Details are still emerging from The Matriarch, a new biography of Barbara Bush, including the fact that she “blamed” President Donald Trump for her heart problems at the end of her life.
The former first lady passed away last year, yes journalist Susan Page is introducing the American people to a brand new side of her in The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty. The biography includes Bush’s frank commentary from five interviews with Page before she died, where she discussed where she saw the U.S. and the world headed in the near future.
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It was no secret that Bush was not a fan of President Trump. However, in an excerpt from The Matriarch published by USA Today, Page explained that Bush saw the president as the cause of her health issues in the summer of 2016. At the time, she was hospitalized for a “crisis” including congestive heart failure and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, which the first lady herself characterized as a “heart attack.”
Page wrote that “the tumultuous presidential campaign in general and Trump’s ridicule of son Jeb Bush in particular had riled her.”
“‘Angst,’ she told me,” she added.
At the time, Trump had just recently mocked Bush on the campaign trail. He referenced his opponent, Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who had just withdrawn from the presidential race. After Bush appeared in one of her son’s ads, Trump said “he desperately needed mommy to help him” at a public event.
The president’s combative discourse wore the former first lady down, she said. When Page asked if she still considered herself a Republican after the election, Bush went so far as to say no.
“I’d probably say no today,” she admitted, adding that the election of President Trump turned the Republican party into “a party she no longer recognized.”
The book contains many other bombshells about the iconic first lady’s opinions on President Trump. She reportedly “expressed astonishment that women could support him,” and couldn’t “understand why people” voted for him.
Bush even told Page how her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, and her son, former president George W. Bush, felt about President Trump.
“This guy doesn’t know what it means to be president,” she recalled her son saying, while he husband reportedly called President Trump “a blowhard.”
The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty is available in full on Tuesday wherever books are sold.
