Anika Begay
By James Oliphant and Alexandra Ulmer
(Reuters) – Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump insisted on Friday that he risked his life in a helicopter crash with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though Brown said the incident never happened and another man said he had traveled on a similar flight with Trump decades earlier.
On Thursday, Trump told the story of his near-death in a helicopter to Brown, who had a brief relationship with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris several decades ago.
“I went down in the helicopter with him,” Trump said in a rambling press conference. “We thought maybe this was the end. We were in a helicopter together going somewhere, and there was an emergency landing. It was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was, he was a little concerned.”
Trump also claimed that Willie Brown said “terrible things” to him about Harris.
While Brown has denied the allegations, another black former California politician, Nate Holden, told Politico that he took part in a turbulent helicopter ride with Trump in New Jersey, possibly in 1990.
As president in 2018, Trump toured wildfire-ravaged California by helicopter with then-California Gov. Jerry Brown, NBC News reported. A representative for former Gov. Brown, who is white, told The New York Times that there was no emergency landing and that Harris was not mentioned during that flight.
Longtime Democratic Party power broker and California State Assembly speaker Willie Brown told the San Francisco Chronicle after Trump’s press conference that he had never been on a helicopter with the former president.
“You would have known if I had gone down in a helicopter with Trump,” he told the newspaper. He also denied ever saying anything disparaging about Harris to Trump.
Republicans have insinuated that Brown is partly responsible for Harris’s rise in politics, although the two broke up in the mid-1990s and Harris didn’t win her first election until 2002. While the two were dating, Brown appointed Harris, then a young prosecutor, to two high-paying state bench positions.
Trump dug in on Friday, insisting in posts on his Truth Social platform that his helicopter ride had been with Willie Brown and that it had taken place in New Jersey, not California.
“There were ‘Logs,’ Maintenance Logs, and Witnesses. There was even an article about ‘Willie and Me,'” Trump said.
He did not provide any of the evidence he referenced in the post. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request to share the evidence Trump cited.
Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, scoffed at Trump’s account, Politico reported Friday.
“Willie is the short black guy who lives in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall black guy who lives in Los Angeles. I guess we all look the same.”
Holden added that Harris was not mentioned during the helicopter flight. “Either he got it mixed up. Or he made it up,” Holden said of Trump.
Reuters could not immediately reach Holden. The Trump campaign did not respond to a question about whether the near miss occurred with Holden.
Trump said he would “probably” sue the New York Times over its coverage of his comments on the helicopter story, according to a Times report Friday. Trump disparaged the paper on Truth Social, attacking its reporter Maggie Haberman as “Maggot Hagermann.”
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Harris’s campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment Friday about the apparent confusion.
When 81-year-old President Joe Biden was still the Democratic nominee in the Nov. 5 election, Trump, 78, frequently mocked his opponent’s mental acuity and offered to take a cognitive test, arguing that Biden was too weak to be president.
Biden has since been replaced at the top by 59-year-old Harris, forcing Trump to scramble to find new lines of attack.
