By James Oliphant and Alexandra Ulmer
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump insisted Friday that he was on a near-fatal helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, even though Brown said the incident never happened and another politician said he was on a similar flight with Trump decades ago.
Trump on Thursday recounted his near-death experience on a helicopter ride with Brown, who was briefly involved with Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris decades ago.
“I landed with him in a helicopter. We thought this might be the end of it. We were in a helicopter going to a certain place together, and we had an emergency landing. It wasn’t a pleasant landing, and Willie was a little bit worried,” Trump said at a news conference.
Trump also claimed that Willie Brown told him “terrible things” about Harris.
Brown, a Democratic veteran who also served as speaker of the California State Assembly, told the San Francisco Chronicle after Trump’s news conference that he was not in the helicopter with the former president. He also denied that he said anything disparaging about Harris to Trump.
Nate Holden, a former black California politician, told Politico late Friday that he had a turbulent helicopter ride with Trump in New Jersey, likely in 1990.
Earlier Friday, Trump insisted in posts on his Truth Social platform that his helicopter ride was with Willie Brown and that it took place in New Jersey, not California.
“There were records, maintenance records, witnesses. There was also a story about ‘Willie and Me,'” Trump said.
He did not provide any of the evidence he referred to in the post.
Asked to share the evidence Trump cited, Trump campaign spokesman Stephen Cheung pointed to his X post of an image from a page in his 2023 book “Letters to Trump.” The post features a photo of Trump and Willie Brown, and quotes Trump saying, “We crash-landed in a helicopter together.”
Asked about Holden’s account of being in a helicopter with Trump, Cheung said: “It sounds like Holden is either lying or has memory problems.”
Holden, a former city councilman and state senator from Los Angeles, mocked Trump’s account, Politico reported.
Holden is quoted as saying, “Willie is the short black guy who lives in San Francisco, and I’m the tall black guy who lives in Los Angeles. I think we’re all alike.”
Holden added that Harris did not mention his name during the helicopter ride. “Either he mixed it up or he made it up,” Holden said of Trump.
Holden did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.
NBC News reported that Trump toured parts of California ravaged by the fire by helicopter with then-California Gov. Jerry Brown. A representative for former Governor Brown, who is white, told The New York Times that there was no emergency landing and that Harris was not discussed during the trip.
Trump said he would “probably” sue The New York Times over its coverage of his comments on the helicopter story, according to a report in The New York Times on Friday. Trump criticized the paper on the Truth Social website, attacking its reporter Maggie Haberman and calling her “Magot Hagerman.”
The Times did not immediately respond to a request for comment. The Harris campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the apparent mix-up.
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.
Since then, Harris, 59, has replaced Biden at the top of the ticket, forcing Trump to look for new lines of attack.
Republicans have suggested that Willie Brown is partly responsible for Harris’s rise in politics, although they broke up in the mid-1990s and Harris did not win her first election until 2002. While the two were in a relationship, Brown appointed Harris, then a young attorney general, to two lucrative statehouse jobs.