Donald Trump was terrified he was going to die in a plane crash when he got some more bad news: the aircraft once belonged to notorious child sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
Along with many other high-profile figures, including Prince Andrew and Bill Clinton, Trump had sought to distance himself from the disgraced financier.
But a new book by best-selling author Michael Wolff reveals that Trump discovered a chartered plane he was using to fly to a campaign stop in Colorado in August 2024 was once owned by Epstein—while being thrown about the skies in one of the worst flights anyone on board had ever experienced. The Daily Beast has obtained a copy of the book ahead of its release on Tuesday, Feb. 25.
“I’m going to die on Jeffrey Epstein’s plane!” Trump “howled,” according to Wolff.
In his book, All or Nothing: How Trump Recaptured America, Wolff writes that Trump’s own plane was having mechanical problems and the campaign team, with Trump, on board, was flying to Aspen after a fundraiser in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, on a hastily chartered Gulfstream.
The flight was a nightmare. Wolff described it as a “white-knuckle, head-banging lurches. Stomach-dropping turbulence” ride with “sudden stone-falling drops in altitude and air pressure.”
“People were actually praying,” he adds. “Then, in the middle of it all, a report tracking the Trump team’s peregrinations identified that they were riding on the former plane of Trump’s old friend, the infamous sex abuser Jeffrey Epstein,” writes Wolff.
Epstein was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019 when he was found dead in his jail cell. He was accused of paying minors, some as young as 14, for sex at his Manhattan town house and his Palm Beach, Florida, estate. Trump was friends with Epstein and socialized at Mar-a-Lago, but has long adamantly and repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
The author of Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House writes that Trump’s “golf buddy” Steve Witkoff, who is now acting as the president’s go-between with Vladimir Putin and led last week’s “peace” talks with a Russian delegation in Saudi Arabia, sent his plane to take him back to Palm Beach.
A grateful Trump gave the flight crew $50 bills, a signed one for each to keep and another to spend.
Problems with his private plane were a major irritant to Trump, writes Wolff. His aircraft—nicknamed Trump Force One—was out of operation with a cracked windscreen weeks before the Iowa caucus. But the reality was that Trump did not want to engage with the fact his Boeing 757, which he bought fourth-hand in 2011 then decked out in gold, was aging. (It had spent years effectively mothballed at an upstate New York airport during and after Trump’s first term.)
When the aircraft was again put out of action during the campaign, after a mechanic accidentally deployed the inflatable chute, the man was fired on the spot.
After the assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania, in July, Wolff writes, Trump Force One became the decoy plane, quipping that “his staff and guests available to be shot out of the sky, with Trump himself on a secret flight.”
The White House has been contacted for comment.
Wolff’s book has already sparked ire in Trump’s circle. In a statement issued last November, the senior staff of the 2024 Trump campaign, including co-chairs Susie Wiles—now the president’s chief of staff—and Chris LaCivita, said: “A number of us have received inquiries from the disgraced author Michael Wolff, whose previous work can only be described as fiction.
“He is a known peddler of fake news who routinely concocts situations, conversations, and conclusions that never happened. As a group, we have decided not to respond to his bad faith inquiries, and we encourage others to completely disregard whatever nonsense he eventually publishes. Consider this our blanket response to whatever he writes.”
The book includes extensive passages on both Wiles and LaCivita.
Trump’s long ties to Epstein were also the subject of a bombshell released by Wolff just before the election, when he shared a tape of the pervert talking about being “best friend” to Trump with the Daily Beast.
Those tapes revealed a claim by Epstein that his fleet of planes had a happier memory for Trump. Epstein alleged to Wolff that Trump and his now wife Melania first had sex on board his Boeing 727—later known as the “Lolita Express” for its use to feed the financier’s sick appetites.
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung responded to a request for comment from the Daily Beast on Thursday evening with a statement on Friday. He said: “Michael Wolff is a lying sack of s*** and has been proven to be a fraud. He routinely fabricates stories originating from his sick and warped imagination, only possible because he has a severe and debilitating case of Trump Derangement Syndrome that has rotted his peanut-sized brain.”
