Peter Baker

“There are no complications from the surgery,” his spokeswoman, Deanna Congileo, said in a statement. “President Carter will remain in the hospital as long as advisable for observation. We do not anticipate any further statements until he is released from the hospital.”

Carter, 95, the longest-living president in American history, was taken to Emory University Hospital in Atlanta on Monday evening with a subdural hematoma brought on by a series of recent falls. His office provided no further details about what led him to seek help or about the surgery itself.

A subdural hematoma is an accumulation of blood outside the brain, usually a result of head injuries and is sometimes life-threatening if not treated. Carter has fallen at least three times in the past six months, including once in May when he broke a hip and twice last month when he required 14 stitches and broke his pelvis. Each time he has bounced back, even showing up for a Habitat for Humanity homebuilding project shortly after one fall.

Congileo said Carter’s office would issue no more updates about his condition until he leaves the hospital. “President and Mrs. Carter thank everyone for the many well wishes they have received,” she said.

This article originally appeared in

WASHINGTON — Former President Jimmy Carter underwent surgery on Tuesday to relieve pressure from bleeding in his head and his office reported that he was recovering at an Atlanta hospital, where he will remain for the foreseeable future.

Jimmy Carter Recovering After Surgery

Speaking at a service for Rep. Elijah E. Cummings, who died last week, Obama never mentioned the president by name but seemed to draw a contrast between his successor and the congressman whom Trump denigrated during the summer.

Obama said that Cummings showed that being strong meant being kind and that being honorable was no flaw.

“There’s nothing weak about kindness and compassion,” Obama told a packed hall at New Psalmist Baptist Church in Baltimore, which Cummings, D-Md., represented in the House for the past 25 years. “There’s nothing weak about looking out for others. There’s nothing weak about being honorable. You’re not a sucker to have integrity and to treat others with respect.”

Warming to his topic, Obama pointed to a sign behind him referring to “the Honorable” Cummings.

“That’s a title that we confer to all kinds of people who get elected to public office,” he said as the largely African American and Democratic audience responded with knowing applause and laughter. “We’re supposed to introduce them as honorable. But Elijah Cummings was honorable before he was elected to office. There’s a difference. There’s a difference if you were honorable and treated others honorably outside the limelight.”

As chairman of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, Cummings, 68, had become a major thorn in Trump’s side and was one of the leaders of the drive to impeach the president for abuse of power. Over the summer, Trump lashed out at Cummings, calling him “racist” and “a brutal bully” who had done “a very poor job” representing a district that he described as a “disgusting, rat and rodent infested mess.”

Obama was part of an all-star lineup of speakers and guests at the Friday’s service, including former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Speaker Nancy Pelosi, former Vice President Joe Biden and Sen. Elizabeth Warren.

But much of the attention was focused on the 44th president, who has largely avoided weighing in lately on his successor even as Trump lately has repeatedly accused Obama of illegally spying on him while in office and blamed the former president for various policy setbacks.

Obama made no reference to any of that but did call on his audience to step up as Cummings did. “People will look back at this moment,” he said, “and ask the question: What did you do?”

In Tribute to Cummings, Obama Hints at Rebuke of Trump

Former President Barack Obama, who has remained largely silent amid the convulsive impeachment debate now gripping the nation, offered a tribute to a late Democratic congressman Friday that sounded to some listeners like an implicit rebuke of President Donald Trump.

Speaking at a campaign rally hours after Vice President Mike Pence and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo brokered a cease-fire, Trump defended his decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, effectively clearing the way for a brutal Turkish assault on Kurdish fighters who had fought for years alongside the United States against the Islamic State.

The president’s decision to pull out drew rebukes from both Democrats and Republicans, who accused him of abandoning America’s friends. But Trump said the violence of the past week was useful. “It was unconventional what I did,” he acknowledged. “Sometimes you have to let them fight a little while. Sometimes you have to let them fight like two kids,” he added. “Then you pull them apart.”

