In an interview with the Washington Times published Thursday evening, President Trump swiped at former first lady Barbara Bush, who died April 17, 2018.
He told the Washington Times, “I have heard that she was nasty to me, but she should be. Look what I did to her sons.”
Speaking about Jeb Bush, his one-time opponent, Trump said, “Look, she’s the mother of somebody that I competed against. Most people thought he was going to win and he was quickly out.”
Trump continued, “I hit him very hard in South Carolina. Remember? He was supposed to win South Carolina and I won it in a landslide. I hit him so hard. That’s when his brother came to make the first speech for him. And I said, ‘What took you so long?’”
The presided was referring to quotes and anecdotes attributed to Mrs. Bush in a new biography called “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of a Dynasty”. The author, Susan Page, writes that, at the time of her death, Barbara Bush no longer considered herself a Republican because of Trump’s success in the Republican party and his attacks on her sons, former president George and presidential candidate and former Florida governor Jeb Bush.
The biography says that Mrs. Bush voted for neither Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton in 2016, instead writing in Jeb Bush’s name. Page says that Bush awakened the next morning and to find that to her “horror that Trump had won.”
Page also states in the book that Barbara blamed Trump’s attacks on her son’s for a cardiac event and kept a countdown clock marking the time to the end of Trump’s presidency beside her bed and blamed , according to CNN.
While President Trump presumes that her disdain for him comes from his treatment of the Bush family on the campaign trail, Susan Page pinpoints Mrs. Bush’s dislike for the current president having started much earlier than 2016. The book points to a diary entry from 1990 in which Barbara first wrote about her contempt for Donald Trump: “Trump now means greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.” The entry was written after Trump made comments about then-President Bush at a charity event.
Politico points out that these comments are the second time since last month that the president has disparaged a deceased political opponent to whose funerals he was not invited. President Trump has recently lashed out at Senator John McCain for ruining the Republican’s chances of repealing Obama Care and for giving the Steele dossier to the FBI.
