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In late April 2018, an unsourced Facebook post reporting that U.S. President Donald Trump had been ordered not to attend former First Lady Barbara Bush's funeral on 21 April 2018 in Houston, Texas, was circulated on social media, prompting readers to ask if it was true: Barbara Bush, who was the mother of former president George W. Bush and former Florida governor Jeb Bush, as well as the wife of former President George H.W. Bush, passed away on 17 April 2018 at the age of 92. After a bitter 2016 presidential campaign in which candidate Donald Trump heavily criticized two of Barbara Bush's sons (as well as beating out Jeb Bush for the Republican nomination), the Bush family matriarch made it no secret that she was not a fan of Donald Trump. We uncovered no other reports that anyone from the Bush family ordered the sitting president not to attend Barbara Bush's memorial service. Instead, the White House released a statement to reporters saying Trump would not attend out of respect to avoid creating a disruption due to added security. First Lady Melania Trump, however, will be in attendance, as will former presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, and former first ladies Hillary Clinton, Laura Bush, and Michelle Obama (along with, of course, Barbara Bush's husband and sons). During the 2016 campaign, Barbara Bush didn't hold back in her critiques of then-candidate Donald Trump. In the course of a CNN interview, for example, she proclaimed that [Trump] doesn't give many answers to how he would solve problems. He sort of makes faces and says insulting things ... He's said terrible things about women, terrible things about the military. I don't understand why people are for him, for that reason. I'm a woman ... I'm not crazy about what he says about women. In another interview with CBS, Bush again lambasted Trump for his comments about women and called him a comedian or a showman: Although there was no love lost between President Trump and the Bush family, the BBC noted it's not unusual for sitting presidents to skip the funerals of former first ladies: Bush did express that he wanted President Trump to attend his own funeral, however:
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