Kelly contradicts Trump in exit interview: ‘To be honest, it’s not a wall’

Outgoing White House chief of staff John Kelly said President Donald Trump has changed his plans for the structure he wants built along the US-Mexico border.

“To be honest, it’s not a wall,” Kelly told the Los Angeles Times in a wide-ranging interview.

Kelly said the solid concrete wall Trump had touted throughout his campaign and early administration was a past plan, and the president was embracing plans for other types of structures.

“The president still says ‘wall’ — oftentimes frankly he’ll say ‘barrier’ or ‘fencing,’ now he’s tended toward steel slats,” Kelly told the Times. “But we left a solid concrete wall early on in the administration, when we asked people what they needed and where they needed it.”

Trump had notably changed his tune as he grew increasingly volatile towards lawmakers who stood in the way of funding approval, saying it would be more like “fencing,” that was an “artistically designed” set of steel slats, not concrete.

But Trump has continued to refer to his planned border structure as the “Wall.” Saturday Trump tweeted that “If we had a Wall,” it would have deterred migrant children who died in Customs and Border Protection custody from coming to the US at all.

The Times also reported that from his time heading Homeland Security in 2017, Kelly valued input from “people who actually secure the border,” the Customs and Border Protection agents on the ground.