President Trump has a habit of going on Twitter and contradicting things said by key members of his staff, surrogates, supporters and more. Today was no exception as he pushed back against comments yesterday regarding his “evolution” on the border wall.

In fact, most of Trump’s talk on the border wall and immigration is contradictory. Not just of his surrogates, of himself. Take, for example, the promise that he absolutely made that is now 100% not happening: Mexico will pay.

No. They won’t.

But the issue of Mexico paying isn’t even the main part of Chief of Staff John Kelly’s remarks yesterday that the President is contradicting. In a tweet, he first pushed back against the idea that his view was “evolving” on the actual, physical nature of the wall.

The Wall is the Wall, it has never changed or evolved from the first day I conceived of it. 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…..

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2018

If Kelly didn’t want pushback, he probably shouldn’t have said Trump’s campaign promises were “not informed.” Hindsight, right?

He did continue, though, to include the payment.

….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. The $20 billion dollar Wall is “peanuts” compared to what Mexico makes from the U.S. NAFTA is a bad joke!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 18, 2018

You can go ahead and LOL at “indirectly” since that is not what he promised, and pretending that this is what he meant all along is too stupid and fake to dedicate any typing to, except to say that “indirectly” is 100% the result of “evolution” of his plan, just exactly as Kelly factually stated.

Also, for the record, taxing remittances is a nonsense idea that will pay for nothing.

Trump is, as Kelly noted – and by the way, as he SHOULD be – flexible on the issue. Trump is correct to be negotiable. But he can’t tell you that. He can’t tell his MAGA base that. He has to pretend that this is what he always said and meant. And he knows the MAGA base will pretend along with him.

Now of course, Trump was absolutely always up front about including “natural” barriers, and that some parts of the border simply wouldn’t be able to have a wall.

Still, that “wastelands” line is new to me, and pretty broad. How many articles and blogs have been written on the right showing and lamenting pictures of big, open, desert spaces with no wall or fence at all? Dozens? Hundreds?

Now, though, “wasteland” is a “natural barrier.” What’s a wasteland? That’s a change to his rhetoric and that’s a fact. Not to mention that suddenly existing metal fencing is now apparently good enough.

Just a refresher:

“It’s go­ing to be made of hardened con­crete, and it’s go­ing to be made out of re­bar. That’s steel,” Trump said. “And we’re go­ing to set them in nice, heavy found­a­tions.”

That de­scrip­tion came in an an­swer to a child’s ques­tion near the end of his hour-and-20-minute re­marks. At an­oth­er point, he also said that al­though the bor­der with Mex­ico is 2,000 miles long, the wall only needed to be 1,000 miles long be­cause the rest of the bor­der has nat­ur­al bar­ri­ers that serve equally well.

And…

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively. I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

And also…

“What we’re doing is we have 2,000 miles, right? 2,000 miles. It’s long but not 13,000 miles like they have in China,” he said, comparing his self-declared great wall with the Great Wall of China, which took hundreds of years to build and reportedly resulted in the death of hundreds of thousands of workers. “Of the 2,000, we don’t need 2,000, we need 1,000 because we have natural barriers … and I’m taking it price per square foot and a price per square, you know, per mile,” he said.

The candidate added that his wall will probably be 35 to 40 feet high — a “real wall” he said. And that it will be one that “actually looks good, you know, as good as a wall is going to look.”

Natural barriers will work. Increased patrols, keeping the existing fences in some places, building a concrete barrier in other places will work. That’s a smart way to build a border wall. It’s logical and cost-saving. Good. It’s not what he said, but good. He’s evolved.

Again, he’s right to evolve. And Kelly, being a practical and matter-of-fact guy, simply stated a reality about the President’s position. But Trump can’t permit people to know it. He knows how definitively he staked out his Wall, with its big, beautiful door, and how literally his devoted and faithful took that promise. He has to pretend that this new position and that old one are all basically the same thing.

Luckily for him, Trump supporters are doggone experts at accepting false premises.