Missed opportunity: did Donald Trump nearly die in a helicopter crash?
It’s arguably the biggest champagne problem of them all, certainly the most dangerous, but we all know that helicopters are death-traps.
Despite the assumption that a form of air travel that’s considerably slower and closer to the ground than travelling in a plane would be safer, with more precise controls to boot, it’s not actually the case, and not by a long shot.
So much so that the fact that the current President of the United States, Donald Trump, has been on countless helicopter flights and isn’t an example of their lethality is a sign that sometimes the worst people really do live charmed lives.
That doesn’t mean that the alleged child molester (and that alleged is doing some seriously heavy lifting there) didn’t have a close brush with death thanks to a helicopter. One that unfortunately claimed the lives of five people who had much more to give the world than every close friend of paedophile child trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. Three of them did work for the Trump Organization at the time, so they probably weren’t entirely innocent, but still probably deserved more of a chance than their boss ever did.
In 1989, a helicopter containing three executives from the Trump Organization, travelling from New York to Atlantic City, crashed a mere 30 miles from its destination after the craft lost its main rotor blade mid-flight. Yeah, that can happen when you’re in a helicopter. No authorities could work out how it happened after the crash, just one of the risks you take when you step on a craft like that. After the news broke, an even more alarming tidbit was added to the story, that their boss was actually scheduled to be on the flight, but decided against it at the last minute because he was too busy.
Now, looking at the headlines of the time, no one actually credits a specific source with this information, but it’s arguably what made the event headline news. Five people die in a helicopter crash, that’s sad, what else is on? Five people die in a helicopter crash, and one of them could have been Donald Trump? A nation weeps for what could have been. The truth is, however, that the source of this dramatic near miss was Donald Trump himself.
I don’t want to blow your mind or anything, but it turns out that Trump was lying about this.
Donald Trump lied about something? Really?!
I know, right? A fork was found in the kitchen, a bear was found shitting in the woods, clouds were found in the sky, and the 45th and 47th Presidents of the USA were found lying about something for the sake of making something about them.
Turns out, this is something he does quite a bit, and we know this thanks to an interview that Barbara Res gave in 2019 to MSNBC. Res was the Trump Organization’s vice president of construction at the time of the crash, so he was uniquely positioned to see how he would react to a situation that saw the death of five real-life people. Three of which he had a professional relationship with.
This was corroborated by the book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald Trump by Harry Hurt, who wrote that while giving an interview about the tragedy with a journalist on the phone, Trump muted the line and told one of his Vice-Presidents, “You’re going to hate me for this, but I just can’t resist. I can get some publicity out of this.”
As Hurt wrote: “Then Donald releases the mute button on his speaker phone and informs the reporter, ‘You know, I was going to go with them on that helicopter…’ Donald goes on to confide that for some unexplained reason he changed his mind and decided not to go.”
It’s funny, some say that Trump’s compulsive lying is a sign of his clear and undeniable dementia. While he does seem like a man whose body is giving up on him (I mean, he did shit himself on live TV the other day), he is also a man who made everything he has by lying through his teeth about everything and having absolutely no principles other than people should be thinking about him. Thus, you get acts like this. If this was anything else, making the deaths of five people all about him would be one of the most vile acts a person does with their life.
With Donald Trump, I don’t think it makes the top 100.