Barbara Bush said Donald Trump caused her ‘heart attack’, biography reveals

Former first lady claimed president’s taunts of her son, Jeb, led to sudden decline in her health

The late Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her heart attack, her biography released next week is expected to claim.

The former first lady is thought to have said the president’s taunting of her son, Jeb, during the 2016 US election campaign had given her “angst”.

Bush, who died in 2018 aged 92, told her biographer Susan Page she blamed Mr Trump’s attacks for a sudden decline in her health in June 2016.

Writing in USA Today, Ms Page said the Bush family matriarch described the incident in interviews as a “heart attack”, although her sickness had actually been caused by complications from congestive heart failure and chronic pulmonary disease.

“It wasn’t technically a heart attack, though she called it that,” Ms Page said. “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.”

Also detailed in the new book, titled The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, is the revelation the former first lady said in her final days she no longer considered herself a Republican.

Her declaration, made in February 2018 just two months before her death, would come as a shocking admission from one of the most well-known GOP faces of recent decades.

Bush, wife to the 41st US president George HW Bush and mother of the 43rd, George W, was also said to have been dismayed by America’s direction of travel under the Trump administration.

“I’m trying not to think about it,” she told her biographer in late 2017. “We’re a strong country, and I think it will all work out.”

Mr Trump had paid tribute to Bush at the time of her death, praising her as a “wonderful, wonderful person” and a “titan in American life”.

“Her presence and character were engraved into America’s identity. Her strength and toughness really embodied the spirit of our country,” the president said.