Old Man Trump Mixes Up California Politicians in Weird Kamala Story

Donald Trump’s spontaneous press conference at Mar-a-Lago was riddled with lies. He claimed that his crowd size was bigger than Martin Luther King Jr.’s March on Washington (it wasn’t even close). He claimed that Democrats want to gut Social Security (they don’t, but Republicans are trying to). He claimed that no one died on January 6 (four of his own supporters died from the events, including Ashli Babbitt, whom Trump and his allies attempted to morph into a MAGA martyr).

But possibly the weirdest lie that Trump told Thursday was a tall tale about nearly dying in a helicopter crash with Vice President Kamala Harris’s old boyfriend, former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump said, responding to a question about whether he believed Harris’s relationship with Brown helped her political career. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this was the end.

“We were in a helicopter, going to a certain location together, and there was an emergency landing. This was not a pleasant landing,” he continued.

“And Willie was—he was a little concerned,” Trump said. “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.”

Brown, for his part, denied ever riding in a helicopter alongside Trump—or nearly dying in one, for that matter.

“You know me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!” he told The New York Times shortly after the press conference, affirming his support for Harris.

Instead, the man in the helicopter was reportedly former California Governor Jerry Brown, who rode in the copter with Trump alongside current California Governor Gavin Newsom in 2018. But aside from sharing a last name, the two Browns look, frankly, nothing alike. Still, the two actual passengers in the story had their qualms with its legitimacy.

“There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris,” a spokesperson for the former governor told the Times, while Newsom laughed the whole thing off, calling it “complete B.S.”

South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem tried to attack Democratic vice presidential nominee Tim Walz on X, only to be bombarded with mockery.

Noem tried Tuesday to call out Walz as a radical, claiming that he “pretended to be moderate” while they were serving in Congress together but “then showed his true extremist colors as soon as he became Governor.” She also said that South Dakota was performing better economically compared to Minnesota, with people moving away from Walz’s state due to his policies.

But on Thursday, former Representative Adam Kinzinger, an anti-Trump Republican, called her out with a photo of a happy Walz hunting with a dog, referring to Noem’s disturbing account of how she killed her puppy after it failed to live up to her hunting expectations.

Noem’s puppy story drew attacks from other Republicans including Mitt Romney, and was likely a major factor in Noem losing out on becoming Donald Trump’s running mate. In contrast, Walz not only has that good photo but also has a pet dog, Scout, that is already an internet darling. The black lab mix, a rescue, was adopted by the Walz family in 2019 and memorably locked himself in Walz and his wife Gwen’s bedroom in 2023. The story resurfaced this week after Walz was named as Kamala Harris’s running mate.

Noem follows Arkansas’s Sarah Huckabee Sanders as red state governors that have tried to attack Walz and failed. Like Noem, Sanders was trolled with a photo of a happy Walz, in this case surrounded by children hugging him, contrasted with Sanders surrounded by serious, unhappy children. Perhaps Republicans can’t comprehend a governor that is actually liked by their constituents—Native tribes have actually banned Noem from all of the tribal land in her state.

Donald Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt called the campaign “disciplined” Thursday after one of the most chaotic press conferences he’s had so far.

During an appearance on Fox News, Leavitt praised the Trump team’s supposedly controlled efforts against Vice President Kamala Harris, just as Trump gave a wild press conference from Mar-a-Lago.

“This is a disciplined campaign,” said Leavitt. “And we’re disciplined because we are led by President Trump, who wakes up every day and focuses on the issues that matter to the American people.”

But Trump was anything but disciplined during his meandering rant Thursday, as he ricocheted between making wild claims about his crowd sizes and weak excuses for his lackluster week of campaigning. In one afternoon, Trump seemingly flip-flopped on whether he would agree to debate Harris, going from not debating her at all to offering three dates.

Trump is so unrestrained that he couldn’t help but put his foot in his mouth, once again attacking Georgia Governor Brian Kemp, who refused to overturn his state’s presidential election results in 2020.

Trump previously spoke about Kemp at his rally in Atlanta over the weekend, the last campaign event before his apparent staycation, taking a significant portion of his stage time to cut down Kemp.