While he has previously denied giving Turkey the green light to attack the Kurds, Trump implied Thursday night that actually he had done so in order to persuade the two sides to come to terms. “Without a little tough love, they would never have made this deal,” he said.

The president arrived in Dallas after days of roiling events and damaging developments. Republicans blistered him for his Syria decision while current and former government officials provided House investigators evidence for Democrats seeking to impeach him for abuse of power. His own acting chief of staff earlier Thursday confirmed that there was a quid pro quo in Trump’s effort to pressure Ukraine for dirt on Democrats before then trying to take it back.

The rally gave the president a chance to vent his frustrations and pique with more than 20,000 cheering supporters packed in American Airlines Center in Dallas. In his third campaign rally in just more than a week, Trump again complained that Democrats were seeking to impeach him out of partisan animus and political ambition.

“They are destroying this country, but we will never let it happen,” he told the crowd. “These radical Democrats have been trying to overthrow the results of a great, great election — maybe, maybe the greatest election in the history of our country. They want to impose their extreme agenda.”

He added, “You know, I really don’t believe any more that they love our country.”

A day after a sharp blowup with Speaker Nancy Pelosi at the White House resulted in Democrats’ walking out of a meeting, he singled her out for criticism. “Crazy Nancy,” he called her. “She is crazy.”

And he lashed out again at the unidentified CIA officer who filed the whistleblower complaint revealing that Trump pressed Ukraine to investigate Democrats, including former Vice President Joe Biden, while withholding $391 million in congressionally approved assistance.

“Who’s the whistleblower?” Trump demanded. “Who’s the whistleblower? Who is the whistleblower? Is the whistleblower a spy?”

Former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, who represented El Paso, Texas, in Congress and is now running for the Democratic presidential nomination next year, staged a counterprogramming rally at a concert hall in Grand Prairie about 13 miles to the west.

O’Rourke condemned “the fabricated fear of the president, who wants us to be afraid of one another,” and blamed Trump’s language for the August mass shooting in El Paso and for a slew of other hate crimes.

“That fear that Donald Trump, the man in the White House, who holds the highest position of public trust in the land — that fear that he’s trying to use against us, that fear that he directed and drove down to El Paso, Texas, that fear that claimed the lives of 22 Americans — we, those of us here together, standing to be counted, are the answer to that fear,” O’Rourke said.

Trump hit back at O’Rourke at his own rally, calling the Democrat “a very dumb presidential candidate” and attacking him for proposing a mandatory buyback of assault rifles and the revocation of tax exemptions for contributions to churches that oppose same-sex marriage.

“Got rid of guns and got rid of religion,” Trump said mockingly. “I will never allow the federal government to punish Americans for their religious beliefs.”

He also singled out other favorite Democratic targets, including former President Barack Obama, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, Rep. Adam B. Schiff of California, Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts and Biden.

Trump’s trip to Texas stirred interest among political strategists because the state has long been a bedrock for Republican presidential candidates and is therefore not a battleground that attracts as much campaigning. In devoting a day here headlining a fundraiser in Fort Worth and cutting the ribbon on a new Louis Vuitton workshop in Keene, Trump prompted Democrats to declare that he must be worried about losing the state.

For Democrats, Texas has been the elusive holy grail for years, always supposedly close to flipping from red to blue yet remaining out of reach. Texas has not supported a Democrat for president since 1976 or for any statewide office since 1994. But as the state’s demographic makeup shifts, Democrats insist change is inevitable. Trump won the state in 2016 by 9 percentage points, the first single-digit margin at the presidential level in 20 years, and O’Rourke came within 2.6 points of unseating Sen. Ted Cruz last year.

A poll last month showed that Trump could be in trouble this time around. Forty-eight percent of Texans surveyed by Quinnipiac University said they would definitely not vote for him next year while only 35% said they would definitely support him and 14% said they would consider it.

But the president’s campaign team scoffed at what it called Democratic wishful thinking, saying that the only reason O’Rourke came close last year was because Trump was not on the ballot. Tim Murtaugh, his campaign spokesman, said the president made the trip Thursday not out of concern but to connect with his strongest backers.

