The Bush Twins Biography

Twins Jenna Bush Hager and Barbara Bush are the only children of former U.S. president George W. Bush and his wife Laura Bush. They are fraternal twins, not identical twins.

Barbara, who has dark hair, was born first and is named after her grandmother, the former First Lady and wife of George Bush the elder. Jenna is blonde; she is named for the twins’ other grandmother, Jenna Welch, the mother of Laura Bush. In the fall of 2000, as their father was finishing a successful run for his first term as U.S. president, both girls began attending college: Barbara Bush at Yale and Jenna Bush at the University of Texas.

Both twins graduated from their respective colleges in May of 2004. George W. Bush left office and returned to private life in Texas in January of 2009. Jenna began working in TV and became the co-host of the morning show TODAY With Hoda and Jenna in 2019; Barbara co-founded the Global Health Corps in 2009, and served as its CEO for nine years.

Jenna Bush married her longtime boyfriend, Henry Hager, on May 10, 2008 in Crawford, Texas. They have three children: daughters Margaret (known as Mila, born 2013) and Poppy (b. 2015), and son Henry (or Hal, b. 2019).  Barbara Bush married actor Craig Coyne in 2018; their daughter, Cora Georgia Coyne, was born in 2021.

George W. Bush was succeeded by President Barack Obama, and the Bush Twins were succeeded as “first daughters” by Obama’s own two daughters: Malia Obama and Sasha Obama. In 2017, as Obama left office, the Bush Twins wrote an open letter to the Obama girls, urging them to “Explore your passions. Learn who you are. Make mistakes — you are allowed to.”

The Bush twins published a joint memoir, Sisters First, in 2017.