Trump’s decision to skewer Kemp has reportedly sparked some concern from Trump’s allies, who had hoped he might actually win in Georgia. Several people close to Trump’s campaign told The Washington Post that there was a concerted effort to persuade Trump to stay on message and focus his attacks on Harris and other Democrats, not Republicans like Kemp.

Trump spokesperson Steven Cheung dismissed concerns from allies about messaging. “Our message discipline is second to none,” he told the Post. “It’s why President Trump was able to take out Joe Biden in the debate; it’s why we’ve been so successful thus far, and it’ll be why President Trump will win the election.”

While the word “disciplined” certainly seems to have worked its way into the Trump team’s talking points, its candidate continues to be anything but.

The far right is attempting to smear Governor Tim Walz by claiming that he replaced the old Minnesota state flag with one that is designed to resemble the flag of Somalia.

The Guardian’s Ben Makuch reports that racist and xenophobic attacks against Walz have spread since Vice President Kamala Harris named him as her running mate Tuesday. The claim that Walz deliberately chose a flag design close to Somalia’s national flag has been echoed on X (formerly Twitter) by right-wing accounts including End Wokeness and Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams. Fox News’s Jesse Watters also picked it up on Tuesday.  

But the claim isn’t true. Both the fact-checking website Snopes and The Washington Post have debunked it, showing that the flag went through a long redesign process following complaints that the old flag, which contains the state seal, was offensive to Native Americans. In 2023, the Minnesota state legislature created a commission to redesign the flag and seal and received more than 2,500 new proposals.

The commission narrowed the flag submissions to six, and then three, before selecting a base design created by Andrew Prekker, which received slight modifications. After 10 attempts, the final design passed both the Minnesota House and Senate and was flown for the first time on May 11, 2024. The commission also released a report breaking down the process for the redesign. 

The new flag bears very little resemblance to Somalia’s flag, though both use shades of blue and a star. The star on Minnesota’s flag has eight points compared to Somalia’s five-pointed star, and the shades of blue are different.  

The far right seems to think that Walz is kowtowing to Minnesota’s 60,000-strong Somali American community, the largest in the U.S. But a member of the Minnesota Historical Society, which took part in the redesign, told conservative website The Dispatch that the designer isn’t Somali, included the star to represent the North Star, and incorporated the shape of the state into the flag design. 

This noncontroversy joins the many weak attacks against Walz and Harris from the right, including shots at his military record, baselessly accusing the campaign of antisemitism, or calling him “far left.” Maybe one day they’ll come up with one with substance.  

At Donald Trump’s Thursday’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago, the former president compared himself favorably to Martin Luther King Jr.

After incorrectly claiming that “no one was killed on January 6th,” Trump went on to gloat that the crowd at his insurrection rally was larger than the March On Washington, which Martin Luther King Jr.’s historic speech at the Lincoln Memorial.

“Nobody’s spoken to crowds bigger than me,” said the former president. “If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech and you look at ours...we had more.”

Growing ever more furious at this perceived slight, Trump began throwing (made up) numbers around. King, he said, spoke to a million (actually 250,000) people. But, according to Trump, the January 6th crowd actually looks just as big in photographs as King’s! and yet the biased experts insist that only spoke to 25,000 would-be insurrectionists and rioters (actually 10,000).

One could give Trump the benefit of the doubt, maybe he is experiencing a “senior moment” and actually confusing his (famously sparsely attended) inauguration and the events of January 6, 2021.

Clearly, the Republican presidential nominee is rattled by the massive crowds that have greeted Kamala Harris and her running mate Tim Walz over the past week. Early Thursday morning, Trump took to Truth Social to complain. “If Kamala has 1,000 people at a Rally, the Press goes “crazy,” and talks about how “big” it was - And she pays for her “Crowd.” When I have a Rally, and 100,000 people show up, the Fake News doesn’t talk about it, THEY REFUSE TO MENTION CROWD SIZE. The Fake News is the Enemy of the People!” In the same press conference, Trump also made the same point in an arguably even madder fashion. (It is, in fact, difficult to think of another moment where he was this angry.)

In the past, Trump has drawn large crowds, perhaps even approaching that 100,000 number, but certainly January 6 was not one of them—or one to brag about.