OPINION:
Barbara Bush, former first lady, placed the blame for her 2016 “heart attack” — or, more to medical truth, her health scare stemming from congestive heart failure — on, get this: Donald Trump.
Oh boy.
And Jussie Smollett is innocent.
And those who want to keep their doctors can keep their doctors.
And read my lips: No new taxes.
The list goes on. Now add this, from Washington bureau chief Susan Page, writing in USA Today about “The Matriarch,” Bush’s new book: “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 [after Trump’s nomination]. … The tumultuous presidential campaign in general and Trump’s ridicule of son Jeb Bush in particular had riled her. ’Angst,’ she told me.”
Bush, as political watchers will recall, actually distanced herself from the Republican Party after Trump came on the scene. And in “The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty,” the former first lady actually confirmed to Page, who spent countless hours interviewing her in the last months of the former first lady’s life, she didn’t really consider herself a member of the GOP any longer.
“[That was a] stunning acknowledgment,” Page wrote.
But blaming Trump for her own heart health troubles?
That’s just silly.
Still, if it were true — if Trump’s political rise did indeed put Bush through so much medical angst, well then, that just reveals the former first lady’s own failures to properly prioritize.
Politicians, after all, are just humans. They ought not be regarded with such reverence so as to bring about heart attacks in those who oppose their views.
• Cheryl Chumley can be reached at cchumley@washingtontimes.com or on Twitter, @ckchumley.
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