WASHINGTON — For decades, she was the grande dame of the Grand Old Party, the white-haired, pearl-wearing, tart-tongued Republican matriarch and, in the words of one eulogist, the first lady of the Greatest Generation. When she left the White House, she was deemed by one poll the most admired woman in the world.
But in the months before her death last year, Barbara Bush, the wife of one Republican president and the mother of another, abandoned the party she and her family had spent their whole lives building, horrified by President Trump’s election and deeply disturbed by his administration.
She refused to vote for Mr. Trump in November 2016, instead writing in the name of her son Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida who had lost the Republican nomination earlier that year. Asked by her biographer in October 2017 if she was still a Republican, Mrs. Bush said yes. By February 2018, she had given up. “I’d probably say no today,” she said.
View the complete March 27 article by Peter Baker on The New York Times website here.