“The president also recognizes that when there’s not a deal to be made, when to walk away,” Sean Spicer said. | Getty Spicer compares GOP health care bill to a 'bad deal'

White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer on Monday likened President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the House Republican proposal to repeal Obamacare — which Trump had supported — to walking away from a “bad deal.”

“The president also recognizes that when there’s not a deal to be made, when to walk away,” Spicer told reporters at Monday afternoon’s daily briefing, describing how the president used his business acumen to make the call on the health care fight. “It's not just about making deals. It’s knowing when to walk away from deals and knowing [that] when there’s a bad deal, that’s the only solution.”


The first legislative battle of Trump’s presidency ended Friday with the GOP’s failure to make good on its seven-year pledge to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act, former President Barack Obama’s 2010 health care law.

Trump had pushed for the Republican replacement legislation and initially demanded a vote on it, but it hemorrhaged support on Friday from both the party’s right and centrist flanks, prompting GOP leaders to pull it from the House floor. When he conceded defeat on the measure in the Oval Office on Friday, Trump still praised the failed bill, though he suggested without offering specifics that he thought it could have been improved.

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Spicer, though, implied on Monday that Trump believed that passing the legislation would have required deviating from his “vision.”

“I think the president understood that where we were, that while you can get a deal at the time, that sometimes a bad deal is worse than getting a deal,” Spicer continued. “And I think he smartly recognized that what was on the table was not going to be keeping with the vision that he had, and so he decided that this was not the time and that a deal was not at hand.”