NBC’s Chuck Todd said on Sunday that President Trump should start building bridges as opposed to making enemies if he wants to move forward with his agenda.
“He has to figure out how to borrow a page from the Bill Clinton playbook of the ’90s,” Todd, host of NBC’s “Meet The Press,” said during an interview on NBC’s “Today” show.
“Bill Clinton had plenty of scandal clouds hovering over his White House at any given moment. He may have been seething about it behind the scenes, but he compartmentalized it, for better or for worse.”
Todd said Clinton tried to find ways to “put it in a box and focus on other things.”
{mosads}”Somehow, the West Wing has to get their arms around the Russian investigation, get the president to accept the fact that it exists and compartmentalize it and focus somewhere else,” he said.
“Until he does that, it’s going to consume him.”
Todd was further pressed on how difficult it will be for the president to push his agenda forward as he continues to attack groups of people and his approval rating keeps falling.
“He’s got to essentially stop making enemies,” Todd said.
“If he attacks the Freedom Caucus and Democrats at the same time, he’s attacking a majority of, suddenly he’s attacking a majority in Congress, and that would be a majority that he would be fighting.”
Todd also questioned why the president would want to be fighting a majority in Congress.
“I think there’s a point where he’s picking too many fights and if you pick too many fights, you have too many enemies,” he said.
“And when you have too many enemies, you can’t get anything done. So again, it goes back to, he’s got to figure out how to compartmentalize Russia and he’s got to figure out how to start building bridges to some sort of governing coalition on Capitol Hill.”
His comments come after the president on Saturday referred to Todd as “Sleepy Eyes” and questioned when he and NBC News will “start talking about the Obama SURVEILLANCE SCANDAL and stop with the Fake Trump/Russia story.”
Todd later tweeted that he “slept well” even though he stayed up late and doesn’t “feel sleepy at all.”