Yesterday a reporter asked Donald Trump if he thought Kamala Harris's career had been helped by her relationship in the 1990s with powerful California politician Willie Brown. This was a perfect opportunity for Trump to throw out a remark about Harris sleeping her way to the top, or something equally Trumpish and obnoxious, but he didn't.
Instead he gapped out and said that he knew Willie Brown very well. He doesn't. Then he hallucinated a story about almost being in a helicopter crash with Brown, which obviously didn't happen either.
However, it turns out he was once in a helicopter with Jerry Brown, who bears no conceivable resemblance to Willie Brown except for his last name. And it was just a routine helicopter ride. No crash, no emergency, no anything.
Everybody's initial response to this was: Huh? Their second response was: What a bizarre guy, lying about everything.
But this is almost certainly not a lie. Nor is it likely that he just got the two Browns mixed up since he was responding to a question about a relationship with Kamala Harris. Willie Brown famously had one; Jerry Brown didn't.
ICYMI — I asked Trump about Willie Brown pic.twitter.com/jY9qvDP3uz
— Jon Levine (@LevineJonathan) August 9, 2024
It's all very weird. Listen to the video. It doesn't sound like a lie. It sounds like Trump knew exactly who the reporter was asking about and just hallucinated his entire answer: knowing Brown "very well"; going down in a rough helicopter landing with him; and Brown saying nasty things about Harris.
Trump has gotten to the point where he doesn't just forget a thing or two. That happens to all us oldsters. He literally invents entire incidents in his mind and believes they're real. I don't think he even knows he's doing it. Can you imagine what he's going to be like four years from now?
UPDATE: Bizarrely, today Trump insisted to the New York Times that the story was true and he has "flight records" to prove it:
When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice. As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them.
I think it's safe to say he will never produce these records.
UPDATE 2: We have an answer! Apparently Trump was once on a rough helicopter ride with Nate Holden, a former LA city councilmember:
“Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco,” Holden said. “I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles. I guess we all look alike,” Holden told Politico, letting out a loud laugh.
....“He was white as snow,” Holden added. “And he was scared shitless.”
So, uh, there you have it. Trump didn't completely hallucinate, but he absolutely insisted it was Willie Brown, who he knows "very well," and that Brown had said nasty stuff about Kamala Harris. This is obviously invented out of thin air.
the press will cover this as 'he slipped up'
it's a mystery why lying and/or dementia is never allowed to become a narrative with trump
/s
The thing that's disgraceful is that the reporter *asked* this question. If there was anything scandalous about Harris's past relationship with Willie Brown, what purpose does it serve to ask Donald Trump, of all people, for his opinion about it? This was just intended to create some juicy campaign fire between the two sides. Wow, imagine if they could get a back-and-forth with one side "blasting" the other and the other side "firing back" so it could become a front-page "war of words."
This is why I hate the political media. Even though it turned out that Trump was too stupid to seize on it, showing his essential ignorance, I bet the reporter was *disappointed* that he wasn't able to create a "dust-up" or whatever cliche they like to use these days. He won't care about the more important story, which is that Trump is an idiot.
+1
there have been a lot of times where wingnut hosts will toss him a juicy beach ball-sized hanging pitch and he totally whiffs it
all about the nuance and totally fit for office, that one
The thing that's disgraceful is that the reporter *asked* this question.
Exactly right.
The threat of Trump and MAGA authoritarianism would be within rounding error of zero if we had a functioning news industry. But we do not.
Lawrence O'Donnell went on a tirade after Thursday's press conference to excoriate American news outlets, including his own. It's worth a look.
https://www.msnbc.com/the-last-word/watch/lawrence-stupidest-candidate-trump-did-not-answer-reporters-questions-216787525948
For this country to move forward, the Republican Party must die. Same can be said for the current news media regime.
“For this country to move forward, the Republican Party must die.”
This has been obvious since at least 2007-10 with the Great Recession. And yet, old school Dems kept saying inane things like “We need a strong Republican Party.” No, we actually don’t. Lots of democracies have had a strong center-left party in power for decades, and have lots of social stability to show for it. (Japan comes to mind. Japan has lots of other serious problems, such as persistent deflation. But it also has high living standards, lots of good infrastructure, nearly no murders and no threats of civil war breaking out like we do.)
