Donald Trump said a lot of wacky things during his Thursday, August 8, press conference at Mar-a-Lago, as he is wont to do. He claimed Kamala Harris, a former California attorney general, “couldn’t pass the bar exam” (she failed the first time and passed a year later). He said he drew a bigger crowd for his January 6, 2021, “Stop the Steal” rally than Martin Luther King Jr. did for his “I Have a Dream” speech (the crowd at the 1963 March on Washington was about 25 times bigger).
But Trump’s zaniest claim was that he nearly “went down in a helicopter” with Willie Brown. Trump was responding to a reporter’s question about whether Harris’s relationship with the former San Francisco mayor helped her career.
“I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump said. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing.”
“This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was, he was a little concerned,” Trump continued. “So I know him, I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her … he was not a fan of hers, at that point.”
This is a crazy story — but not because Trump and Brown nearly died in a helicopter crash and this is the first we’re hearing of it. It seems Trump did nearly crash during a flight with a Black politician from California, but he’s either misremembering major elements of the story or lying.
On Friday morning, the New York Times reported that Willie Brown said Trump’s story was totally false:
He had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump, he said. He had never nearly perished in any helicopter ride. And he remained an avid supporter of Ms. Harris’s.
Mr. Brown, who loves regaling anybody who will listen with stories and who penned a weekly column in The San Francisco Chronicle until 2021, added, laughing: “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”
The Times suggested that Trump might have confused Willie Brown with Jerry Brown, the former governor of California. In 2018, Trump took a helicopter ride with Jerry Brown and Governor-elect Gavin Newsom to survey damage from the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history.
This would be quite the mix-up, as Willie Brown and Jerry Brown don’t look anything alike. Here’s a photo of the two men shaking hands in 1998:
And both Jerry Brown and Newsom told the Times that nothing unusual happened during their 2018 helicopter ride with Trump.
“There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris,” the former governor said through a spokesperson.
Newsom said basically the same thing, with more detail and chuckling:
“I call complete B.S.,” Mr. Newsom said, laughing out loud.
“I was on a helicopter with Jerry Brown and Trump, and it didn’t go down,” Mr. Newsom, 56, said in an interview. He said that Mr. Trump had, however, repeatedly brought up the possibility of crashing.
The subject of Ms. Harris, with whom Mr. Newsom had enjoyed a friendly rivalry, did not come up on the helicopter, he added. “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala,” he said with a laugh.
In an angry phone call to reporter Maggie Haberman on Friday afternoon, Trump threatened to sue the Times and claimed he could prove the story was true (though he has yet to produce any evidence):
“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” and indicating that he intended to release the flight records, before shouting that he was “probably going to sue” over the Times article.
When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.
On Friday night, Trump attacked the Times on Truth Social and insisted that Willie Brown is lying:
Around the same time, the mystery was (partially) solved. Nate Holden, a former city councilmember and state senator from Los Angeles, told Politico that he took a helicopter ride with Trump around 1990 and they nearly crashed. During the flight from Manhattan to the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, the aircraft’s hydraulic system failed and they were forced to make an emergency landing in Linden, New Jersey. As Holden noted, he doesn’t really look like Brown:
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
“I guess we all look alike,” Holden told POLITICO, letting out a loud laugh.
Holden’s version of the story was corroborated by Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice-president of construction and development, who was on the helicopter along with Trump’s brother Robert. Res actually wrote about the incident in her 2013 book and told Politico that Trump has been telling the story incorrectly for years:
Over the phone Friday, Res said Trump liked to tell a joke about Holden on the helicopter — “you turned white,” he said. But she said it was Trump’s face that was white.
“He was white as snow,” Holden added. “And he was scared shitless.”
Trump told the helicopter story in a book, too. But in 2023’s Letters to Trump, he said it was Willie Brown on the helicopter with him.
The likeliest explanation for this strange tale is that Trump was nearly in a helicopter crash over New Jersey in 1990, he’s been confusing Nate Holden and Willie Brown for years, he made up the bit about Brown trashing Harris during the flight, and now he doesn’t want to admit that the story is wrong.
So, is Trump lying or is he deeply confused? As former National Security adviser John Bolton remarked on Thursday (in reference to another false thing Trump said in his presser), Trump may not even know what’s real anymore.
“Trump can’t tell the difference between what’s true and what’s false,” Bolton told CNN. “It’s not that he lies a lot, because to lie, you have to do it consciously. He just can’t tell the difference. So, he makes up what he wants to say at any given time.”
This post was updated to include Trump’s response and Politico’s reporting.
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