Donald Trump’s spontaneous press conference at Mar-a-Lago was riddled with lies. He claimed that his crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (it wasn’t even close). He claimed that Democrats want to gut Social Security (they don’t, but Republicans are trying to). He claimed that no one died on January 6 (four of his own supporters died from the events, including Ashli Babbitt, whom Trump and his allies attempted to morph into a MAGA martyr).
But possibly the weirdest lie that Trump told Thursday was a tall tale about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Vice President Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether he believed Harris’s relationship with Brown helped her political career. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was 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,” he continued.
“And Willie was—he was a little concerned,” Trump said. “So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. But he—he, I don’t know, maybe he’s changed his tune. But he—he was not a fan of hers very much, at that point.”
Brown, for his part, denied ever riding in a helicopter alongside Trump—or nearly dying in one, for that matter.
“You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!” he told The New York Times shortly after the press conference, affirming his support for Harris.
Instead, the man in the helicopter was reportedly former California Governor Jerry Brown, who rode in the copter with Trump alongside current California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2018. But aside from sharing a last name, the two Browns look, frankly, nothing alike. Still, the two actual passengers in the story had their qualms with its legitimacy.
“There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris,” a spokesperson for the former governor told the Times, while Newsom laughed the whole thing off, calling it “complete B.S.”