“You’ve got to campaign and go show love to the people who got you there,” Murtaugh said. Rather than be turned off by the impeachment battle, he said, Trump’s base has been energized. “I didn’t think it was possible for the president’s supporters to be more engaged, but impeachment has achieved that,” he said.

Trump declared that Texas would remain in his column. “Texas is not in play,” he said.

Trump Compares Turks and Kurds to 'Two Kids' Fighting

DALLAS — President Donald Trump insisted Thursday night that he was smart to let Turkey attack America’s Kurdish allies in northern Syria, comparing the two warring sides to children on a playground who need to slug it out before settling their differences.

At the invitation of the team building his barrier along the border, he affixed his distinctive signature to one of the steel slats that have risen just opposite Mexico in recent months, the most physical manifestation of what he plans to make his argument for a second term next year and, he hopes, his place in the history books.

Trump flew to this dusty community outside San Diego on a hot, sunny day to highlight the progress, however halting, that he said was finally being made after a couple of years of frustration and political opposition. Like a builder showing off a new tower in New York, he talked in detail about the new barrier, explaining how the 30-foot slats are erected with rebar inside and then filled with concrete and boasting that it would be the most impenetrable wall in the world.

“The wall has a ways to go, but we’re building it at breakneck speed,” he said, surrounded by Border Patrol agents and construction workers. “When this is completed,” he added, “there won’t be a border anywhere like this.”

What he sees as security, of course, is viewed much differently by others who see it as a waste of money or even a symbol of intolerance. Critics say the wall represents a departure from the values of a country built on immigration and is hardly the most cost-effective way to reduce the number of people illegally living in the United States.

Moreover, it is not even the wall that the president promised as a candidate in 2016. At the time, he vowed to build 1,000 miles of barrier that he insisted would be paid for by Mexico. Instead, he has reduced his goal to 500 miles and has diverted money from military construction projects and other government programs over the objection of Congress, which refused to give him the money.

Of the 500 miles, the administration has so far built only 66 miles of replacement barriers in areas that previously had either battered fencing or vehicle blockades. But Trump’s administration has yet to extend the new steel frames, ranging from 18 to 30 feet, to any part of the border that did not previously have some sort of impediment.

Trump’s photo op at the border was his only public appearance during two days in California, a state that has been a hotbed of opposition to his presidency and policies. While fundraising for his re-election, he made a point of taking on California and its Democratic leaders, portraying its biggest cities as awash in homelessness and crime while moving to overturn the state’s efforts to thwart his environmental deregulation initiatives.

He met with none of California’s top elected leaders while in the state and appeared before no audience except those paying thousands of dollars to attend any of four fundraising events that collectively were expected to draw at least $15 million for his re-election campaign and Republicans.

Trump returned to the same section of the border that he visited in March 2018 to inspect prototypes of his wall. This area has also been a flash point for another hotly disputed policy enacted by the administration. The policy forcing migrants seeking asylum to remain in Mexico for the duration of their case began at the San Ysidro port of entry this year, forcing hundreds of migrant families to wait in shelters in Tijuana.

The policy has since been extended farther east to more dangerous Mexican cities like Nuevo Laredo, where migrants have been subjected to kidnappings and violence. More than 40,000 migrants have been returned to Mexico under the policy, which the administration says is needed to weed out fraudulent asylum claims and ease the burden on a detention system that experienced extensive overcrowding this year.

The president was joined by Kevin McAleenan, the acting secretary of homeland security, and other top officials who are also still serving in an acting capacity, underscoring the extensive turnover at the department as the president has repeatedly fired officials who disappointed him in cracking down on immigration, including its general counsel, who was dismissed just this week. “I wasn’t happy with the job they were doing,” Trump said, but added that he would announce permanent appointments soon.

