Roll another number

So here’s the New York Times story about a story that Donald Trump told at his press conference yesterday:

Former President Donald J. Trump told a jaw-dropping story on Thursday about nearly dying in a helicopter ride with Willie Brown, the former California politician and ex-boyfriend of his rival, Vice President Kamala Harris.

There was only one problem with the story. Or maybe two. Or maybe three.

It wasn’t the famous former San Francisco mayor on the helicopter flight at all. It was Gov. Jerry Brown, the former governor of California, who bears little resemblance to Willie Brown.

There was also no emergency landing, and the helicopter’s passengers were never in any danger at all, according to Gov. Gavin Newsom, who was also on the flight.

Jerry Brown, who left office in January 2019, said through a spokesman, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.”

“I call complete B.S.,” Mr. Newsom said, laughing out loud.

Mr. Trump’s errant account, delivered during a news conference at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, came in response to a reporter who asked a leading question about Ms. Harris’s past relationship with Willie Brown, and whether Mr. Trump thought it might have had something to do with her career trajectory.

The two dated in 1994 and 1995, while she was a prosecutor in Alameda County, which includes Oakland, and he was the speaker of the California State Assembly, and he appointed her to two state boards. He was — and still is — married to Blanche Brown, but they have long lived separate lives.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Mr. Trump responded. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him.”

He went on to tell a cinematic tale of a close call with death — and of politically advantageous gossip on death’s door:

“We thought maybe this was the end,” Mr. Trump said. “We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing.

And Willie was — he was a little concerned,” Mr. Trump continued. “So I know him, but I know him pretty well. I mean, I haven’t seen him in years. But he told me terrible things about her. But this is what you’re telling me, anyway, I guess. But he had a big part in what happened with Kamala. 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.”

Reached on his cellphone just after Mr. Trump’s news conference — at his regular lunch spot at Sam’s Grill in downtown San Francisco — Mr. Brown, 90, said the whole story was false. He had never ridden in a helicopter with Mr. Trump, he said. He had never nearly perished in any helicopter ride. And he remained an avid supporter of Ms. Harris’s.

Mr. Brown, who loves regaling anybody who will listen with stories and who penned a weekly column in The San Francisco Chronicle until 2021, added, laughing: “You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”

Ms. Harris ended their relationship nearly three decades ago, but Mr. Brown said he had always been a big fan and supporter of hers. “No hard feelings,” he said.

The helicopter ride that Mr. Trump took in 2018 with Gov. Jerry Brown, 86, and with Mr. Newsom, then the governor-elect of California, was to survey damage wrought by the deadly Camp Fire in the town of Paradise, in the Sierra Nevada foothills north of Sacramento.

Mr. Newsom’s recollection of the occasion was vivid.

“I was on a helicopter with Jerry Brown and Trump, and it didn’t go down,” Mr. Newsom, 56, said in an interview. He said that Mr. Trump had, however, repeatedly brought up the possibility of crashing.

The subject of Ms. Harris, with whom Mr. Newsom had enjoyed a friendly rivalry, did not come up on the helicopter, he added. “We talked about everyone else, but not Kamala,” he said with a laugh.

Mr. Newsom called Mr. Trump’s news conference “an act of desperation” prompted by what he called Ms. Harris’s momentum.

Mr. Trump’s visit to the burned forest with then-Governor Brown and Mr. Newsom did generate headlines, but not because of anything that occurred on their helicopter ride. Rather, it was because, during a news conference after landing at the scene, Mr. Trump, 78, attributed the wildfire to too many fallen, dead tree branches and said the answer to solving California’s wildfire crisis was to rake the forest floors.

“It was back when we were making raking the forest great again,” Mr. Newsom said.

My friend Steve has some thoughts (I will confess I had totally forgotten about the imaginary Civil War battle fought at one of his golf courses, just as all of us have forgotten so many things over the past few years):

This lie reminds me of the fake Civil War battle monument he put on his golf course. He’s so used to making things up that he doesn’t even bother to think that maybe someone could do some independent checks. Like, when was this near crash? What year? What were you doing? Is there an FAA incident report? What bad things did Willie Brown tell you about Harris? It doesn’t seem like you to withhold them out of a sense of decorum.

