Photo: Saul Loeb/AFP/Getty Images
Donald Trump said a lot of wacky things during his 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 major 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 — not because Trump and Brown nearly died in a helicopter crash and this is the first we’re hearing of it, but because it appears to be entirely made up.
The New York Times called Brown after the press conference, and he 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!”
Trump did take a helicopter ride with California governor Jerry Brown and governor-elect Gavin Newsom in 2018 to survey damage from the Camp Fire, the deadliest wildfire in the state’s history. So maybe he just got confused about which California politician he shared a near-death experience with?
That still doesn’t explain it, because Willie Brown and Jerry Brown don’t look anything alike. Here’s a photo of the two men shaking hands in 1998:
Photo: Lea Suzuki/San Francisco Chronicle/Getty Images
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.
The Trump campaign has not offered a plausible explanation for Trump’s story. When CNN asked Trump-campaign spokesman Steven Cheung to elaborate, he only responded, “Slick Willie!” — a nickname of Willie Brown’s.
It’s quite hard to believe that the president and two California governors nearly died in 2018 and it wasn’t reported at the time — or that Trump ever survived a brush with death and kept quiet about it. The only plausible argument for how this wasn’t just a crazy lie came from another Trump foe, John Bolton. And the former National Security adviser wasn’t arguing that what Trump says is true, but that he’s so delusional even he doesn’t know what’s real.
“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.”
Bolton was actually commenting on another Trump lie from the press conference (that he urged his supporters not to chant “lock her up” about Hillary Clinton). But Bolton’s insight into his former boss’s psyche helps explain why Trump would tell an outrageous, false story in front of a bunch of reporters. Who are we to say the helicopter story is a lie if Trump really believes it?
