Barbara Bush reportedly kept a Trump presidency countdown clock.
Former first lady Barbara Bush reportedly blamed then-candidate Donald Trump for the "heart attack" she suffered in 2016 and, after his election, kept a countdown clock marking the days, hours, minutes, and seconds until his term was over. Those revelations are made in the soon-to-be-released book, 'The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,' written by USA Today Washington Bureau Chief Susan Page. In an excerpt published by the publication, Page wrote of Barbara Bush's heart incident: "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…The tumultuous presidential campaign in general and Trump's ridicule of son Jeb Bush in particular had riled her 'Angst,' she told me." Page also discusses the countdown clock, which was reportedly given to the former first lady by a friend. "She parked it on the side table in her bedroom, next to the chair she would sit in to needlepoint or watch television," Page noted. "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." Barbara Bush passed away on April 17, 2018. Her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, died on November 30 of that same year.
