The late first lady Barbara Bush disliked President Donald Trump so much that she kept a jokingly gifted clock counting down to the end of his presidency by her bedside until the day she died, according to an excerpt of a new book about her.
According to Susan Page, USA Today Washington Bureau Chief and author of “Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,” the former first lady received the red, white and blue digital clock after the 2016 election as a joke from a friend in Kennebunkport, Maine, who knew how deep her disdain for the president ran.
“She parked it on the side table in her bedroom, next to the chair she would sit in to needlepoint or watch television,” Page wrote of the clock, which counted down to the second the end of Trump’s term. “She liked the countdown clock so much that when the Bushes returned to Houston that October, she brought it with her. It sat on her bedside table, where she could see it every day.”
The new book set to be published next week was compiled from interviews with the Bush matriarch before her death last year as well as decades of diary entries from the former first lady. It shows that Bush’s dislike of Trump goes as far back as the 1990s, when she wrote of the then-real estate mogul that “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly.”
But despite her opposition to Trump and her “horror” at his election, Bush also sought to offer advice to current first lady Melania Trump, who at the time was rumored to have been on the fence about leaving New York with the couple’s son Barron and moving into the White House.
“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 club,” Bush wrote to Melania shortly after the 2016 election. “My children were older and there fore I did not have the problems you do. Whatever you decide to do is your business and yours alone. Living in the White House is a joy and their only job is to make you happy.”
But, she added, “if you decide to stay in NYC that will be fine also. When you come to the White House let your son bring a friend. That is my unasked for advice.”
Bush also said she had written a tongue-in-cheek congratulatory letter to former President Bill Clinton to welcome him to the “First Ladies Club” on the assumption his wife, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, would win the 2016 election.
Bush said the never-mailed missive quipped: “We can’t wait to initiate you.”
While Bush was able to find some humor in her dislike of the president, which she had made public throughout the 2016 election, it may have come at the expense of her health. Page reports that Bush attributed a 2016 heart attack-like cardiac event to the “angst” his campaign had caused her. Bush praised the advice from her son Jeb, who had been trounced by Trump in his own 2016 presidential campaign, who she said told her to try and ignore Trump.
Bush, long the face of one of the GOP’s great political dynasties, even said that Trump had driven her from the party she’d supported for so many years.
In October 2017, more than half a year after Trump’s inauguration, she answered in the affirmative when asked if she would still consider herself a Republican, though around the same time she said she tried not to think about how Trump’s presidency was going. But four months later, by February 2018, her answer changed.
“I’d probably say no today,” she said.
Bush passed away in April of last year, followed months later by her husband, former President George H.W. Bush.
Article originally published on POLITICO Magazine
Source: https://www.politico.com/story/2019/03/27/barbara-bush-trump-countdown-clock-1238787
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The Article Was Written/Published By: coprysko@politico.com (Caitlin Oprysko)
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