Yesterday, during his impromptu press briefing at his Mar-a-Lago resort and post-White House home, former President and 2024 Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump claimed that he once had to make an emergency landing while he was riding in a helicopter with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
He also implied, without detail or elaboration, that the former SF mayor told him “terrible things” about his newly installed Democratic presidential opponent, current Vice President Kamala Harris.
Willie Brown says that never happened.
“I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was the end,” Trump told reporters gathered at his luxury golf resort yesterday afternoon, in response to a question about Brown. “We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing.”
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Brown spoke with the San Francisco Chronicle on the heels of Trump’s presser and confirmed that he did have a very close call on a helicopter 20 years ago — but Donald Trump wasn’t on it, and he had no clue what the former president was even talking about.
“You would have known if I had gone down on a helicopter with Trump,” Brown said in remarks to the publication, in response to Donald Trump’s storage claims during his presser yesterday. “I’ve never been on a helicopter with Trump.”
Further, Brown said he has never once had a disparaging word to say to Donald Trump about Kamala Harris — who he briefly dated for about a year in the mid-1990s and would go on to appoint to two state commissions, years before Harris would win the 2003 election for San Francisco District Attorney.
“It’s just as accurate as all of the other components of what you’re asking me about,” Brown said of Trump’s claims. “No, not accurate at all.”
“Nooooooo,” Brown answered when specifically questioned about Trump’s claims that he disparaged Harris during this alleged helicopter flight. “Hell, no.”
“I wouldn’t say anything bad about any woman to him,” Brown said. “I would know better. It might encourage him to take a (verbal) shot.”
Brown went on to tell the publication that he hasn’t spoken to Harris “in about three or four years.”
He went on to add that he “can’t understand what Trump has been doing” since Joe Biden dropped out of the 2024 presidential race and “outmaneuvered everybody and put Kamala Harris in a position to make history.”
Of Kamala, he said it is “absolutely fabulous that somebody we mutually know is about to make history at the highest level that you can in America.”
Of Trump, he said, “He’s wasting his time.”
“I would hate to conclude that it is purely motivated by race,” Brown said. “I think that he just thinks that he needs to win, and he will do anything he can, including, by the way, trying his best to abolish the (vote) count.”
As far as the strange helicopter story goes, Brown said that he has been on Trump’s plane before, “but Trump wasn’t on it.”
The Chronicle writes: “Brown, a former Chronicle columnist, wrote in 2013 that Trump, ‘who’s a friend of mine,’ once sent a plane to Boston, where he had a speaking engagement, to fly him down to have lunch with him. Brown wrote that the plane was filled with the kind of art you’d see in a museum.”
Brown was on a helicopter in 2004 flying from Malibu to Los Angeles International Airport that had to make an emergency landing. Donald Trump was not on that flight and no one was injured.
You can find the full report from the San Francisco Chronicle here.
Featured image via screen capture/Wikimedia Commons — Nancy Wong, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license