The battlefield one is worse, because he doesn’t even realize that the Civil War is very well documented. Just about every little battle is obsessively documented, and the big ones, the ones who could rise to the level of “River Of Blood”–each has about a thousand books about every detail. Trump found a new one though, too bad he won’t even give the year, or the armies, or anything. He knows it was a big war, lots of blood, so why couldn’t there have been a battle on his golf course? It seems logical. And it seems fair! Important war, important guy. Who are you to say otherwise? Were you there?

Anyway, obviously you can’t blame the Times here; they wrote this article! They covered it. It won’t go anywhere though. He won’t have to explain it because he’ll choose not to. The consequences people used to worry about don’t come if you brazen it out, that’s his big contribution to American politics. Thanks.

Two things are true at the same time:

(1) If Kamala Harris confabulated an imaginary incident along these lines, it might end her presidential campaign, and it would certainly damage it seriously, as there would be hundreds of stories about it for the reminder of the campaign.

(2) This incident will have literally no effect on Trump’s chances of being re-elected. Steve is right, the Times can’t be blamed here, they published a detailed debunking, and there will be a few more stories over the next day or two in other media, and a few late night TV comedy jokes, and then that will be it, just like the River of Blood battle, and the raking the forests to prevent forest fires (which is somehow part of the helicopter incident that did not happen), and literally dozens and dozens of other things like this, that have made no difference and will continue to make no difference.

Trump has changed the rules, but the rules aren’t now that it doesn’t matter if you constantly fabricate stories about things that didn’t happen like some sort of demented grandpa. The rules are that this doesn’t matter if you are the beneficiary of a cult of personality, which Donald Trump is, and nobody else is at present. I don’t think Nikki Haley or Ron DeSantis could get away with anything like this, at least not to anything like the same extent, which again is “totally,” because they are still thought of and treated as normal politicians, unlike Donald Trump, who isn’t normal in any way, so the rules simply don’t apply to him.

Ultimately I really don’t think you can blame the elite media for this: They tried to make people care, and they failed, but not for lack of trying. When they say we can’t do anything about this because this is just Trump being Trump, they are right! They can’t do anything about it. They could run 2,000 stories about the fake helicopter ride and it wouldn’t move the needle at all, because the Trump base doesn’t care at all (obviously), but somehow the Ariana Grande voters don’t care, either. They’ve somehow internalized the idea, to the extremely minimal extent they ever think about it, that this is what Trump does, so such stories are pure dog bites man, or more like dog barks at squirrel. I mean to be totally frank as Richard Nixon used to say — yesterday was the 50th anniversary of his resignation, and what a long strange trip it’s been since then — I really couldn’t care less about this story, either, and neither can you, at least not in any practical sense, because it doesn’t in any way alter our opinion of Donald Trump, who lies about everything all the time, except to the extent that he’s not lying because he’s either bullshitting (doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether what he’s saying is true or false, so technically not a lie, h/t Harry Frankfurt), or because he’s sincerely demented and thinks the story is true.

I mean it’s easy enough to reconstruct how the latter thing may well have happened.

(1) It involves two famous California politicians of about the same age who were big deals a generation ago named Brown. They were mayors of San Francisco and Oakland, which is really the same city (not a lot of people know this). They both dated famous women who Donald Trump has had sexual fantasies about.

(2) Donald Trump got very nervous during the 2018 helicopter ride with Gavin Newsom because lets face it those things are scary and — key detail here yo — another famous black guy from California died in a helicopter crash fairly soon afterwards, which just proves that things could easily have gone wrong during the 2018 helicopter ride, which when you’re an increasingly demented old man is really kind of the same thing as things actually going wrong in what we might naively think of as the real world.

(3) Willie Brown told Donald Trump lots of not very nice things, probably of a sexual nature, about Kamala Harris, because he knows things like that and he should have told them to Trump — see, e.g., locker room talk — so he did tell him those things, or he did tell them in the sincere(ish) memory of an increasingly demented old man, which among many other things is what Donald Trump is.

My take here, not that it matters, is that Trump is now in some sort of twilight mental world in which his lifetime habit of bullshitting — saying stuff that he doesn’t know and doesn’t care whether it’s true or not — is blending with his age-related cognitive deterioration, to generate stories like this, that Trump more or less believes are true at the moment he’s confabulating them, to the extent he believes literally anything, which to be fair is not much.

Anyway, this is where we are right here right now, and I can’t wait until I’m a million miles away from this helicopter day.