I’m glad Kamala Harris seems to finally be like “Fuck the GOP. They need to get their shit together before we bother sharing power with those assholes again.” Hopefully, Pelosi, Biden, Obama and the other “but we need a strong opposition party” bipartisan fetishists realize by now that it already doesn’t exist, hasn’t existed since at least 2007, and we’ll just have to make do with only one Responsible Adults Party for the foreseeable future.
But we already have a strong opposition party, it's half the Democrats.
The Republicans aren't a political party, they're an instrument to legalize corruption, and that to the extent they want to legalize lawlessness, if only for themselves.
They're a force whose mission is to destroy society, that's not a political party, it's a crime.
"For this country to move forward, the Republican Party must die. Same can be said for the current news media regime."
The offending news media regimes such as Fox, OAN, Newsmax,etc. and, of course, their predecessor - talk radio - are all creations and potent weapons of the right-wing. You cannot legislate them out of business. And yet, the harm they are doing is apparent. It is not clear that a lot of freedom that we have granted ourselves will not turn around and drastically limit those very freedoms (at least for a time).
That's why I didn't waste time watching the event. It was the first opportunity journalists have had to press hard for Trump to explain his nebulous positions on "policy" - for example, which parts of the Project 2025 manifesto does he find ridiculous? What concessions would he demand Ukraine make to end the war? - but it was inevitable they would not take it. They might lose their access to Trump and his inner circle.
Much easier to lob softballs like "What do you think of the polls?"
Asking salacious questions hoping to get some juicy reply that would chum the waters further I think started back with the Clintons, but it got really bad during the W administration where journalists were cowed into *not* asking any uncomfortable questions about WMD or how the occupation was going, lest they get scolded by the press secretary and sent to the back of the room to "think about what they've done." It's just been downhill from there.
Great point Citizen. As a former member of the media (long time ago), I ran into this kind of reporter often. I tried to ask the more boring relevant questions, but that usually got me nowhere.
This shit happens all the time, to all politicians and government officials of every stripe. I'd guess that something more than half of all "Joe Blow says blah" quotes that become major news items are instigated by reporters asking questions, not those political or government figures volunteering those statements on their own.
Their role models aren't Walter Cronkite or Edward R. Murrow any more, it's Jerry Springer and Geraldo Rivera.
He is mad as a hatter and nuttier than a fruitcake. Delusional thinking is part of his appeal to the cult members.
Maybe the new media should start asking questions about his mental competence, or maybe start doing their jobs and ask appropriate follow up questions when he spews out his bullshit, lies, and completely delusional statements.
Ideas like linear time and object permanence are woke liberal conspiracies.
But that has always been his gift, to project maximum self-confidence in everything he says, to find the best thing to say in the moment, to win the moment, to absolutely believe it, and sell it.
It's the quality he has in common with evangelical preachers, and probably why religious conservatives spontaneously respond to him.
What he's forgotten here is that this is something so easily checkable, that a lot of people will quickly know is wrong.
He's lost his edge because he's so mammothly distracted.
that a lot of people will quickly know is wrong.
through the magic of editing he's always the victorious alpha male on wingnut outlets while the beta cuck dems are left utterly vanquished
that's the entirety of the fox/oan/etc business model
and it's very profitable
HAH!!!
So he is being controlled by an A.I.
I knew it!!!
He hasn't had both oars in the water for a long time. He frequently invents stories, and has been doing so for years. As an example, the whole story about the guy he met who told him batteries will sink a boat. Such a conversation almost certainly never happened. And then he goes off on a tangent about electrocution and sharks, which always seems to him to be brilliant, but leaves everyone else scratching their heads.
He's a pathological narcissist and I'm not at all sure he understands the boundary between reality and his imagination. This is one of the distinguishing features of serious mental illness.
Brown did meet Trump. He said Trump flew him and Kamala Harris and some other folks to meet with Trump about a real estate project in the 90s. Harris was not in the meeting. https://www.businessinsider.com/kamala-harris-donald-trump-plane-ride-willie-brown-2024-8
They're both over the hill.
so brown and trump were never on a helicopter that almost crashed while they were talking shit about harris
other than that, everything checks out
Oh come now Kevin, both are old(er) bald guys…
Trump finds it hard to tell one brown from another. They all look the same.
