Nolte: Barbara Bush Blamed Trump for Her ‘Heart Attack’

Today’s fake news is that the late Barbara Bush blamed President Trump for a heart attack that wasn’t really a heart attack, but because facts no longer matter to our fake news media, that’s the headline.

The matriarch of the Bush dynasty, the wife of one president (George H.W. Bush, who died in November of last year) and the mother of another (George W. Bush), passed away in April of last year at the age of 92 after a years-long fight with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Nevertheless, in June of 2016, Trump gave her a heart attack — sorry, I mean, a “heart attack.”

Barbara Bush blamed Donald Trump for her heart attack.

It wasn’t technically a heart attack, though she called it that. 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. “Angst,” she told me.

Afterward, Jeb, whose presidential campaign was already history, urged her to let it go, to focus on herself and have faith in the country.

“There’s just a lot of angst” among those distressed by President Trump’s leadership, Jeb Bush told me, using the same word that his mother had used. “So I think one of the solutions is don’t watch it; don’t obsess.”

“Jeb said, ‘Mom, don’t worry about things you can’t do anything about,’ ” Barbara Bush recalled. “He’s right. Just do good, make life better for someone else.”

This is an excerpt from Susan Page’s upcoming biography, The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, published Wednesday by the far-left USA Today.

And it’s fake news.

As you can see, the headline debunks itself in the next sentence. On top of that, Bush was 90 or 91 at the time and already sick with COPD … but we gotta sell some books, smear Trump, keep the hate campaign against the president going….

This particular anecdote is also deeply unflattering to Mrs. Bush.

By this time, Jeb(!) had already dropped out of his hapless low-energy bid for the 2016 Republican nomination, so why would a 90-year-old woman who had already been through four decades of the political wringer allow a presidential primary, allow a Donald Trump, allow anything other than a family crisis to discombobulate her to where she had a fake heart attack?

There’s more…

When asked in February of 2018 if she was still a Republican,. She said, “I’d probably say no today.”

And then there’s this…

“I woke up and discovered, to my horror, that Trump had won.”

She didn’t hide her horror from those close to her. After Trump was elected, a friend in Kennebunkport gave her a Trump countdown clock as a joke. The red, white, and blue digital clock displayed how many days, hours, minutes and seconds remained in Trump’s term. She parked it on the side table in her bedroom, next to the chair she would sit in to needlepoint or watch television.

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. It was there to the day she died.

You know, I have no idea how I’m going to exit this life. I might be found under a stripper covered in cocaine dust or buried under all the cans of food amassed in my doomsday prepping, but I sure as hell know how I’m not going out — and that’s while obsessing to the point of fake heart attacks over politics, or who’s president, or glued to the criminal stupidity of cable news.

Barbara Bush literally had everything — a fairytale marriage, wealth, success, a place in history, a tight-knit family, countless grandkids and great-grandkids… And still.

You have almost have to feel some pity for someone buried in monetary and familial wealth who still allows a politician to undermine her peace of mind, to in any way affect what should have been the most contented winter years imaginable.

Honestly, Barbara Bush always struck me as a much stronger woman than this, someone with poise and self-control.  Even more surprising is that she would admit to such a thing. If that were me, I would at least have the self-respect to keep something so embarrassing to myself.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.