Jenna Bush Hager and Roommates Took ‘Mind Eraser’ Shots on Dad’s Stressful 2000 Election Night: ‘My Mind Didn’t Erase’

Jenna Bush Hager didn’t exactly have a traditional college experience. 

The 43-year-old daughter of George W. Bush was a college freshman at the University of Texas at Austin when her dad was elected President of the United States in 2000. While talking about her two random roommates on the Dec. 5 episode of Today with Hoda & Jenna, Bush Hager talked about how the two ladies helped her ahead of her transition into becoming the first daughter. 

“On Election Day, they were like, ‘Girl, we gotta get some ‘mind erasers’ because we just can’t deal,’” Bush Hager recalled, explaining that “mind erasers” were a popular shot in the early aughts. “‘We gotta get you some mind erasers because who knows what’s gonna happen tonight?’”

Amid the chaotic 2000 presidential election, which included an inconclusive vote count involving “hanging chads” and “janglies,” Bush Hager admitted, “So I had one and my mind didn’t erase.”

And that wasn’t the only way the now mother of three let loose ahead of her dad taking on the office of the president in January 2001. 

“Then he was elected after the chads fell and such, and my roommates were like, ‘We need the last weekend of freedom. Put it in your agenda,’ ” Bush Hager shared. “The weekend before I got Secret Service, they were like, ‘Can we take you out?’ And I’m like, ‘Sure, what should we do?’ They were like, ‘We’re driving to Mexico!’ ”

Bush Hager, who married Henry Hager in 2008, revealed that she did, in fact, cross the border with her roommates, telling Kotb, “It used to be safer, but I drove across the border to Acuña, Mexico. It was legal to drink there, so it felt safer. There was a bar with a slide, that’s all I remember. Thank God I’m alive. Thank you, God.”

Back in September, Bush Hager revealed that she and her twin sister Barbara Bush weren’t supportive of their dad when he initially decided to run for president.

“Unfortunately, when I was 16, my father sat my sister and I down and said, ‘Now listen, we really want your support, I’d like to run for president.’ [Barbara and I] broke down in tears,” she recalled on the Sept. 3 episode of Today with Hoda & Jenna. “As only twins can do, we cried in unison. We said, ‘No!’ We said, ‘You’re going to ruin our lives, Dad.’ And then we said, ‘And even if you run, you’re going to lose!’ ”

Bush Hager moved to Texas in 1994 when her dad was elected as governor. While Bush moved to Washington D.C. after being elected president, Bush Hager stayed in Texas to get her degree in English from the University of Texas at Austin. 

While she worked for a few years in D.C. and Maryland as a teacher, Bush Hager — who is mom to daughters Mila, 11, and Poppy, 9, and son Hal, 5 — went on to become an author and later, a television host, when she replaced Kathie Lee Gifford as the co-host of Today in 2019.

“It feels organic and it feels right, which I don’t know if I would do it if it didn’t,” she told PEOPLE at the time. “They probably wouldn’t have asked me to do it if it didn’t. But it just feels like the right time for me.”

With Kotb’s departure from Today next month, Jenna will be hosting Today with Jenna & Friends with guest cohosts until she can find a more permanent replacement.