Donald Trump left many questioning his mental faculties last week when he seemingly conjured a near-fatal helicopter ride that everyone else onboard agreed didn’t happen. It soon became clear that the former president conflated two different Black politicians and two different helicopter rides from two different decades. He nearly died alongside Nate Holden, a Los Angeles city council member, in 1990. Despite Trump’s repeated claims. It wasn’t former San Francisco mayor Willie Brown.
Holden visited Trump at Trump Tower when the real estate mogul bought the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Trump planned on demolishing the historic building and building a skyscraper in its place. The visit involved a tour of the Trump Taj Mahal in Atlantic City, New Jersey, necessitating a helicopter flight from Manhattan to the resort 95 miles away. Politico spoke with another passenger, former Trump executive Barbara Res, about the flight:
Res remembers Brown, too. He took a liking to her, and she brought him a hat from the superyacht the Trump Princess, which she says he loved. But the man on the helicopter was definitely Nate Holden, she said.
On that ride, she said the pilots started feverishly maneuvering the equipment as the chopper lurched over the water. “From the corner of my eye, I can see in the cockpit and what I see is the co-pilot pumping a device with all his might,” Res wrote in her book. Donald Trump and Robert Trump were reassuring Holden.
“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.”
After considerable turbulence, they landed safely in New Jersey at an airport where Trump had his commuter helicopters stored.
Holden told the magazine that Trump “was scared shitless,” and confirmed that then-Almeda County deputy district attorney Kamala Harris wasn’t discussed. Nothing came of Trump’s ambitions for the Ambassador Hotel. The historic hotel was demolished in 2005. Several public schools were built on the site, named after Robert F. Kennedy who was assassinated at the Ambassador in 1968.