(Crooks and Liars web site)
Of all the Trumpian (and Republican) hypocrisies, one of the most despicable is his/their courting the Black vote.
Of course this is also a double-edged sword, electorally speaking, given that for every Black voter they might gain, a white supremacist might be lost. Thus unsurprisingly, the “not Black enough” ploy Trump trotted out against Kamala Harris, as with the GOP’s previous disparagement of Barack Obama’s African American-ness, was misbegotten from the start and again failed miserably.
Don’t be sad, Donnie. Not everyone can be Black (The New York Times)
The Willie Brown incident, however, was Trumpian through and through, and therefore not only backfired but exploded into the demented doofus’s whiny mug.
At an August 8, 2024, news conference at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told yet another whale of a tale about how some time ago he and then-San Francisco Mayor Brown (1996-2004) were involved in a near-fatal helicopter accident. This latest in Trump’s litany of lies served two purposes: to showcase his ostensible longstanding relationships with African Americans, but mainly to bash Kamala Harris by alleging that Brown, who’d had an affair with Harris in the mid-1990s when she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, “told me terrible things about her.”[1]
Harris and Brown cutting a rug in the 1990s (Getty Images / Provided by Snopes)
As usual, when Trump’s claim was contradicted by Brown, the wanna-be Houdini simply pulled another lie out of his flip-over, boasting that “we have flight records.”[2] And when these failed to materialize, The New York Times tersely concluded, “Didn’t happen.”
Trouble was, what the Times and other outlets initially said did happen was also false.
They got right that Willie Brown had quickly dispensed with the helicopter calumny, aptly pointing out, “You would have known if I had gone down on a helicopter with Trump.”[3] He also firmly denied having ever demeaned Harris, saying he “could not envision thinking of Kamala Harris in any negative way. She’s a good friend [from] a long time ago, absolutely beautiful woman, smart as all hell, very successful, electorally speaking.”[4]
But in search of who Trump’s fellow traveler might have been, the over-eager media latched on to another politician named Brown, former California Gov. Jerry Brown (1975-83, 2011-19), who indeed recalled having flown in a chopper with the then-president in 2018, while touring wildfire-ravaged Paradise, California, together with then-California Lt. Gov. (2011-19) and future Gov. Gavin Newsom (2019-present). Both Brown and Newsom denied any emergency landing, however, or any discussion of Harris., plus their being White added color to the apparent mix-up with Willie Brown, as did Newsom’s calling Trump’s tale “complete BS.”[5]
Newsom, Trump, and Jerry Brown in Paradise (photo Paul Loeb/AFP/Getty)
Enter Nate Holden, former California state senator (1974-78) and Los Angeles city councilmember (1987-2003).
(eurweb.com)
After learning of Trump’s and the media’s mumbo-jumbo about the two Browns’ helicopter rides with Trump, the 95-year-old Holden finally set the record straight. There had in fact been a Black politician who’d accompanied the then-real estate mogul in 1990 on that rocky flight. But how Trump could have confused “the short Black guy from Northern California with the tall Black guy from Southern California” Holden found befuddling. “But as they say,” he quipped, “we all look the same.”[6]
Left to right: Holden; Trump’s first wife, Ivana; Trump; and LA Mayor Tom Bradley in 1990 (photo Mindy Schauer for the Los Angeles Times)
As for the Harris-bashing, there was no reason for the then-fledgling Bay Area lawyer to have entered the conversation. What the trip, from Manhattan to Atlantic City, was really about, was Trump’s attempt to get Holden’s support for building his umpteenth Trump Tower on the site of the Ambassador Hotel, which was located in Holden’s council district. Not that it mattered to Trump, in fact it was likely grist for the mill, but to raze the venerable Ambassador and replace it with his latest monument to Mammon was to desecrate a place that had once housed the famed Cocoanut Grove nightclub frequented by Hollywood’s crème de la crème and that had hosted six Academy Awards ceremonies; a place where chiefs of state from around the world and as many as seven presidents from Herbert Hoover to Richard Nixon had stayed; and last not least, the place where presidential hopeful Robert F. Kennedy was tragically assassinated in the hotel’s main ballroom in 1968.
