President Donald Trump on Thursday expressed his thoughts on the criticism levied against him by Barbara Bush in a new biography, where the former first lady accused Trump of aggravating her health issues and suggested that she might no longer consider herself a Republican if asked about her affiliation.
In an interview published Thursday by The Washington Times , Trump said that he was not surprised by the allegations Bush made in the recently published biography, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of a Dynasty . The president told the outlet that he had heard about how Bush was “nasty” toward him, before adding that she had a right to feel that way against him.
“Look what I did to her sons,” Trump continued.
Talking about Barbara Bush’s second son, Jeb Bush, the president recalled to The Washington Times that he had convincingly defeated the former Florida governor and Republican presidential hopeful in the 2016 South Carolina primary, even as Jeb’s older brother, former president George W. Bush, stepped up to campaign for him.
“Look, she’s the mother of somebody that I competed against. Most people thought he [Jeb Bush] was going to win and he was quickly out. That’s when his brother came to make the first speech for him. And I said, ‘What took you so long?’”
Barbara Bush’s biography, which was written by USA Today reporter Susan Page, was based heavily on interviews conducted with the former first lady prior to her death in April 2018 at the age of 92, as well as her personal diaries. As reported last week by The Inquisitr , Bush alleged in her book that Trump’s tendency to ridicule Jeb on the campaign trail resulted in great stress and caused her to have a heart attack.
Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her ‘heart attack’: book https://t.co/fzVnpvgxvw pic.twitter.com/fsisrKTmum
— New York Post (@nypost) March 27, 2019
Trump’s remarks about Barbara Bush came shortly after he was heavily criticized by his fellow Republicans for a series of disparaging comments he made about another deceased ex-rival, former Arizona Senator and Republican presidential candidate John McCain. Per USA Today , McCain was a staunch critic of Trump and his administration and had pushed for a return to bipartisanship in his final speech as a senator prior to his death from brain cancer in August 2018.
As previously reported by CNN , Trump notably criticized McCain last month for his decision to vote against the repeal of Barack Obama’s Affordable Care Act and for supposedly leaking the Steele dossier to the press. The president also took aim at McCain’s stint in the U.S. Navy, suggesting that he graduated “last in his class” from the Naval Academy.