Trump said he still expected to get nearly all of the 500 miles completed by the time he stands for re-election next year and said more was not needed because of natural barriers along stretches of the border. While Mexico is not paying for the wall, he noted that it is paying for its soldiers to stop migrants in a more aggressive campaign begun in recent months under pressure from Trump.

The characteristically money-conscious president repeatedly noted that this was the most expensive possible variant, saying he had originally wanted a simple and less costly concrete barrier but was convinced by Border Patrol professionals that it would be better to have a slatted barrier that they could see through to observe any potential threat on the other side. “That’s the Rolls-Royce version,” he said in a chagrined tone.

Trump said the steel slats would be wired — the Army general accompanying him declined to elaborate — and added that they would absorb heat so that they would be too scalding for potential migrants to even touch, much less scale. “You can fry an egg on that wall,” he said.

Mark Morgan, the president’s acting commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, called the new barriers “a game changer” that has reduced illegal crossings.

“There’s a false narrative out there that this wall is the president’s vanity wall,” Morgan said as Trump listened. “I’m here to tell you right now that’s false.”

Trump was then told that it was tradition for those working on the wall to sign it and was asked to follow suit. He happily took the pen.

OTAY MESA, Calif. — One thing President Donald Trump loves about his job is signing his name. He relishes signing executive orders, letters to foreign leaders and even red Make America Great Again hats. But on Wednesday, he signed a wall.

A Signature Trump Moment at the Border

Trump, at a rally in New Mexico, a border state with the highest Hispanic population in the country, said that he has great support among Latino Americans because of his hard line on stopping migrants and drugs from crossing illegally into the United States.

“The Hispanic Americans, they understand,” he said as supporters waved preprinted “Latinos for Trump” signs at Santa Ana Star Center in Rio Rancho, near Albuquerque. “They don’t want criminals coming across the border. They don’t want people taking their jobs. They want to have that security. And they want the wall. They want the wall.”

Trump flavored his typical campaign speech with repeated references to Hispanics, boasting that unemployment among Hispanics was at a record low, calling attention to the beginning of Hispanic Heritage Month and asserting that Hispanics love him. He asked how many in the arena were Hispanic, and a sizable share of the audience cheered in response.

He singled out a longtime supporter, Steve Cortes, a CNN commentator, who was present. “He happens to be Hispanic, but I’ve never quite figured it out because he looks more like a WASP than I do,” Trump said.

Shouting across the arena to Cortes, the president said: “Nobody loves the Hispanics more. Who do you like more, the country or the Hispanics?”

Cortes cupped his hands and shouted a reply that was hard to hear.

“He says the country,” Trump interpreted for him. “I don’t know, I may have to go for the Hispanics, to be honest with you. We got a lot of Hispanics. We love our Hispanics. Get out and vote.”

He even boasted of support from Hispanics in Florida. “The Venezuelans and the Cubans, they’re all for Trump,” he said.

The notion of choosing loyalty between Hispanics and the country drew immediate condemnation from Democrats. “Tonight Trump said, ‘Who do you love more, the country or the Hispanics?’” Rep. Ben Ray Luján, who is running for Senate in New Mexico, wrote on Twitter during the rally. “I don’t even know where to begin with that question. Hispanics are proud Americans. We are part of this country, just like you @realdonaldtrump. Do better.”

Trump has the support of about one-quarter of Hispanic voters, according to polls. His approval rating among Hispanics in the latest Washington Post-ABC News poll stands at 25%, significantly below that among the American population as a whole. Former Vice President Joe Biden, the Democratic front-runner, leads Trump among Hispanics by 71% to 26%, according to combined Post-ABC polls.

New Mexico, whose population is about 49% Hispanic, according to the census, would be a tough state for the president to flip. Trump lost it in 2016 by 8 percentage points, and in 2018, Republicans lost the governor’s mansion and a House seat, making the state’s entire congressional delegation Democratic.

In his speech, Trump sounded many of the themes that usually animate his rallies, promoting his record on the economy, border security and military spending while lashing out at Democrats, the news media and “the elite.”