To quote a quote from an article in The Atlantic (making up for giving Gorsuch space?):
"This is what The Atlantic’s editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has described as the “bias toward coherence,” and it leads to careful circumlocutions instead of stunned headlines."
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/08/truth-about-trumps-press-conference/679425/
good article; i liked this part:
Reporters might listen to Trump and then understandably be reluctant to start typing stories that must feel like spec scripts for The West Wing pieced together by a creative-writing circle:
The former president, lying about abortion laws, said women murder their own babies in the delivery room. He megalomaniacally claimed that he gets bigger crowds than anyone in history, and compared himself to Martin Luther King Jr. He descended into fantasy by telling a story about surviving a helicopter emergency that never happened with a man who wasn’t there.
Instead, The New York Times ran this headline: “Trump Tries to Wrestle Back Attention at Mar-a-Lago News Conference.” The Washington Post said: “Trump Holds Meandering News Conference, Where He Agrees to Debate Harris.” The British paper The Independent got closer with: “Trump Holds Seemingly Pointless Press Conference Filled With False Claims,” but CNN went with “Trump Attacks Harris and Walz During First News Conference Since Democratic Ticket Was Announced.”
All of these headlines are technically true, but they miss the point: The Republican nominee, the man who could return to office and regain the sole authority to use American nuclear weapons, is a serial liar and can’t tell the difference between reality and fantasy.
Donald Trump is not well. He is not stable. There’s something deeply wrong with him.
Any of those would have been important—and accurate—headlines.
+1
100% true. The media and folks like KD like to use their time trying to make sense of what Trump said rather than just challenge it on its face and force Trump to clean up his own words.
Why save a man from his serial lying or excusing his errors. Let him sink himself.
"Sanewashing" is the best word I've seen for this (and just tonight too, but on a bluesky thread I don't remember anymore so can't credit).
Headlines are the worst, as lower-case says, and NYT is the worst offender, but it happens plenty in story writeups and TV standups too.
Are you really saying he is having cognitive problems. Perhaps age and health related dementia?
Trump has been hallucinating for years. Remember when he was ranting about prayer blankets and souped-up cars outracing border patrol cars at the Mexico-US border? And nobody knew wtf he was talking about until somebody realized that Trump was remembering a movie he'd seen as if it were real?
We all act like the nonsense he spews is some sort of strategy--like, he's cleverly using bullshit to project this or that image, or to get people to engage with him seriously-not-literally/literally-not-seriously, etc.
But the simpler explanation is that he really is that dumb and really is that unmoored from reality, and is simply surrounded by enough sycophants, cynical weirdos, and similarly delusional freakshows that said hallucinations don't get pushback.
I mean, the folks in his cabinet who resigned and turned on him universally say that Trump is stupid and unfit, not that he's some clever confabulist.
+1!
Maybe Trump confused Kamala Harris with Linda Ronstadt.
Linda Ronstadt dated Willie Brown?-)
No, Linda Ronstadt dated Jerry Brown, who did ride in a helicopter with Donald Trump, but never dated Kamala Harris. That was Willie Brown, who Trump never met, but who he thinks was in a helicopter with him. That clear everything up?
Willie Brown has met Trump, but not in a helicopter; nor would Brown badmouth Harris, nor has he ever done so.
if you play 'blue bayou' backwards at 78 she lays it out in full detail
lol!
Willie-Jerry-Linda for the win!
Well, Trump was on a helicopter ride with Gavin Newsom and Jerry Brown. Newsom's ex, Kimberly Guilfoyle, is now dating Don, Jr.
I could totally see some dishing going on there. Never mind that Newsom cheated on her with his best friends wife.
So, is Trump confused, or just borrowing - changing the labels? We will never know, I think.
Love this answer from Perplexity:
Inventing stories that never happened can be a symptom of dementia, and this phenomenon is known as confabulation. Confabulation involves the unintentional creation of false or distorted memories, where individuals genuinely believe the stories they tell, even though these events did not occur. This is distinct from lying or delusions, as confabulation is rooted in memory errors rather than intentional deceit or psychiatric disorders.
In the context of dementia, confabulation can occur when individuals attempt to fill gaps in their memory, often resulting in vivid and detailed false memories. These can range from subtle inaccuracies to elaborate and fantastic scenarios. Confabulation is commonly associated with neurological conditions, such as Alzheimer's disease, where memory and cognitive functions are impaired.
