An American airline has thrown a passenger off a flight after he confronted Ivanka Trump, President-elect Donald Trump’s eldest daughter. According to TMZ, “an out-of-control passenger” on Ms Trump’s JetBlue flight out of JFK airport in New York “began verbally berating her and jeering at her three children.”
The unidentified passenger, holding his own child at the time, reportedly told Ms Trump, who was flying economy on the budget airline, “Your father is ruining the country.”
He went on to express surprise that Ms Trump, whose father owns his own 757 Boeing jet, was travelling with the masses. “Why is she on our flight?” he said. “She should be flying private.” Eventually the passenger was escorted off the plane by airline personnel. Ms Trump was travelling with Secret Service protection at the time, according to a Secret Service official.
Although the disgruntled passenger has yet to be identified, one Twitter user, Matt Lasner, a professor at Hunter College in New York, posted on the social media platform about the incident. In since deleted tweets, Mr Lasner wrote that he and his husband were “kicked off the plane” after his husband “expressed displeasure in a calm tone.” In a previous tweet, Mr Lasner wrote that the couple had spotted Ms Trump and her husband, Jared Kushner, and that his husband “was chasing them down to harass them”.
So far there has been no official word from the Trump team regarding the incident. JetBlue said: “The decision to remove a customer from a flight is not taken lightly. If the crew determines that a customer is causing conflict on the aircraft, the customer will be asked to deplane, especially if the crew feels the situation runs the risk of escalation during flight. “In this instance, our team worked to re-accommodate the party on the next available flight.”
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