President Donald Trump speaks with Fox News' Bill O'Reilly. | Fox News Trump: Obamacare replacement might take a year The timetable was notably longer than he's cited lately.

President Donald Trump walked back his recent vow that Obamacare would be replaced in short order, telling F0x News’ Bill O’Reilly that the process is “complicated” and “maybe it’ll take till sometime into next year.”

"It statutorily takes a while to get," Trump said in a wide-ranging interview that aired Sunday during the Super Bowl pre-game show. "We’re going to be putting it in fairly soon, I think that yes I would like to say by the end of the year at least the rudiments, but we should have something within the year and the following year."


Trump’s description of the timetable was notably more cautious than he’s been recently. At a Jan. 11 news conference, he said that he would put forward a plan to repeal and replace the health care law as soon as Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) is approved as health and human services secretary.

"It will be essentially simultaneously," Trump said. "The same day or the same week ... could be the same hour."

A day earlier, he told The New York Times that Congress must repeal and replace Obamacare “very quickly.”

In the interview, Trump also stopped just short of promising a deal to cut taxes this year — “I think so, yes. … I would like to say yes,” he told O’Reilly — and vowed to set up a commission to investigate voter fraud headed by Vice President Mike Pence.

Fox also aired the full exchange of Trump’s controversial remarks about Vladimir Putin, which were excerpted on Saturday and sparked a backlash from both parties.

After Trump said he “respects” Putin, O’Reilly pushed back, calling the Russian president a “killer.”

“We've got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?” Trump said.

Trump then elaborated, invoking the U.S. invasion of Iraq.

“Take a look at what we’ve done. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning. It’s okay, but a lot of people were killed. There are lot of killers involved.”

Trump also defended the rollout of the executive order banning travel into the U.S. by citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries. He called the process “very smooth,” despite the fact that it blindsided government agencies and airlines and has been hotly contested in the courts.

"You had 109 people out of hundreds of thousands of travelers and all we did was vet those people very, very carefully,” he said, downplaying the number of people affected.

The president also had tough words for Iran, saying the country “lost respect” for the U.S. because “they can’t believe anyone could be that stupid” to give them such a deal.

"It’s like they’re emboldened where they follow our planes, they circle our ships with their little boats and they lost respect because they can’t believe anybody could be so stupid as to make a deal like that," he said.

At the end of the interview, Trump predicted that the Patriots would win by 8 points. But he never named the Atlanta Falcons, referring to the opponent as the “other team.”

“I think the other team is fantastic though,” he said, after noting his friendship with Tom Brady and the Kraft family, which owns the Patriots. “No I think it’s a fantastic team, turns out to be a good quarterback.”