he told reporters Thursday morning.

With his base apoplectic, Trump’s most reliable cheerleaders strained to defend his latest ideological contortion. Steve Doocy, a host of Trump’s favorite show Fox & Friends, suggested that the wall was just a metaphor. “Congressman, has the wall almost become symbolic?” he asked Jason Chaffetz. “I know the president ran on it. It was a mantra. But at the same time, border crossings have gone down dramatically and you were talking about how the wall exists in certain forms and there’s money to go to it, has to come from Congress, but do you think we’re going to get to the point where maybe they won’t build the wall?”

Conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza, another guest on Fox & Friends, echoed the sentiment. “At the end of the day, Trump may be moving to a position in which he says the wall is symbolic,” he said, suggesting that Trump could put together a deal that enhances border control without a large, physical wall. “What people voted for is this, they voted for a principle and the principle is we can’t fix domestic immigration without stopping the porous border in which, in a sense, people keep streaming across.”

That take-him-seriously-not-literally sentiment has long been aired among Republican lawmakers versed in the art of the possible, with Senators Ron Johnson, Lindsey Graham, and Jeff Flake and Representative Francis Rooney suggesting that the wall was just a “metaphor” for better border security.

But up until now, Trump has insisted that his wall will be a real, concrete-and-steel barrier, festooned with high-tech bells and whistles. The apostasy on display, on a show that often stoked fears over illegal border crossing, was noteworthy—especially when Chaffetz, admittedly a fair-weather Trump supporter, insisted that the wall was “already there” and he didn’t need to build another. Occasionally, the backtracking went to great lengths: Scott Adams, the creator of the comic strip Dilbert and an ardent Trump supporter, wrote a long blog post arguing that Trump was actually employing a “persuasion technique” to bring the conversation towards enhanced border security, and that “build the wall” was simply a conceptual campaign slogan. Trump himself argued on Twitter that the wall wouldn’t need to be built because it had already been built, and would continue to be upgraded, a process that is already underway.

But never underestimate Trump’s propensity to muddle his own message. Later that day, he sent an e-mail to his campaign followers insisting that the media had gotten it all wrong: “Let me set the record straight in the simplest language possible . . . WE WILL BUILD A WALL (NOT A FENCE) ALONG THE SOUTHERN BORDER OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA TO HELP STOP ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION AND KEEP AMERICA SAFE.”