He focused on the latest accusation of youthful sexual misconduct against Justice Brett Kavanaugh, detailed in The New York Times in an excerpt from a new book on his confirmation. The excerpt reported that a Yale University classmate recalled seeing the future justice with his pants down at a drunken dorm party, where friends pushed his penis into the hand of a female student.

The woman declined to be interviewed, and friends said she did not recall the episode, a fact not originally mentioned in the excerpt and later added to it. Several Democratic presidential candidates have called for Kavanaugh to be impeached.

“Look at what they are doing today to Justice Kavanaugh,” Trump said. “Look at what they are doing. The woman said, I don’t remember that. And they still want him to be impeached.”

He assailed The Times. “I called for the resignation of everybody at The New York Times involved in this,” he said. “They have taken the old Gray Lady and broken her down, destroyed her virtue and ruined her reputation.”

Trump’s visit to New Mexico was his first since becoming president, and he vowed to make it competitive next year. “We are here because we really think we’re going to turn a state and make it a Republican state,” he said.

In his build-the-wall fervor, Trump has repeatedly used racially inflammatory language. He opened his presidential campaign in 2015 by denouncing Mexican “rapists” coming across the border (although, he said, some immigrants “I assume are good people”) and later claimed an American-born judge could not fairly handle a lawsuit against him because he was “Mexican.” The president has also denounced caravans of migrants heading for the border as “invaders” and gang members as “animals.”

But Trump and his allies maintain that his tough words apply only to criminals or bad actors, not to Hispanics as a whole. Hispanics whose families came to the United States legally, they argue, do not approve of others breaking the law to enter the country. And they add that many Hispanics share Trump’s views on regulation, taxes and social issues.

In his speech Monday night, Trump rejected the accusation that his policies and language played to racial stereotypes and promoted animosity. “I’m the least racist person in this room,” he said.

“We are working night and day to deliver a future of limitless opportunities for our nation’s Hispanic American citizens,” he said, “including millions and millions of extraordinary Mexican Americans who enrich our society, and strengthen our country, serve in our military, and contribute immensely to other shared American family.”

New Mexico Democrats, who held a unity and diversity rally to counter Trump, argued that the president was actually harming the people he said he was helping, noting that he had diverted money from military construction projects to finance his border wall without permission from Congress, including an unmanned aerial training facility at Holloman Air Force Base.

“President Trump says he’s building his wall, but it’s New Mexico’s service members who are paying the price,” the state’s Democratic Party tweeted. “We don’t need an expensive and ineffective vanity project, we need common-sense reforms to address the humanitarian crisis at our border.”

From here, Trump will travel to California for fundraising events Tuesday and Wednesday.

Trump Tries to Woo Hispanic Voters at Rally in New Mexico

RIO RANCHO, N.M. — President Donald Trump opened a three-day Western campaign swing by venturing into blue territory Monday in a bid to flip a Democratic state and demonstrate electoral strength among Hispanic voters despite his anti-immigration policies and messaging.

But it turns out he received a gift in return: a Bible whose pages were edged with gilt and decorated with the words “Faith,” “Hope” and “Charity” after I Corinthians 13:13 — a holy book at a time when Lincoln was turning increasingly to Scripture to understand personal tragedy and national trauma.

Now, more than 150 years later, historians have discovered the Bible for the first time, a unique artifact of the 16th president’s life that they did not even know existed. Given by his widow to a friend of Lincoln’s after his assassination, it has remained out of sight for a century and a half, passed along from one generation to another, unknown to the vast array of scholars who have studied his life.

As of Thursday, it will go on display for the first time at the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library and Museum in Springfield, Illinois, a bequest from the family of the Rev. Noyes W. Miner, who lived across the street from the Lincolns in the Illinois capital and spoke at the slain president’s funeral. After preserving the Bible over the decades, Miner’s descendants recently came forward to disclose its existence and donate it to the public.

