A California Democrat believes Donald Trump confused him with former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown after the former president told a wild story Thursday about a helicopter ride with Brown that ended in an “emergency landing.”
“Willie is the little black guy living in San Francisco, I’m a big black guy living in Los Angeles,” Los Angeles City Councilman and California State Senator Nate Holden said in an interview with Politico on Friday.
“I guess we all look the same.”
Trump claimed in a rambling press conference at Mar-a-Lago that he “crashed in a helicopter” with Brown and thought that was “the end.” He added that it was “not a pleasant landing” and that Brown was “a little worried” at the time.
Brown, 90, later denied the claim and called Trump “obviously wrong.”
Holden, 95, has since said Trump may have been thinking about him the whole time.
Holden recalled meeting Trump, a well-known developer and businessman, in the 1990s when he was planning to renovate the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles.
He met the current Republican candidate at Trump Tower before a trip to Atlantic City to visit the Taj Mahal Casino.
Holden was concerned because the flight came “not long after” a 1989 helicopter crash that killed several top executives at Trump’s casinos, Politico noted. Trump, however, assured the California Democrat that they would be OK.
Former Trump Organization executive Barbara Res, who was on the helicopter ride, told Politico that Holden was the man on the plane, citing her recollections of the incident in her 2013 book.
Res wrote that she saw the co-pilot in the cockpit “pumping a device with all his might” before the pilot told the passengers that they would have to make an emergency landing.
“By now the helicopter was shaking like crazy,” wrote Res.
The group eventually landed in Atlantic City and, as Res revealed to Politico, Trump joked that she “turned white” during the incident.
“He was white as snow,” Res said of Trump. “And he was scared to death.”
A Trump campaign spokesman said in a comment to Politico that the former president referenced the helicopter story in his book “Letters to Trump” last year, claiming that Brown – whose letter is included in it – was with him during an “emergency landing.”
The former president quoted an article about Brown on his Truth Social platform late Friday. Brown wrote in a 2013 SFGate column that he remembered Trump once sending him to Boston for lunch on a private jet.
“He just wants to ride in Trump’s jet (helicopter!) one more time. But Willie doesn’t remember? No, he remembers!” Trump insisted.
In his column, Brown made no mention of an “emergency landing” in his description of the plane flight.
Holden told Politico that he has spoken to Brown since Trump told the helicopter story, noting that people on the flight were not critical of Vice President Kamala Harris, as the Republican candidate claimed on Thursday.
Brown dated Harris for about a year in the mid-1990s.
“Either he mixed it up. Or he made it up,” Holden said of Trump.
