This story about Trump's memory of an apparently harrowing helicopter ride just keeps getting funnier, and it sounds like we now have a good explanation for Trump's insistence that this helicopter ride did happen — only it still wasn't Willie Brown he was riding with.

In the wake of Trump's rambling tale about Willie Brown shit-talking Kamala Harris while they were both about to die on a helicopter that had to make an emergency landing, at some point in the undefined past in which Trump "knew Willie Brown very well," there has been a lot of attempted fact-checking of this incident. Willie Brown has insisted, in no uncertain terms, that such a helicopter ride never happened. And Governor Gavin Newsom has tried to suggest that Trump confused Willie Brown and Jerry Brown, with whom Trump did share a helicopter in 2018.

But we now have a better explanation for why Trump doubled down on his story and is telling the New York Times that he wants to sue them over their attempts to discredit him. Another elder statesman of California politics who is also Black, 95-year-old Nate Holden — a former Los Angeles city councilman and state senator — has confirmed that he was in a helicopter that almost went down along with an "ashen" Trump around 1990, and the helicopter had to make an emergency landing in New Jersey.

Trump was reportedly seeking support from Holden for his plans to build a hotel on the site of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles, and invited Holden out to New York. The two then boarded a helicopter in Manhattan to fly out to Atlantic City in New Jersey, where Trump had recently built the Taj Mahal casino resort.

Holden tells the Times, "He was trying to impress me. We start flying to New Jersey. He said, ‘Look at the skyline! Look at how beautiful it is! And I’m part of it!'"

"We start flying to Atlantic City. He’s talking about how great things are. And about 15, 20 minutes in, the pilot yells, ‘Shut up! Shut up!’” Holden recounts to the Times, saying that the pilot said the hydraulic system had failed. “Donald turned white as snow. He was shaking."

There had actually been a deadly helicopter crash a year before, in 1989, that killed three members of the Trump organization in New Jersey, which Holden immediately thought of, wondering to himself how Trump's helicopters could all be so poorly maintained, he tells the Times.

"I thought, if we go down, this is your fault," Holden tells the paper.

Trump's then executive vice president of construction and development, Barbara Res, was also onboard the helicopter and corroborated the story in her memoir, All Alone on the 68th Floor. (Res also wrote a book in 2020, Tower of Lies: What My Eighteen Years of Working With Donald Trump Reveals About Him.) Res noted that Trump liked to joke after that incident that Holden had "turned white" during the ordeal, but that Trump himself had gone ashen.

The helicopter reportedly made a successful emergency landing, after extended turbulence, in Linden, New Jersey.

Politico also spoke to Holden about the incident, as well as Res.

"Willie is the short Black guy living in San Francisco. I’m a tall Black guy living in Los Angeles," Holden tells Politico. "I guess we all look alike."

Holden also told the Times that he had called Willie Brown after watching Trump's press conference on the news. "I said, ‘Willie, you know what? That’s me!’" Holden says that Brown "just laughed and laughed."

Since the story has blown up about Trump being mistaken about his helicopter ride with Willie Brown, Trump has been spiraling a bit, at least according to the Times' Maggie Haberman. He apparently called Haberman threatening to sue, and he went on Truth Social to rant that there were "‘Logs,’ Maintenance Records, and Witnesses" to back up his account.

"When asked to produce the flight records, Mr. Trump responded mockingly, repeating the request in a sing-song voice," Haberman writes. "As of early Friday evening, he had not provided them."

Previously: Trump Claims In Bizarre Press Conference That Willie Brown Said ‘Terrible Things’ About Kamala Harris

Top image: Photo of Nate Holden by Bob Riha, Jr./Getty Images; Willie Brown photo by Kimberly White/Getty Images