Barbara Bush says Trump's "anguish" caused heart problems, according to a new book

March 27, 2019, 11:43 GMT / Update March 27, 2019, 11:58 GMT

By Allan Smith

Barbara Bush hated President Donald Trump so much that she blamed him for what she called a heart attack, and at the end of her life she did not consider herself a Republican anymore.

"I would probably say no today," she told Susan Page, of USA Today, in an interview in October 2017. She was if she was still Republican.

These were excerpts, published Wednesday, of an upcoming biography of Bush by Page, who had spoken extensively with the former first lady in the last few months of her life. Bush died last April and her husband, the 41st President George H. W. Bush died in November.

The book "The Matriarch" describes in detail the dislike of Barbara Bush for Trump, dating back several decades. In the 1990s diary entries, which the former first lady had made available to Page, she described Trump as "greedy, selfish and ugly". In 2016, she was "dismayed by the divisions of the country and by the leadership of the party she had worked for, and for so long".

In an interview, she told Page: "I do not understand why people are for" Trump. In another, she expressed her "astonishment" that women could vote for Trump.

The former first lady suffered what she described as a heart attack in 2016, resulting from a long battle with congestive heart failure and chronic lung disease. She blamed this episode on the 2016 election cycle and the relentless reluctance of her son, former Florida governor Jeb Bush, presidential candidate in 2016 as well. She told Page that "anxiety" had contributed to the heart episode.

Bush hesitated at first to get his son into the race. If he had won, he would be Bush's third president after her husband and eldest son, the 43rd President George W. Bush. But, as the page writes, the former first lady was so alarmed by Trump that she eventually agreed to her son being elected.

In 2016, the former first lady would vote for her son Jeb Bush to the presidency of the general election, while her husband voted for Hillary Clinton, Democratic presidential candidate of 2016. After Trump's victory, her husband was called the elected president to present his congratulations and Barbara Bush wrote in his diary that Trump "was very kind" in this conversation.

After initially writing a funny letter to former President Bill Clinton after assuming he would become a member of the "First Ladies Club," Barbara Bush wrote to the First Lady, Melania Trump, to welcome her to the cohort.

"Dear Mrs. Trump, The world thought I was writing this note to Bill Clinton, I'm glad I did not want to be, I wanted to welcome you to the very exclusive First Ladies Club," she said. -she writes. "My children were older and so I did not have the problems you have.Everything you decide to do is your business and yours.Living at the White House is a joy and their only job is to If you decide to stay in New York, it will be fine too, when you come to the White House, let your son take a friend, that's where I do not ask for advice, God bless you. "

After Trump's election, a friend in Maine gave Barbara Bush his countdown as a joke, the details of the new biography. The clock displays the number of days, hours, minutes, and seconds remaining in Trump's tenure. The former first lady put her on a table in the bedroom before bringing her to Houston. The clock was near his bed until his death, wrote Page.

"I'm trying not to think about it," Barbara Bush told Page in an interview in 2017 just before the first anniversary of Trump's election. "We are a strong country, and I think everything is going well."