The process of confabulation can be provoked by questions or occur spontaneously, and it often involves autobiographical memories, where individuals misremember their own experiences or place them in incorrect contexts. Understanding and addressing confabulation in dementia patients involves recognizing that these false memories are not intentional and providing appropriate support and validation.
I’m not going to support or validate anything for that monster.
(And I say that as someone who guided my own mother through dementia in her final years.)
"Appropriate support" may mean "confined to an institution under 24 hour supervision". I could support that.
Yeah most people with dementia aren’t total assholes. Trump is a total asshole who may or may not have dementia. Therefore, he can go fuck himself, before or after receiving treatment for his dementia.
Is he hallucinating or just making up a story from bits and pieces of his memories? He combined his helecopter trip with another person and maybe the story about another person/politician involving a helicopter? At this point I don't think he can differentiate between what's true and what's not. That's the result of decades of blatant dishonesty. It becomes his reality. Truth is irrelevant to the narrative at the moment.
Exactly. And when we remember an incident it's not like watching a video recording of it. Each time it has to be reassembled from different bits in our brains, then gets refiled. So it can change over time with each retelling while the person remembering it thinks it actually is like a video. (I'm no expert at all in this stuff but that's about what I've read. Feel free to correct.)
Since Donald tossed "what's real" and replaced it with "whatever works" when he was about three years old (actually, three year olds will believe anything, including any story they tell....hmmmmm) he's had over seven decades experience in doing this.
btw, this is exactly the same sort of stuff that reagan (R-Alzheimer's) was inventing at the end of his term in office
Hardly anyone (besides me and you, I guess) brings up Reagan any more. He was showing Alzheimers symptoms in his first term and spent his whole second term shuffling around the White House in bunny slippers, eating jelly beans and watching old movies from his glory years. He could still read and deliver a script but there was absolutely no telling what he would say if his handlers would let him answer a question, so they absolutely for a fact didn't let him field questions from the press corps.
This could have been the scenario if Biden had stayed in the race and won. Handlers would have taken care of all the day to day stuff and they would have trotted Biden out for short speeches then hustled him away before anyone could ask a question.
yup, correct on all counts
Reagan would also tell famous Hollywood stories as if they had happened to him, or were something he'd seen in a movie, which I suppose is 'confabulating'.
Oh, how mortifying, Keith B beat me to it just below!
oh man... keith's a real hard case, better prepare yourself for a proper beat down 😉
“This could have been the scenario if Biden had stayed in the race and won.”
So in other words, Biden could’ve managed to be president from 2025-2028 after all? I mean, you said Reagan managed to do a second term while completely Alzheimered out. And now Reagan has tons of buildings named after him and conservatives sing his praises when their mouths aren’t busy fellating Trump.
Welp, I’m glad we tossed Biden - the best president of my lifetime - overboard anyway. (Don’t get me wrong: I love that Kamala is polling higher. But it’s real shitty how we collectively as a citizenry have treated Biden.)
The awful thing is we can never know, but I have been certain that Trump would be doing as badly now as he would have been if we'd nominated a stuffed mallard to run against him. His collapse like an accelerating avalanche has been baked in for a year, and, I thought, really obvious.
Thank you. If enough people - especially the press - had regularly pointed to trump's disintegrating mental state when most were still unwilling to call his lies exactly that, maybe he could have been dumped, & Biden might have won the election after some other, less "charismatic" opponent waa nominated.
After all he has accomplished, I'm not certain how diminished he is in what he can actually continue to handle, but I don't believe that he is nearly at the level of either trump or Reagan, when Nancy was calling the shots while consulting an astrologer. I will never respect the pile-on before or after Clooney used the NYT to publicly embarras Biden. The president deserved better & deserves our thanks, not opprobrium.
even before then and almost nobody thought it was worth mentioning.
Reagan told a lot of stories based on scenes from old movies that he presented as having happened in real life. I vaguely recall a one about a WW2 bomber crewman who was injured and couldn't bail out of the plane, and his commanding officer stayed with him so that they went down together.
One amusing incident was when he visited House Speaker Tip O'Neill, who was using President Grover Cleveland's desk. Reagan said he had played Grover Cleveland in the movies. Actually he played Grover Cleveland Alexander, the baseball player.
The next one will be that he rode in the same helicopter with Kobe Bryant, was pronounced dead at the scene, but rose again, in fulfillment of the Scriptures!
