Donald Trump confused one black man for another in his controversial story about a helicopter near miss – and cracked a shocking joke about dark skin, it is claimed.
Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilmember, believes Trump is thinking of him when describes as a ‘near-death experience’ chopper ride with Trump in around 1990.
Earlier this week, Trump said he’d almost crashed while flying in a chopper with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, who says he’s never met the former president.
Holden, 95, had a relationship with Trump in the 90s when he was trying to build at the site of Los Angeles’ historic Ambassador Hotel, which was in his district.
The ex-councilman – who has a photo of himself with Trump and ex-wife Ivana on his website – says Trump and Holden took the chopper ride, which had Trump thinking ‘maybe this was the end’ but believes he’s confused him with another black politician.
‘Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco. I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike,’ Holden said amid laughter after having seen Trump’s claims in his Thursday press conference.
Donald Trump confused one black man for another in his controversial story about a helicopter near miss – and cracked a shocking joke about dark skin, it is claimed
Nate Holden, a former Los Angeles city councilmember, believes Trump is thinking of him, as he took the chopper ride to what he describes as a ‘near-death experience’ with Trump in around 1990
Holden told Politico that he met Trump near Atlantic City over 30 years ago to tour his Taj Mahal Casino.
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He took the flight with Trump, his late brother Robert, lawyer Robert Freedman and ex-Trump Organization executive Barbara Res.
Res has now said that she too remembered the near disastrous ride and wrote about it in her memoir.
She said that while she’d met Brown – the former mayor of San Francisco and speaker of the California State Assembly who dated Kamala Harris decades ago – the man on the helicopter was Holden.
‘That’s the story, OK,’ she said. ‘No Willie Brown.’
Res added that Trump made a joke about Holden’s skin tone at the time near the crash, telling him: ‘You turned white’.
However, Holden says that would be a more adequate description of the former president at the time.
‘He was white as snow,’ he said. ‘And he was scared s***less.’
Barbara Res, a former Trump organization executive, says that she had made Willie Brown (pictured) but remembered the man on the helicopter with her being Holden
Holden (pictured left) told Politico that he met Trump near Atlantic City over 30 years ago to tour his Taj Mahal Casino
Holden said that he checked in with Brown on Thursday following the Trump press conference.
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‘I said, ‘Willie, were you almost in a helicopter crash with Trump also?’ He said ‘No.’ I said, ‘I was the one, Willie.’
While he joked about Trump confusing himself and Brown, Holden doesn’t seem to attach malice to Trump’s story, but wonders what happened in that moment.
‘He either mixed it up or he made it up,’ Holden said. ‘This was just too big to overlook. This is a big one. Conflating Willie Brown and me? The press is searching for the real story and they didn’t get it.’
A spokesperson for Trump pointed to the fact that Trump had written about the incident – allegedly with Brown – in his 2023 book.
Trump faced backlash to the misremembered story when confronted by journalists looking for proof.
In an ‘angry’ phone call to The New York Times, Trump is said to have lashed the paper for claims he’d lied about a near-miss during a helicopter ride with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
NYT journalist Maggie Haberman – the paper’s star political reporter, who is said to have Trump’s ear – said Trump angrily insisted he could provide proof of the near-death experience.
Donald Trump mocked a reporter over their request for records of a helicopter ride he claimed to have taken with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown
Kamala Harris with Willie Brown whom she dated in the mid-1990s while he was speaker of the state assembly and she was a prosecutor in Alameda County
Trump insisted his people ‘have the flight records of the helicopter’, the Times reported, and said he was ‘probably going to sue’ the newspaper.
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When the reporter asked to produce the records, Haberman said Trump ‘responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice’.
Haberman added that Trump has not yet provided any such records, which Trump claims proves that the chopper landed ‘in a field’.
Trump told the story in response to a question during his press conference at his Mar-a-Lago home in Florida on Thursday.
‘I know Willie Brown very well. In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was the end,’ Trump said.
‘We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing.’
A biography of Harris claims that Trump sent his private plane for Brown and Harris to fly from Boston to New York in 1994, when the two were dating.
However, according to Brown, he and Trump have never rode in the same helicopter and he was instead doing his best ‘creative fiction’.
Republican presidential nominee Trump told reporters at a Mar-A-Lago news conference on Thursday night that he and Brown (pictured) were in a helicopter that was forced to make an emergency landing and both men thought this ‘may be the end’
‘I’ve never done business with Donald Trump, let’s start with that,’ Brown – who dated Kamala Harris in 1994 and 1995 – told KRON4.
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‘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!’
‘He was doing what Donald does best, his creative fiction. He’s creative, real creative. That’s so far-fetched, it’s unbelievable.’
Brown went on to say that the world ‘would have known about it’ if it was to have happened.
The Times theorized that Trump was referencing when he took a helicopter ride through wildfire-ravaged California with then-Governor Jerry Brown in 2018, but insists he didn’t get him mixed up with Willie Brown.
Jerry Brown also insisted there was no in-flight danger during the ride.
‘There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris,’ Jerry Brown’s spokesperson told the NYT.
Meanwhile, California’s governor – Gavin Newsom, who was on the helicopter with Trump and Jerry Brown, said after the press conference: ‘I call complete B.S.’
The Times theorized that Trump was referencing when he took a helicopter ride through wildfire-ravaged California with then-Governor Jerry Brown in 2018, but insists he didn’t get him mixed up with Willie Brown
Trump’s account was given in response to a reporter who asked about Harris’ relationship with Brown.
Brown and Harris dated in the mid-1990s when Brown was speaker of the California State Assembly and Harris was a prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s office. During that time, Brown appointed her to two boards.
After telling the helicopter story, Trump claimed that Brown had some negative things to say about the current vice president.
‘But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he – I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.’
Brown, now 90, also disputed that aspect of Trump’s claim on Thursday calling it ‘so far fetched, it’s unbelievable.’
‘I could not envision thinking of Kamala Harris in any negative way. She’s a good friend a long time ago, absolutely beautiful woman, smart as all hell, very successful, electorally speaking,’ Brown said.