“For me, it’s a physical connection with Abraham Lincoln,” said Alan Lowe, executive director of the library and museum. “We see it as an important artifact to preserve for history’s sake, but also the beginning of a conversation about the relevance of Lincoln and the role of religion in our lives today.”

The Bible is now the sixth known to historians at the library to have been owned by Lincoln and his family. The most famous, the one on which Lincoln placed his hand at his inauguration in 1861, is held by the Library of Congress in Washington and was used by Barack Obama to take the oath of office in 2009 and 2013 and by Donald Trump in 2017.

The newly discovered Bible is more than twice as large, about 14 1/2 inches long by 11 5/8 inches wide. On its cover, it says, “Presented to Abraham Lincoln, President of the United States, by the Ladies of the Citizens Volunteer Hospital of Philadelphia.”

Mary Lincoln, who gave it to Miner seven years after her husband’s death, had it inscribed on the back: “Mrs. Abraham Lincoln to N.W. Miner, D.D., Oct. 15, 1872.”

Miner, a friend of the president’s, was “very much beloved by my husband,” according to Mary Lincoln. During his years in Springfield, Lincoln regularly stopped by Miner’s house to visit. After the assassination, Miner was among those who escorted Lincoln’s body to Springfield from Chicago and read from the Book of Job at the funeral. He remained in contact with Mary Lincoln in the years that followed.

Historians at the library speculate that the former first lady gave the Bible to Miner, a Baptist minister, as part of her post-White House campaign to protect her husband’s legacy. She angrily rejected assertions by his former law partner William Herndon that Lincoln had been an atheist, and the gift may have helped encourage Miner to testify to that effect.

Indeed, Miner did. “I never heard a word fall from his lips that gave me the remotest idea, that his mind was ever tinctured with infidel sentiments,” he later wrote. Instead, Miner said he was convinced that Lincoln “believed not only in the overwhelming Providence of God, but in the divinity of the Sacred Scriptures.”

And while some doubt the account, Miner wrote that Mary Lincoln once told him that at Ford’s Theater, her husband was thinking ahead to life after office, and his last words to her expressed a desire to visit Jerusalem to “see the places hallowed by the footsteps of the Saviour.”

Lincoln’s faith has long been a source of debate among scholars. Growing up, he rejected his parents’ Baptist religion, seeing it as too emotional. He never joined a church, and as a young man, he was viewed as the “village atheist.”

But biographers say he evolved as he grew older, influenced by the deaths of his sons Edward just before his fourth birthday and later Willie at age 11, as well as by the horrific slaughter of the Civil War. He attended services at the New York Avenue Presbyterian Church in Washington and often quoted the Bible.

By the time he received the newly discovered Bible in June 1864, scholars say, he was growing more overtly religious. His second inaugural address, in March 1865, was infused with biblical allusions and mentions of God and was often called the most explicitly religious speech ever given by a president while taking the oath.

After his death, his White House secretary, John Hay, found a written rumination on the role of God amid the battlefield carnage. Hay gave it the title, “Meditation on Divine Will.”

Ronald C. White, a prominent Lincoln biographer who also wrote a volume on the second inaugural address, said the Bible given to Miner was a significant discovery. “This is one more marker or signpost that Lincoln is on a journey, and that journey will not finally come out until the second inaugural,” White said.

The Bible remained in Miner’s family through the years. Sandra Wolcott Willingham, Miner’s great-great-granddaughter, said her grandparents displayed it on a Victorian tall table in the corner of the sitting room in their house in Oyster Bay, New York.

“It was almost like wallpaper — it was just there,” she said. “But it also had an aura about it that was special because it was elevated. It wasn’t just on the coffee table. It wasn’t in the bookcase. My grandmother and grandfather obviously very much loved it and appreciated it. But it wasn’t like, ‘Oh, look at us, we have Lincoln’s Bible.’ ”

In 1994, the Bible was left to Willingham’s son, William Prescott Wolcott Jr., who works in private wealth management for Morgan Stanley in San Francisco. Willingham, who lives in a small mining town in Idaho, recalled being sent the Bible and then wrapping it in a beach towel to drive it to her son’s house in California, where it was displayed on a mantel.