He is, after all the second coming of the Savior.
He said so himself
so you think he made up all those stories about banging mary magdalene?
or is he just confusing her with marla maples?
Trump does not grasp facts or truth that do not comport to his wishes. It's just not a thing with him. Thus, he does not lie, as he's incapable of perceiving reality as something that stands on its own, unrelated to his whims, desires, or temper tantrums.
MEOOOOOW. In 4 years the CONVICTED whore monger will be in a NURSING HOME. Kitties know
Agreed. I am not a psychologist or psychiatrist, but for years it has been obvious that Trump has some sort of condition in which facts/truth/reality are not really a thing. If he says something, it becomes "true", and no amount of evidence to the contrary matters.
As a number of people here and elsewhere have observed, Trump doesn't lie. He bullshits. The liar understands the truth and wishes to conceal or distort it. The bullshitter doesn't care if what he says is true or not -- all that matters is that whatever he says serves his purposes in the moment. In Trump's case, it's almost always his galactic-sized ego/insecurity.
' If he says something, it becomes "true", and no amount of evidence to the contrary matters.'
Right! That's exactly it. And it's unclear whether the news media has been unable or unwilling to demonstrate that.
It is absolutely infuriating that the press held Biden accountable for his lapses and poor debate performance but refuse to assail the fitness of Trump to run for office.
They didn't want to lose access, meow. Funny how that's the excuse when it's a Republican, not so much for a Democrat.
A number of journalists have come right out and said the quiet part out loud: Republicans don't care about Trump's mental condition, so there's no point in belaboring it. Everyone "knows" he's insane, and nobody cares. Democrats, on the other hand, seemed sensitive about Biden's age and mental competency, so there was a payoff in scrutinizing it.
It's all part of the larger problem of the MSM holding Democrats to grown-up standards, while Republicans are treated like ill-mannered toddlers with oppositional defiance disorder and absolutely no agency.
Trump's face is increasingly looking like a house where no one is home.
If Trump can confuse Nikki Haley with Nancy Pelosi, he could easily confuse Jerry Brown with Willy Brown. He has been making shit up and getting away with it for so long that his brain has atrophied in to a sort of a Cuisinart in which unrelated facts and pure fiction get pureed and mixed together.
Didn't he confuse a few people with wife #2?
He claimed he couldn't have raped the women he was found liable for raping because she wasn't his type. Then in the deposition for the case, identified a picture of the rape victim from the time of the rape, as Marla Maples, his second wife.
On the one hand, Fuck Yeah! On the other, the one thing in life I personally fearis dementia, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy, no matter how deserving.
The FAA will have the pilots report of the emergency. I think they are free on the FAA web site.
The Aviation Safety Network is a good source for incidents (including but not limited to accidents): https://asn.flightsafety.org/
NASA maintains a database of voluntary, confidential reports by ATC, crew, mechanics, and others of incidents raising potential safety issues: https://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/
Both are searchable.
Pastybrit is correct. The technical, or medical, term for what Trump does is confabulation.
I read earlier today - can't remember where - that the story was not new. Apparently Trump included it in a book last year.
Trump couldn't include anything in a book since he can't write.
At 0:21 he looks upward and right. This is complete speculation but do you think he was hallucinating? I've seen people with Dementia have hallucinations where they look at seemingly nothing but insist there's something there.
He’s not hallucinating, he’s always lies. He’s a sociopath verging on psychopaths with a little dementia thrown in. You wouldn’t want him managing a Mc Donalds, for a lot of reasons and wouldn’t trust him to be treasurer of the PTA. That’s the republican candidate for president. His VP choice is no better.
The actual helicopter ride was 14 years before Kamala Harris became DA, before Trump had even heard of her. The whole story us hallucination. Can anyone explain why this level of disconnect from reality is not disqualifying? It seems way worse than any minor stumbles Biden made at the debate.
Trump sent investigators to California to check into the helicopter flight records. They can’t believe what they are finding.
nice snark
LOL. A team of top pro investigators. Their comprehensive report will be published in two weeks when it will be revealed in a press conference.
"A team of top pro investigators". Guilianni, Lake and Lindell Esq(s)
Yup.......
If you are looking for the long version of the new Black guy in a helicopter story:
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/09/trump-plane-crash-california-00173487