Former President Donald Trump wasn’t completely lying about his near-death helicopter experience after all, but the 2024 Republican presidential nominee did get a few details mixed-up.
For one, the Black man Trump mistook for former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown was actually former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator, Nate Holden.
“I guess we all look alike,” said Holden in an interview with Politico. He added, “Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco. I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles.”
Now 95-years-old, Holden said Trump was looking to develop the site of a historic Los Angeles hotel around 1999, and he had approved the project to go ahead as the senator representing the district.
Meeting at Trump Tower in Manhattan, Holden and Trump planned to pop over to Atlantic City, New Jersey, in a helicopter to tour Trump’s new Taj Mahal casino. But things, as Trump correctly recounted, took a harrowing turn on the way.
Donald Trump in his office in Trump Tower in 1999.
Michael Brennan
In the helicopter were Holden, Trump, Trump’s late brother, Robert, attorney Harvey Freedman, and Barbara Res, Trump’s former executive vice president of construction and development.
As Res wrote in her book, All Alone on the 68th Floor (2013), “Very shortly thereafter the pilot let us know he had lost some instruments and we would need to make an emergency landing,” she wrote. “By now, the helicopter was shaking like crazy.”
Res told Politico on Friday that Trump liked to say that Holden “tuned white.” But Holden said it was Trump who was really afraid.
“He was white as snow,” said Holden. “And he was scared s—less.”
And the way Holden remembers it, the topic of Vice President Kamala Harris did not come up, as Trump claimed.
Former senator Nate Holden and developer Erika Alexis.
Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Heart of Los Angeles
“He either mixed it up,” Holden said. “Or, he made it up.”
He added, “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. You did.”
The New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN that Trump brought up the helicopter story again during a recent call and threatened to sue the newspaper for reporting that Brown denied the incident.
Trump added that he had records to prove the incident, and made fun of Haberman when she asked to see them.
“He made fun of me asking that in a sort of child sing-song voice,” said Haberman. But she said what she found most interesting about her talk with Trump was that he chose to focus on proving the incident over his presidential campaign.
“He was focusing on this because that is what we have seen him do historically when he is in times of stress,” said Haberman.
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