During a cross-country trip last year, Willingham and her husband stopped in Springfield and visited Lincoln’s home. Shown the lot across the street where her relatives’ house once stood, they decided to visit the museum, which is run by the Illinois state government, and told Ian Hunt, head of acquisitions, about the family keepsake.

When the family agreed to donate it, Lowe and Hunt flew to San Francisco to authenticate it. “They came in with their white gloves on, and they’re looking at it,” Willingham recalled. “‘Is this the real thing guys?’ They were speechless. ‘Yeah, it is the real thing.’ ”

When it was removed from the mantelpiece, it was stuck at first, but Lowe said the Bible was in “really good shape.” When they took it to the airport to return to Illinois, Lowe said, a representative from United Airlines who helped them through security grew emotional at seeing it. “She completely broke down crying,” he said.

Willingham, 73, a retired floral designer and volunteer firefighter, said the family was inspired by Obama’s election as the first African American president and initially tried to give the Bible to his family but never heard back.

Either way, his election moved her, and she thought Lincoln had paved the way. “It’s just come to me — yes, that man was incredible and we need to share this with the nation,” she said. “It needs to go back to the country.”

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/19/us/politics/abraham-lincoln-bible.html" id="8487da9d-a86d-399d-ae6f-adcddefb0358">The New York Times</a>.

Unveiling a Lincoln Bible That Was Sitting in Plain Sight All These Years

WASHINGTON — In 1864, Abraham Lincoln made a rare wartime trip out of Washington to visit a charity event in Philadelphia raising money to care for wounded soldiers. He donated 48 copies of the Emancipation Proclamation to be sold for fundraising.

Unveiling a Lincoln Bible that was sitting in plain sight all these years

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 Donald Trump’s election and deeply disturbed by his administration.

She refused to vote for 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, Bush said yes. By February 2018, she had given up. “I’d probably say no today,” she said.

Bush’s journey from Republican stalwart to Never Trumper is chronicled in “The Matriarch,” a biography by Susan Page, the Washington bureau chief of USA Today, to be published Tuesday by Twelve, an imprint of the Hachette Book Group. Page interviewed Bush five times before the former first lady died in April 2018 at age 92, and had exclusive access to her diary.

An excerpt published in USA Today on Wednesday described Bush’s antipathy toward Trump — “greed, selfishness and ugly,” as she summed up the New York real estate mogul in her diary in 1990, long before he became president — but a copy of the book obtained by The New York Times includes other revelations about her life.

Among other things, it recounts Bush’s strained relationship with Nancy Reagan when George Bush was vice president, describing how she crossed the Bushes off invitation lists to White House events. It reveals that her husband was outraged when his 1988 presidential campaign hired Roger J. Stone Jr., who would later come to fame as Trump’s adviser indicted on a charge of obstruction of justice, and demanded that he be fired.

And the book explores incessant but never proven rumors that George Bush had an affair with Jennifer Fitzgerald, a longtime assistant. While not reaching a definitive conclusion, Page quotes an unnamed “member of the Bushes’ inner circle” confirming that they did have an extramarital relationship.

“Their surreptitious romance would last for more than a dozen years, inexplicable to those around him and impossible for anyone to manage,” Page wrote. “Several aides decided to leave rather than deal with her. The persistent rumors were humiliating for his wife. They fueled gossip that was politically perilous. Despite all that, Bush for years was unwilling to distance himself from her.”

Both George Bush, who died in November, and Fitzgerald denied any affair to the president’s biographer, Jon Meacham. “I was very close to her for a while. And liked her,” Bush told him. But did they have an affair? “No,” he said. As for Fitzgerald, she told Meacham: “It simply didn’t happen.”

Barbara Bush was a singular figure in American life, the only first lady to see her son become president as well. (Abigail Adams, the wife of John Adams, had died by the time John Quincy Adams was elected.) But she was a more complicated figure than her grandmotherly image suggested.

