Melania Hit With Ultimate Snub for White House Ceremony
Her East Room event will honor former first lady Barbara Bush—but one big name won’t be there.
Kayla Bartowski/Getty Images
A key member of the Bush family has snubbed Melania Trump after declining to attend a ceremony hosted by the first lady honoring the late Barbara Bush.
Former President George W. Bush is not expected to attend a Thursday event at the White House’s East Room for the unveiling of a U.S. Postal Service stamp dedicated to his late mother, two unnamed officials told The Washington Post.
Dorothy Bush Koch, the former president’s younger sister, is listed by Trump’s office as one of several featured speakers at the event. Alice Yates, the chief executive of the George and Barbara Bush Foundation, will also attend.
Though Bush attended both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations, he did not endorse Trump in his three presidential runs.
In a 2021 event marking two decades since the 9/11 attack, Bush lamented that “so much of our politics has become a naked appeal to anger, fear, and resentment.”
Trump appeared to take those comments as a dig towards him, later saying in a statement that Bush “led a failed and uninspiring presidency” and that he “shouldn’t be lecturing anybody!”
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Trump had a testy history even with Barbara Bush herself.
In the 2019 book The Matriarch: Barbara Bush and the Making of a Dynasty, Barbara calls Trump “a symbol of greed.”
The book also revealed that months before she died in 2018, Barbara said she no longer considered herself a Republican despite having been one of the party’s most recognizable faces.
“I have heard that she was nasty to me, but she should be. Look what I did to her sons,” Trump said in 2019, referring to former Florida Governor Jeb Bush. “Look, she’s the mother of somebody that I competed against. Most people thought he was going to win and he was quickly out. I hit him very hard in South Carolina.”
A spokesperson for Bush did not respond to a request for comment from the Post.
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