Donald J. Trump was doubling down on Friday about his story of nearly crashing during a helicopter ride once with Willie Brown, the notable Black California politician.
He was so adamant that it had happened that he threatened to sue The New York Times for reporting that the story was untrue, then posted on his social media site that there were “‘Logs,’ Maintenance Records, and Witnesses” to back up his account.
“It was Willie Brown,” Mr. Trump, who spent much of the last year hoping to make gains with Black voters, posted. “But now Willie doesn’t remember?”
Mr. Brown, 90, who was mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California Assembly, gave several interviews on Thursday and Friday saying such a trip never occurred.
Turns out, however, that there was a Black politician from California who once made an emergency landing in a helicopter with Mr. Trump. It just wasn’t Mr. Brown.
Nate Holden, 95, a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, said in an interview with The Times that he had been on a helicopter ride with Mr. Trump around 1990 when the aircraft experienced mechanical trouble and was forced to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.
Recounting an episode that he had described earlier on Friday to Politico, Mr. Holden said Mr. Trump had been seeking to develop the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles when it was part of Mr. Holden’s district. Mr. Trump wanted him to see his Taj Mahal casino, Mr. Holden said, so on a visit to Manhattan, he rode with Mr. Trump from his Midtown skyscraper to a helipad, where the two took off for Atlantic City, accompanied by Mr. Trump’s brother Robert and by his executive vice president of construction and development, Barbara Res.
“He was trying to impress me,” Mr. Holden said. “We start flying to New Jersey. He said, ‘Look at the skyline! Look at how beautiful it is! And I’m part of it!’”
Mr. Holden said he wasn’t impressed. “I grew up in New Jersey,” he said. “It ain’t nothing new to me.”
“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.”
The helicopter ultimately landed safely in Linden, N.J., Mr. Holden said.
Ms. Res wrote about the episode in a memoir and corroborated Mr. Holden’s account in a brief interview late Friday. Ms. Res, who also spoke to Politico, recalled that Mr. Trump liked to say that Mr. Holden had “turned white” from fear, but that it was actually Mr. Trump whose face was ashen.
A spokesman for Mr. Trump did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Mr. Holden said he was in his living room watching Mr. Trump’s news conference on TV on Thursday when the former president told of experiencing a brush with death on a helicopter ride with Mr. Brown.
“I said, ‘What the hell is this?’” Mr. Holden said. “‘Was he in two near-fatal helicopter crashes? He didn’t fix those damn helicopters yet?’”
Mr. Holden said that he called Mr. Brown to compare notes. Mr. Brown told him he had never been in a helicopter crash with Mr. Trump.
“I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’” Mr. Holden said. “And I told him, “You’re a short Black guy and I’m a tall Black guy — but we all look alike, right?”
Mr. Holden gave his own height as 6-foot-1. “Willie has to be about 5-foot-6. Maybe 5-foot-5. He comes up to about my shoulders. And he’s bald. And I’m not bald.”
Mr. Brown, he said, “just laughed and laughed.”
Mr. Holden, summing up his assessment of Mr. Trump’s recollection, said: “I just think he makes things up. That’s what I think. He never thought anybody’s going to check.”
Mr. Trump told the story about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Mr. Brown after a reporter at Thursday’s news conference asked him a leading question about Vice President Kamala Harris’s long-ago relationship with Mr. Brown and whether it helped her career trajectory.
The two dated in 1994 and 1995 when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and Mr. Brown was the Assembly speaker. Mr. Brown appointed Ms. Harris to two state boards before she ended their relationship.
“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”
He recounted how the two had a close brush with death — “We thought maybe this was the end” — and that Mr. Brown used the frightening ride to tell him “terrible things” about Ms. Harris. “He was not fan of hers very much, at that point,” Mr. Trump said.
Mr. Trump had previously told the story, saying it was Mr. Brown on a helicopter with him, in his book, “Letters to Trump,” which was published in 2023.
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.”
Asked if Mr. Trump might have confused the two California politicians because they are both Black, Mr. Brown said, “I wouldn’t want to conclude that he can’t tell Black people apart, because I’d hate for him to think that I’m Beyoncé.”
And then he burst out laughing.
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