Post by Admin on Mar 27, 2019 13:49:19 GMT -4
Barbara Bush had been one of the most recognizable faces of the Republican Party through two presidencies. But after Trump’s rise, she saw it as a party she could not continue to support, a party she no longer recognized.
Barbara Bush: Did she still consider herself a Republican? 'I'd probably say no today.'
Susan Page, USA
In a new book, "The Matriarch," Susan Page reveals that Barbara Bush blamed her angst over Donald Trump becoming president for a major health scare. USA TODAY
EXCLUSIVE: This story is adapted from The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, which will be published April 2 by Twelve Books. Author Susan Page, the Washington Bureau chief of USA TODAY, spent hours interviewing the former first lady during the final six months of Bush's life and was given access to her personal diaries spanning decades.
Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her heart attack.
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. An ambulance was called to take her to the hospital. The two former presidents who had been at home with her that day, her husband and her oldest son, trailed in a car driven by the Secret Service. The tumultuous presidential campaign in general and Trump’s ridicule of son Jeb Bush in particular had riled her. “Angst,” she told me.
Afterward, Jeb, whose presidential campaign was already history, urged her to let it go, to focus on herself and have faith in the country.
Barbara Pierce Bush, the former first lady, died at her Houston home Tuesday after a long struggle with congestive heart failure and pulmonary disease. The down-to-earth matriarch who saw both her husband and son win the White House, was 92. USA TODAY
“There’s just a lot of angst” among those distressed by President Trump’s leadership, Jeb Bush told me, using the same word that his mother had used. “So I think one of the solutions is don’t watch it; don’t obsess.”
“Jeb said, ‘Mom, don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about,’ ” Barbara Bush recalled. “He’s right. Just do good, make life better for someone else.”
How did she think things were going in the USA in the Age of Trump?
"I'm trying not to think about it," she said in an interview as the first anniversary of Trump's election approached. "We're a strong country, and I think it will all work out.” Even so, she was dismayed by the nation’s divisions and by the direction of the party she had worked for, and for so long.
Did she still consider herself a Republican?
In an interview with me in October 2017, she answered that question yes. When I asked her again four months later, in February 2018, she said, "I'd probably say no today."