A product of the World War II generation, she changed along with society. She resented it when Wellesley College students protested her selection as commencement speaker on the grounds that she owed her only achievement to her marriage. Page recalled encountering Bush at a Kennebunkport picnic in 1990 when the first lady asked her, “How can you work when you have young children?”

But years later, when Bush received a citation that made no mention of her work promoting literacy and other social causes, she bristled at the focus on her family role. “I had not realized that I was a women’s libber,” she wrote in her diary, “but I am now.”

By the time Page interviewed her for the biography, Bush boasted that all of her married granddaughters had children and worked outside the home. Still, she resisted activism. “Do I believe in equal rights for women? Yes,” she told Page. “But I wouldn’t put myself as a feminist, no.”

She struggled over the abortion issue, drawing from her experience watching her 3-year-old daughter Robin die of leukemia. She came to believe that the question was “when does the soul enter the body” and decided it was when a baby takes its first breath.

“Having decided that the first breath is when the soul enters the body, I believe in Federally funded abortion,” she wrote in her diary. “Why should the rich be allowed to afford abortions and the poor not?” She added, “Abortion is personal, between mother fathers and Dr.” But after her husband joined Ronald Reagan’s anti-abortion ticket in 1980, she kept her views to herself.

She likewise evolved on sexual orientation. In 2015, at lunch with Meacham and historian Timothy Naftali, she criticized the Obama White House for making a big show of announcing that it had hired the first openly transgender person. Naftali told her he was gay and explained why it was important to know about the appointment.

“I ended up being persuaded in my mind that after years of hiding this may be a good thing,” she wrote in her diary at age 90. “Nobody wants to be born Gay or Transgender. They have been misunderstood for years. He won the argument.” She added: “There are a world of folks born transgender who are quiet and lonely. How sad to be in the wrong body.”

She never came to terms, however, with Nancy Reagan. “She really hated us,” Bush told Page. “I don’t know why, but she really hated us.”

Page found a draft invitation list to the Reagans’ famed White House dinner in 1985 for Prince Charles and Princess Diana of Britain in which someone, almost certainly Nancy Reagan, had crossed out the Bushes’ names. Reagan also crossed their names off the list for the president’s birthday party a year later.

Yet when the Bushes were leaving the White House in January 1993, Reagan publicly complained that she and her husband had never been invited to the Bush White House for a state dinner, even though Ronald Reagan had been there just 10 days earlier to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

When Nancy Reagan later called Barbara Bush, they had it out. “Don’t you ever call me again!” Bush recalled telling her predecessor before hanging up. It was their last extended conversation.

Bush’s view of Trump long predated the 2016 nomination battle with Jeb Bush. “The real symbol of greed in the 80s” she called him in her diary in 1990. A month later, after reading about his divorce, she wrote: “Trump now means Greed, selfishness and ugly. So sad.”

She blamed anxiety over Trump for a heart spell that hospitalized her in June 2016 and erupted when he suggested that her son could not handle Russia. “Putin endorsed him, for heaven’s sake,” she exclaimed. “Putin the killer! Putin the worst! He endorsed Trump! That’s an endorsement you don’t want.”

On Election Day, she wrote in Jeb Bush’s name. “I could not vote for Trump or Clinton,” she wrote in her diary. (Her husband voted for Hillary Clinton and her son George W. Bush voted for “none of the above.”) The next day, Bush told Page, “I woke up and discovered, to my horror, that Trump had won.”

A friend gave her a red, white and blue digital countdown clock displaying the time that remained in Trump’s term down to the second. She kept it on her nightstand where she could see it every day until her own countdown clock expired a year ago.

This article originally appeared in <a id="2bca967b-fabe-4622-926e-ddd9face2cde" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/27/us/politics/barbara-bush-biography-trump.html">The New York Times</a>.

To Barbara Bush, Donald Trump Represented 'Greed, Selfishness'

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.

To Barbara Bush, Donald Trump represented 'greed, selfishness'

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