On Saturday night, an incident occurred over the Gulf of Mexico as the former president returned to Florida from a rally in New Orleans. After experiencing engine failure over the Gulf of Mexico, a plane carrying former US President Donald Trump was forced to make an emergency landing on Saturday night.
According to an unnamed source, the Dassault Falcon 900 had flown about 75 miles from a New Orleans airport before returning to the city.
The plane was returning Trump to his luxury Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida, from a hotel in New Orleans where he addressed Republican party donors at a private event.
Other passengers included Secret Service agents, support personnel, and Trump advisers. Just before 11 p.m., the plane made a U-turn.
According to a source, audio of communications between the pilot and the air traffic control tower revealed that the landing was described as “emergency in nature,” according to the Politico website, which first reported the incident.
The plane belonged to a donor who loaned it to Trump for the evening, and Trump advisers arranged for another donor’s plane to take him back to Florida. He arrived in Palm Beach around 3 a.m. on Sunday.
Trump delivered a discursive and bizarre 84-minute speech in New Orleans, musing that the US should put the Chinese flag on F-22 jets and “bomb the shit out of Russia” in retaliation for the invasion of Ukraine.
“And then we say, ‘China did it, we didn’t do it, China did it,’ and they start fighting, and we sit back and watch,” he said to a laughing audience. Trump also hinted at a presidential run in 2024, saying, “We’re looking at it very, very hard.” We must do it. We must do it.”
He’ll likely be in the air again on Saturday when he joins Governor Henry McMaster and congressional candidates Russell Fry and Katie Arrington for a rally in Florence, South Carolina.
