WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Former President Donald Trump on Thursday recounted a harrowing helicopter ride with Vice President Kamala Harris’ ex-boyfriend, Willie Brown, in which the two men thought they might not survive the landing.
“I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump said, when asked by The Post about Harris’ relationship with the former San Francisco mayor.
“In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him,” the 78-year-old Republican nominee for president recalled.
“We thought, maybe this is the end. We were in a helicopter going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing,” Trump explained. “This was not a pleasant landing, and Willie was – he was a little concerned.”
Brown, 90, was involved in a bumpy helicopter landing in September 2004, while traveling from a Santa Barbara, Calif., fundraiser to Los Angeles International Airport.
The helicopter experienced transmission problems and “buzzed” a Malibu High School football game before making an emergency landing in an adjacent elementary school field, the San Francisco Chronicle reported days after the incident.
“They barely cleared the high school and then landed very quickly at the elementary school playground,” Hans Laetz, a witness to the crash landing, told the outlet. “This guy came in fast and he was down in 10 seconds. You could tell it was not a planned landing.”
It’s unclear if Trump was aboard that particular helicopter with Brown. His campaign did not respond to The Post’s request for comment.
The former president also claimed during his Mar-a-Lago press conference that Brown, who dated Harris in the mid-1990s, didn’t have nice things to say about his ex.
“He told me terrible things about her,” Trump said, referring to what the former mayor said of the vice president.
“He had a big part in what happened with Kamala,” the former president continued, noting that at the time he and Brown were in touch, “he was not a fan of hers.”
Brown was speaker of the California Assembly and Harris was a prosecutor in the Alameda County District Attorney’s Office when the couple dated, a relationship that reportedly began in 1994 and ended sometime in 1995.