To LA’s enduring relief, Trump’s Tower to Himself, and its defamation of history, never came to pass, though he still managed to do some damage by selling off several of the hotel’s and nightclub’s precious artifacts.[7] But with the Ambassador having fallen into disrepair and the surrounding area into disrepute, the Los Angeles Unified School District came to the rescue. After getting Trump to blink after a decade-long legal battle, they built the much-needed K-12, Robert F. Kennedy Community Schools on the site, and in a way that that paid homage to the hotel’s original architecture and its ambivalent past.[8]
The old Ambassador (etsy.com)
Robert F. Kennedy Schools and Inspiration Park, 2010 (Los Angeles Times)
As for Holden’s 1990 helicopter ride with Trump when the Ambassador deal was still in play, Holden said he thought Trump was trying to impress him, serving him a drink as they went aloft. But when the hydraulic system failed, forcing an emergency landing in New Jersey, Holden—recalling the copter crash that had killed three of Trump’s executives and two others a year earlier—was angered. “I couldn’t believe they didn’t maintain their helicopter. I was raising hell because they put my life in jeopardy.” Trump, who famously never apologizes, on this occasion “was speechless. He turned white as snow, glued to his seat,” Holden says. “He was scared shitless.”[9]
As he clearly is again, since a beautiful, smart, electorally successful Black woman has stolen his thunder, and since not Joe Biden but he himself is now the doddering old codger—or as LA Times columnist George Skelton recently described him, “If not deranged . . . at least delusional.”[10]
Granted, this is not a particularly new or original assessment of a man whose sociopathic tendencies have been on display ever since he first ran for office, have gotten noticeably worse with age, and especially since Harris grabbed the limelight. Or as a New York Magazine title trumpeted, “Losing Makes Trump Crazier, and Being Crazy Makes Him Lose.”[11]
Skelton’s reason for echoing the magazine’s diagnosis was personal, however, and uncannily related to the Willie Brown incident. Skelton himself had been involved in a helicopter emergency landing 58 years ago, and can “still remember every detail, including the other passenger, political writer Peter Kaye,” with whom Skelton was covering the campaign swing of yet another Brown, Jerry Brown’s father, Edmund G. “Pat” Brown![12]
And for Skelton, other explanations for Trump’s tattered tale besides early stage dementia come readily to mind. It could have been “just another example of Trump’s perpetual, pathological lying,” he avers, pointing to the 162 “lies and other distortions” NPR counted in the Mar-a-Lago conference where Trump first brought up the daredevil helicopter ride. Holden similarly concedes that Trump “either mixed it up or made it up.” Either way, Skelton concludes, “His unhinged pattern of behavior should scare America.”[13]
Indeed it should. Though even more terrifying are the Trump cultists for whom the more unhinged their Führer is the better, and most loathsomely, the unprincipled GOP politicos and rightwing pundits like Ann Coulter, who can say with a straight face that she’ll vote for Trump even though he’s “totally untrustworthy” and “an awful, awful person.”[14]
As for little old me, I’ll stick with trust, decency, beauty, smarts—and electoral success!
(ibtimes.sg)
* * * * * * * * * *
NOTES
[1] Heather Knight and Shawn Hubler, “That Time Trump Nearly Died in a Helicopter Crash? Didn’t Happen,” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/08/us/politics/trump-helicopter-willie-brown.html.
[2] David Jackson and Natasha Lovato, “‘We have the flight records’: Trump insists that he was on helicopter with Willie Brown,” https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/08/09/trumps-helicopter-crash-story-untrue.
[3] Zoë Richards and Rebecca Shabad and Alex Seitz-Wald and Liz Kreutz, “Trump appears to confuse former Mayor Willie Brown with former Gov. Jerry Brown,” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-appears-to-confuse-former-mayor-willie-brown-with-former-gov-jerry-brown.
[4] Sandra MacDonald, “Willie Brown denies Trump claim he said “terrible things” about Kamala Harris on helicopter trip,” August 8, 2024, https://www.yahoo.com/news/willie-brown-says-trump-claims-015624236.html.
[5] Ibid.
[6] Don Lee, “Willie Brown wasn’t on that harrowing copter ride with Trump. Here’s who was,” Los Angeles Times, August 11, 2024, B10.
[7] Cara Mia DiMassa, “For Sale: Stardust Memories,” https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2005-sep-02-me-ambassador2-story.html.
[8] Doug Smith, “In at least in one huge deal in L.A., Trump got schooled,” https://www.latimes.com/nation/politics/la-na-trump-ambassador-20151220-story.html.
[9] Lee, “Willie Brown.”
[10] George Skelton, “Deranged Trump is unfit for White House,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 2024, B1.
[11] Jonathan Chait, “Losing Makes Trump Crazier, and Being Crazy Makes Him Lose,” August 12, 2024, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/donald-trump-kamala-harris-crowd-fake-ai-cheated-crazy-death-spiral.html.
[12] Skelton, “Deranged Trump,” B5.
[13] Ibid.
[14] Kelby Vera, “Ann Coulter Calls Trump An ‘Awful, Awful person’ . . . But She’ll Still Vote For Him,” https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/ann-coulter-calls-trump-an-awful-awful-person-but-says-shell-still-vote-for-him.
Chalk it up to ptsd.
Indeed, that’s another way of putting it.