“Don’t ask,” said former First Lady Laura Bush when asked if she would vote for Donald Trump if he were to become the GOP presidential nominee.
“I’m not going to answer,” Mrs. Bush told USA Today’s “Capital Download” host Susan Page. “Don’t ask that,” she added, shutting down the question regarding the controversial frontrunner.
Mrs. Bush has stayed generally quiet regarding political matters, as has her husband, former President Bush, since stepping out of the White House. But as Mrs. Bush has made her way into the media recently, promoting the new book We Are Afghan Women, she has received her share of questions about The Donald, as one might suspect.
The former First Lady said that she is currently “uncommitted” to a presidential candidate since her brother-in-law Jeb! Bush suspended his campaign.
“We got off the sidelines for Jeb,” said Mrs. Bush of herself and her husband. “He was our candidate.”
Mrs. Bush, typically cautious of making political waves, added some commentary about the value of religious freedom in the United States.
“One of the reasons we’re a country is because we believe in freedom of religion,” said Mrs. Bush. “We believe that people could be religious.
“They could choose any religion that they wanted to, or they could not worship, if they didn’t want to,” she continued. “We don’t have any religious test in the United States. And that’s what we need to remember. We need to remember what our values are.”
The former First Lady added a note of caution regarding potential isolationism and apathy: “We have a tendency in the United States, and it’s happened in other times in our history, to become sort of isolationist and xenophobic and, you know, we’re just going to stay here together and not pay attention to the rest of the world. It’s something we have to pay attention to now because our world is so small. It’s important for us — even though we’ve gone through these stages many other times in our history — to pay attention to the rest of the world.”
On Monday, The Daily Wire noted that during a recent interview with Today Show host Savannah Guthrie, Mrs. Bush gave similarly evasive answers when asked about the current primary, stating that she was “full of opinions” which she did not care to share.