(NewsNation) — Former President Donald Trump claims he feared his life could be in danger during a perilous 2018 helicopter ride with the former mayor of San Francisco, but those who were aboard the aircraft counter Trump’s recollection by saying the events how Trump described them never took place.
Trump relayed the story Thursday during a lengthy news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach, Florida. In response to a question about a past dating relationship between Vice President Kamala Harris and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown, Trump claimed the helicopter he was riding in was forced to make an emergency landing.
“We thought maybe this was the end,” Trump told reporters.
However, Brown — who is now 90 — along with others, said the event in question never happened. Brown told The New York Times that he has never been on a helicopter with Trump and had never been on a helicopter ride that nearly ended in tragedy, the newspaper reported.
“If I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it,” Brown told the Times in a telephone interview.
Brown told NewsNation affiliate KRON that he has never done business with Trump and that the supposed forced landing was instead Trump “dreaming.”
“I don’t think I’d want to ride on the same helicopter with him,” the former mayor said in an interview with KRON. “There’s too many people that have an agenda with reference to him, including the people who service helicopters!”
Donald Trump’s helicopter claims
Trump’s claims stem from a helicopter ride with California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who at the time was the state’s governor-elect, along with Gov. Jerry Brown, the New York Times reported. The three were aboard the aircraft to survey damage caused by the deadly Camp Fire, which took place in Paradise, just north of Sacramento.
In addition to claiming that the helicopter was forced to make an emergency landing, Trump said that Harris’ dating relationship with Willie Brown came up. However, Newsom and Jerry Brown both said Harris, who previously served as a prosecutor in Alameda County and eventually, as California’s attorney general, was never mentioned.
Newsom told the Times on Thursday that while the helicopter was never in danger of needing to make an emergency landing, Trump repeatedly brought up the possibility that the aircraft could crash.
Regarding the entire episode, Newsom told the newspaper, “I call complete B.S.”
Trump, in speaking to reporters, claims that Willie Brown told him “terrible things” about Harris, who dated Brown in 1994 and 1995 while he was the speaker of the California State Assembly, the Times report indicated.
Trump referred to the supposed landing as “not a pleasant landing” and said that the former mayor did not have a favorable impression of Harris.
“He had a big part in what happened with Kamala,” Trump said on Thursday. “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.”
In the interview with KRON, Brown also denied speaking ill of Harris.
“He’s creative, real creative,” Willie Brown said. “That’s so far-fetched, it’s unbelievable,” Brown said. “I could not envision thinking of Kamala Harris in any negative way. She’s a good friend a long time ago, (an) absolutely beautiful woman, smart as all hell, very successful, electorally speaking.”
The response to Trump’s claims
Although Trump was present on the helicopter while serving as president, a spokesman for Jerry Brown refuted that an emergency landing or talk about Harris ever happened, the Times reported.
Newsom told the newspaper that Trump’s claims are an “act of desperation” as polls show Harris gaining momentum since replacing President Joe Biden on the Democratic ticket for president.
At the time of the wildfires, Trump claimed that the deadly burning took place because too many dead tree branches had fallen. The Times reported that Trump said that the solution was to “rake the forest floors.”
“It was back when we were making raking the forest great again,” Newsom said, according to the report.
Asked about the former president’s recollection of the helicopter ride six years ago, Karoline Leavitt, the Trump campaign’s national press secretary, said during an appearance on Newsmax on Friday that Trump has “a lot of amazing stories from his life” as a businessman and celebrity before he turned to politics.
“I would leave it at that,” she said.