President Donald Trump needs to adopt a "bite-size, medium-size approach" to passing his agenda instead of trumpeting huge moves that are bound to get stalled in political squabbling, Bill Kristol, editor-at-large of The Weekly Standard, tells Newsmax TV.
A case in point, Kristol said, is last week's failure of the healthcare reform Republicans have been touting for eight years and was one of the highlights of Trump's campaign platform.
"I'm not a huge Trump fan as you know but … I think his instincts are actually better than those in the Republican establishment," Kristol, who also founded the conservative publication, said Wednesday on "The Steve Malzberg Show."
"His instinct to introduce some bite-size things the way he's doing with the executive orders. They're not huge, they change a couple of executive orders, they're not going to change the face of America, but does it help the economy, does it help energy, oil and gas if you repeal some of the EPA things.
"You can do the same thing legislatively. He can get through appropriations, the things he cares about, [like] the wall."
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Those small steps could also be used in changing the nation's healthcare without as much controversy as the failed American Health Care Act did.
"He could do some stuff on healthcare that's not changing the whole system but use some stuff to get prescription drugs down, prices down for example, some things moderates like, some things conservatives would like," Kristol said.
"I think he needs to kind of have a little more of a bite-size, medium-size approach to this. [Republican House Speaker] Paul Ryan, whom I like and respect, he really thinks in this kind of think-tanky way.
"All the pieces are connected, which is sort of true, but still it doesn't mean you have to fix all the pieces at once. The idea that you're going to do some massive tax reform and infrastructure all together, I just don't buy that."
A bite-size agenda will work "for at least a while," he told Steve Malzberg.
"You got the victories in that and then maybe in the fall you say 'there are some big things we've got to do here, things going in the right direction, the economy's picked up … now we got to suck it up and do the big things,'" Kristol said.
"That's usually how it works incidentally … [President Barack] Obama didn't get Obamacare through until April of his second year. Reagan didn't get tax reform through until the summer."
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