A highlight of Donald Trump's first news conference in months was his shocking account of a brush with death aboard a helicopter alongside former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.
The only problem? There is no record of any such emergency, and the veteran California politician says he has never been in a helicopter with Trump.
The Republican former president was so caught up in the drama of his story at Thursday's media event that he appeared to have confused the mayor with former California Gov. Jerry Brown, who once shared an uneventful helicopter ride with Trump.
The Republican presidential candidate said he knew former Mayor Brown “pretty well” as he spoke to a room of reporters at his oceanfront home in South Florida.
“I actually went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain place together and there was an emergency landing,” Trump said.
“It wasn't a pleasant landing and Willie was… a little worried.”
The story was as surprising to Brown, 90, as it was to Trump's audience, given that the Californian says he has never done business with the former president and would not want to be in a helicopter with him.
It quickly became the most talked about part of the press conference, with the Guardian newspaper that calls Trump's anecdote “the big chopper lie.”
Brown immediately denied the anecdote, saying that Chronicle of San Francisco“You would have known if I had landed in a helicopter with Trump.”
Brown, once a powerful figure in state politics and also a former speaker of the California legislature, had emerged because he dated Kamala Harris, Trump's election rival, for about a year in the 1990s.
Trump said Brown had said “terrible things” to him about Harris on the flight and that he was “not a big fan of her at the time.”
The other Brown, Gov. Jerry Brown, shared a helicopter ride with Trump to the fire-ravaged California town of Paradise in 2018. Pundits speculated that Trump had confused the two men.
But the governor said The Washington Post They had never been in danger.
“It was a bumpy ride, but a perfectly safe landing,” he told the paper, adding that “the Harris issue never came up.”
Brown's successor, Gavin Newsom, was also on the trip and said there was no emergency landing or other drama and that Harris was not discussed.
