Barbara Bush, a former United States first lady blamed Donald Trump for her “heart attack” after he relentlessly ridiculed her son Jeb, according to a new book about the former first lady, New York Post reports.
USA Today’s Washington bureau chief Susan Page interviewed Bush during the final six months of her life and penned “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,” which is due out April 2.
“It wasn’t technically a heart attack, though she called it that,”
“It was a crisis in her long battle with congestive heart failure and chronic pulmonary disease that hit her like a sledgehammer one day in June 2016,” when Trump had secured the GOP nomination.
Bush described her “angst” after the tumultuous presidential campaign, during which Trump derided her son as “Low Energy Jeb.”
“Afterward, Jeb, whose presidential campaign was already history, urged her to let it go, to focus on herself and have faith in the country,” according to an excerpt.
“Jeb said, ‘Mom, don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about,’ ” Bush recalled. “He’s right. Just do good, make life better for someone else.”
Bush was asked how she thought things were going during the Trump presidency as his first anniversary in office approached.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” she said. “We’re a strong country, and I think it will all work out.”
In October 2017, Bush also told Page that she considered herself a Republican.
But four months later, she said: “I’d probably say no today.”
But Bush’s “negative opinion of Trump dated back decades,” Page says.
In 1990, she wrote in her diary that he is “the real symbol of greed in the ’80s.” Two years earlier, Trump had volunteered to be her husband’s running mate, an idea he’d dismissed as “strange and unbelievable.”
