Barbara Bush Had A Clock That Counted Down Donald Trump’s Presidency In Her Bedroom

Barbara Bush was literally watching the clock when it came to Donald Trump’s presidency, according to a new book.

Author Susan Page writes in her upcoming tome, titled The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of an American Dynasty, that the former first lady had a clock in her bedroom that counted down the days, hours, minutes and seconds that Trump had left in office.

A friend gifted the clock to Bush as a joke following Trump’s 2016 victory, Page noted in an adaption of her book that USA Today published Wednesday.

“It sat on her bedside table, where she could see it every day. It was there to the day she died,” wrote Page. Her book is slated for an April 2 release.

Page had access to Bush’s personal diaries and conducted numerous interviews with the former first lady in the six months before her death, aged 92, in April 2018.

Bush wrote in her personal diary in 1990 that Trump was the “real symbol of greed in the 80s,” per Page. Trump’s election win left the former FLOTUS horrified, she noted.

Page also detailed how Bush blamed Trump’s 2016 campaign attacks on her son (then-GOP presidential hopeful Jeb Bush) for causing her “angst” which resulted in her hospitalization.

Bush did not vote for Trump or his Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, instead opting to write Jeb Bush’s name on the ballot. Her husband, former President George H.W. Bush, however, voted for Clinton. It was “the first time in his life that he had cast a ballot for a Democrat for president,” wrote Page.

By February 2018, Bush told Page that she would “probably say no” to being asked if she considered herself to be a Republican.

Read the full adaptation on the USA Today website here.