Two days and at least ten journalists later, we finally have an explanation for Trump’s story claiming to have almost died with Willie Brown.
As Politico first reported, Trump did almost crash in one of his helicopters with a Black politician. But it was former Los Angeles city councilman Nate Holden, not former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
Trump’s former Executive Vice President Barbara Res wrote about it in her book.
On that ride, she said the pilots started feverishly maneuvering the equipment as the chopper lurched over the water. “From the corner of my eye, I can see in the cockpit and what I see is the co-pilot pumping a device with all his might,” Res wrote in her book. Donald Trump and Robert Trump were reassuring Holden.
“Very shortly thereafter the pilot let us know he had lost some instruments and we would need to make an emergency landing,” she wrote. “By now, the helicopter was shaking like crazy.”
After considerable turbulence, they landed safely in New Jersey at an airport where Trump had his commuter helicopters stored.
As Holden described it, he came onto the flight already worried because another of Trump’s helicopters had just gone down, killing three of Trump’s executives.
Holden recalled being a bit worried about the helicopter ride because it came not long after five people, including three high-level executives of Trump’s casinos, were killed when their chopper crashed in 1989 over Forked River, N.J.
But Holden says Trump told him they were in good hands, noting that he had two capable pilots. “He tells me to ‘look at the sky,’” Holden said. ‘Oh my God, it’s so beautiful.’”
At about the time Politico was publishing this story, Trump was on the phone with Maggie Haberman, complaining about the original NYT story reporting that the politician in question wasn’t Willie Brown.
In an angry phone call to a New York Times reporter as he landed several hours away from his planned rally in Bozeman, Mont., because of a mechanical issue on his plane, Mr. Trump excoriated The Times for its coverage of his meandering news conference on Thursday at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home, during which he told of an emergency landing during a helicopter trip that he said both he and Mr. Brown had made together.
[snip]
“We have the flight records of the helicopter,” Mr. Trump insisted Friday, saying the helicopter had landed “in a field,” 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.
When Maggie and the two NYT journalists who first suggested maybe Trump was confusing Willie Brown with Jerry Brown matched the Politico story, they didn’t mention that Trump’s plane had maintenance issues last night, just like the helicopter 34 years ago. They didn’t mention it, even in spite of Holden’s memory of wondering how Trump could so badly neglect his equipment even after a helicopter crash the year before.
“Anyway,” he continued, “we start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’”
The hydraulic system had failed, he said. “Donald turned white as snow,” Mr. Holden recalled. “He was shaking.”
Mr. Holden said that as the helicopter’s crew worked frantically to set the aircraft down safely, his own thoughts ran to a helicopter crash in 1989 that had killed three senior executives of Mr. Trump’s casinos over Forked River, N.J.
“I just thought, how the hell do you let your staff not maintain your aircraft after you just had a crash that killed some of your staff? How could you let this happen again? I thought, if we go down, this is your fault.”
This whole incident could serve as vehicle for commentary about how a billionaire who wants to run the country again can’t even keep his own gear running. It could provide opportunity to remind readers that Trump got elected in 2016 on a promise he’d spend on infrastructure, only to deliver a never-ending series of infrastructure weeks that nevertheless never delivered the promised investments. Heck, that might even provide opportunity to remind readers that Kamala cast the tie-breaking vote on the American Rescue Plan in 2021, which funded infrastructure projects Republicans now like to claim credit for, and then cast the tie-breaking vote on the Inflation Reduction Act, which similarly invested in local communities. Tim Walz, too, was able to get infrastructure spending funded.
But that’s not how this started. That’s not why Trump told a story in which he swapped one Black politician with another widely known for being Kamala’s early mentor (apparently Trump told the story in response to a softball about Brown’s role in Kamala’s career).
Trump told this story to create the illusion that he remains close to Willie Brown, so close that Willie badmouths Kamala Harris to Trump. Trump told the story to make a claim that even Kamala’s early mentor now criticizes her.
Whether people have flown with Trump or not, they all deny that trash talking.
Yet that part of the story is getting buried. Holden’s denials appear in paragraph 24 in the Politico story.
Before he hung up with POLITICO, Holden assured a reporter that nobody discussed—let alone criticized—Kamala Harris as Trump claimed Brown did.
“He either mixed it up,” Holden said. “Or, he made it up. This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one. Conflating Willie Brown and me? The press is searching for the real story and they didn’t get it. You did.”
Willie Brown’s denials appear in paragraph 29 in the latest NYT version; Holden’s don’t appear at all.
Reached again Friday night, Mr. Brown reiterated that he had never flown in a helicopter with Mr. Trump and that he had not denigrated Ms. Harris to the former president because he admires and respects her.
“Those are the two things I am certain of,” he said. “All the rest of this is amusing.”
Jerry Brown’s denials appear in paragraph six of the original NYT story.
Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”
Willie Brown’s appear in paragraph 14.
Reached on his cellphone just after Mr. Trump’s news conference — at his regular lunch spot at Sam’s Grill in downtown San Francisco — Mr. Brown, 90, said the whole story was 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.
[snip]
Ms. Harris ended their relationship nearly three decades ago, but Mr. Brown said he had always been a big fan and supporter of hers. “No hard feelings,” he said.
Gavin Newsom’s denials appear in paragraph 20.
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.
This effusive denial from Willie Brown appears in paragraph 8 of the SF Chronicle’s early story reporting the former Mayor’s denials of flying with Trump.
Willie Brown told the Chronicle he did not say anything disparaging to Trump about Harris, whom he dated for about a year in the mid-1990s and appointed to two state commissions years before Harris was elected San Francisco district attorney in 2003.
“It’s just as accurate as all of the other components of what you’re asking me about,” Brown said. “No, not accurate at all.”
So Brown has never said anything bad about Harris to Trump?
“Nooooooo,” Brown said Thursday. “Hell, no.”
Trump told a makebelieve story so that he could lend credence to a claim that even a historic Black politician, the Vice President’s early mentor, doesn’t like Kamala anymore. And after chasing the story for two days, that part of the fabrication is being lost, buried beneath fact checks of who flew with whom.
It was just another lie among many Trump told about Kamala Harris at that presser, lies for which only some outlets are calling him out.
I raise this because of the campaign by a slew of mostly insipid male reporters who — whether goaded by Trump or not — are making the point he wanted them to take away from his presser: that Kamala hasn’t done a presser (because, Trump claims, she’s not smart enough).
Here’s how Maggie, in a piece that never directly called Trump on a single one of his lies about Kamala or polling or his crowds or the economy (it does note his claims that he left office peacefully are false), wrote it up in a piece with Shane Goldmacher and Jonathan Swan.
Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists.
[snip]
The goal of Mr. Trump’s news conference, which he announced on Thursday morning on his social media site, was to highlight that Ms. Harris has yet to hold a news conference of her own or to give an unscripted interview to the news media.
It was a point he made during his event, arguing that she had avoided doing so because “she’s not smart enough.”
Journalists have been running around for days suggesting that some vaunted Fourth Estate is entitled to interviews with and press conferences from Kamala Harris as if they add something, as if they have value to democracy.
And yet the biggest immediate news story that came out of an hour long presser (Trump’s dodges about abortion will have more lasting import), that he fabricated a story about Willie Brown, has not been described as just one of many efforts in the press conference to lie about the Vice President.
Trump gathered a bunch of journalists to get them to accuse Kamala of being too stupid to hold a press conference. And yet there’s no reflection that one of the biggest things he fed journalists was a fabricated story made to prop up all the rest of his lies about Kamala.