Barbara Bush blamed D🐷onald Trump for her “heart attack” after he relentlessly ridiculed her son Jeb, according to a new book about th🦩e former first lady.
USA Today’s Washington bureau chief Susan Page during the final six months of her life and penned “,” which is due out April 2.
“It wasn’t technically a heart attack, though she called it that,” Page writes.
“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 Tr🃏ump derided her son as “Low Energy Jeb.”
“Afterward, Jeb, whose presidential campaign was already history, urged her𓂃 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 any🐼thing 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 appro🎐ached.
“I’m trying not to think about it,” she said. “We’re a strong country, and I think it will all work out.”
In Oc🐭tober 2017, Bush also told Page that she considered herself a Republican.
But four months later, she said: “I’d probably say no today.”
Page called that “a stunning acknowledgment” from “one of the most recognizable faces of the Republican Party through two presidencies,” two months before she died.
But Bush’s ꦛ“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.”
More than 25 yᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚᩚ𒀱ᩚᩚᩚears late💜r, Barbara Bush couldn’t imagine that Trump was going to win the White House.
“I don’t understaಌnd why people are for him,” she told Page.
Bush also🐟 revealed that she had writte𓂃n a funny congratulatory letter to first lady Melania Trump.
“The world🐻 thought I was writing this note to Bill Clinton. I am glad that I am not. I wanted to welcome you to the First Ladies very exclusive c🐟lub,” she wrote in the letter.
“I woke up and discovered, to my horror, that Trump had won,” Bush recounted to Page.
After Trump was elected, a friend gave Bush a red, white and blue digital “Trump countdown clock” that displayed how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remained in his term, Page writes.
She pl🉐aced it on a table at her beside, where she could see ꧅it every day.
“It was there to the day she died.”