In his press conference at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida, Donald Trump’s stream of invective, wild claims and outright lies included a story about a brush with death during a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, a veteran California politician who once briefly dated Kamala Harris, now Trump’s Democratic rival in the presidential election.
Claiming to “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 … a little concerned. So I know him pretty well.”
Trump also said Brown told him “terrible things” about Harris and was “not a fan of hers very much at that point”.
Both parts of Trump’s story turned out to be untrue.
It quickly became clear after the news conference on Thursday that Trump was talking about a helicopter ride with Jerry Brown, then the California governor. Furthermore, Willie Brown had nothing bad to say about Harris.
The pair dated nearly 30 years ago. Brown, 90, told the New York Times, adding: “No hard feelings.”
Of Trump’s helicopter claim, he said: “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”
Speaking to KRON4, a San Francisco-area radio station, Brown said: “I’ve never done business with Donald Trump, let’s start with that. And secondly, I don’t think I’d want to ride on the same helicopter with him. There’s too many people that have an agenda with reference to him, including the people who service helicopters!”
It was widely established that Trump’s helicopter ride happened in 2018, when Trump was president and he and Jerry Brown took a trip to inspect wildfire damage.
Through a spokesperson, Jerry Brown said: “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”
It turned out that Gavin Newsom, the current governor of California, was on the flight too, as governor-elect.
“I call complete BS,” Newsom told the Times, while “laughing out loud”.
Trump did repeatedly bring up the subject of crashing, Newsom said, but: “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala.”
Trump held his press conference in an attempt to highlight Harris’s lack of such events since becoming the presumptive Democratic nominee, after Joe Biden dropped his re-election campaign less than three weeks ago and endorsed his vice-president to replace him at the top of the 2024 presidential ticket. But the former president’s chaotic and bad-tempered event did little to reset a campaign narrative showing Harris surging in popularity on the campaign trail as the former president flounders.
Newsom told the Times he thought the press conference was “an act of desperation”.
