The NY Times Outclasses NY Posts’s Pro MAGA Reporting on Trump’s Absurd Willie Brown Fable

Former President Donald Trump got some help in making a fool of himself during Thursday’s rambling and unhinged press conference: the pro-MAGA outlet New York Post.

A handful of reporters got wind of Trump’s “surprise” press conference early Thursday morning, which explains why national stars like Maggie Haberman, Jonathan Swan, and Garret Haake all made their way to Palm Beach for the midday event.

While the goal may have been for Trump to shine a spotlight on Vice President Kamala Harris’s lack of press availabilities, his absurd answers about crowd sizes, MLK, and confusing what part of his ear was injured created a raft of headlines that mainly served to remind the nation that he is perhaps even more unstable than he was four years ago. Oh, and he also effectively pushed negative news about the military service of Governor Tim Walz out of the news cycle.

Trump hasn’t held such a press conference in a long time, and with a significant shift in polling since Harris became the Democratic nominee, and major issues of economic and foreign policy to clarify, the reporter sent by The New York Post used precious audience with the former president to ask about former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown.

For those unfamiliar, Brown hasn’t been a relevant political figure on the national stage in some time, but has only resurfaced in the past few months due to his past romantic

relationship with Harris, and unproven allegations from conservative smear merchants who insist that the only reason Harris enjoyed any professional success was due to Brown ostensibly looking after his former paramour.

“There’s been some discussion around the Vice President Harris’ prior relationship with Willie Brown and how that might have intersected her career trajectory,” the unidentified reporter asked. “So I’m just wondering if you followed that discussion at all.”

One can only wonder why a newspaper outlet would ask Trump about Brown. It doesn’t stretch the imagination to consider that the curious question teed up the Republican nominee for a partisan attack on Harris. Or, perhaps the Post reporter was trying to show fealty to the Trump campaign with such a sycophantic question. Still, it’s not unfair to think that tossing such a partisan attack-friendly softball — in a remarkably uncritical way — did not serve the reputation of the Post very well.

“Well, I know Willie Brown very well,” Trump replied. “In fact, I went down in a helicopter with him. We thought maybe this is 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. And Willie was. He was a little concerned. So I know him, but I know him pretty well.”

It’s pretty stunning to learn that Trump claimed he almost died in

a helicopter crash with Brown. This is news to the entire political media world. Except, as is the case in almost everything Trump says, the story is, at best, almost certainly an exaggeration or just as likely to be created out of whole cloth. And guess which is the case here.

“Everything about the story is false,” wrote Haberman on X/Twitter as she shared the New York Times report from 1989.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times reporter clarified, “Trump’s story about being in a rough helicopter landing with Willie Brown was actually with [former California Governor] Jerry Brown, and there was no rough landing. Everything about the story was false, both men said.”

According to California Governor Gavin Newsom, who was also aboard that fateful helicopter trip, the flight in question had been uneventful. In a further post, Haberman added: “Three Trump casino executives were killed in a helicopter crash in 1989, an event that Trump later insinuated he was supposed to join them on, a claim some employees said was untrue.”

Those three men associated with the story hit back in a New York Times article on Friday. A spokesperson for Jerry Brown said, “There was no emergency landing and no discussion of Kamala Harris.” Newsom reportedly laughed at the former president’s tale, remarking: “I call complete B.S.”

Further, Willie Brown flatly denied ever riding in a helicopter with Trump, let alone facing a life-threatening situation: “You know

me well enough to know that if I almost went down in a helicopter with anybody, you would have heard about it!”

The fact that The New York Times would fact-check a bullshit yarn from Trump is not at all surprising. What stands out, however, is the stark difference in journalistic standards between the Times and the Post, whose reporting on Trump’s bizarre Willie Brown helicopter claim was nearly limited to the words that came out of his mouth. There was next to zero fact-checking or reporting designed to get to the truth of what the Republican nominee claimed.

There were details about a helicopter incident involving Brown, but only a brief caveat: “It’s unclear if Trump was aboard that particular helicopter with Brown. His campaign did not respond to The Post’s request for comment” or offer any skepticism. Nevermind the facts at hand, the goal appeared to be getting Willie Brown and Trump in the news cycle as a potential hit on Kamala Harris.

Seems self-evident that the New York Post’s political coverage has prioritized promoting Trump’s bizarre claims over serious journalism, which is just another example of how the tabloid has declined.

The irony is that Maggie Haberman cut her teeth working as an ink-stained assistant at the Post during a time when it had much higher journalistic standards. Today, sadly, those standards no longer exist.

Watch the video above via Fox News.