The JetBlue passenger who harassed Ivanka Trump on board a plane about to take off from JFK Airport for San Francisco was “agitated,” and the airline did the right thing in kicking him off, a passenger who witnessed the incident wrote on Facebook.
“When he got on and saw her, sitting behind me, he said, ‘oh my god. This is a nightmare,’” Marc Scheff, a Brooklyn-based illustrator, wrote of irate fellow passenger Daniel Jennings Goldstein on Thursday, describing the Brooklyn lawyer as “visibly shaking.”
The bearded Scheff and his young son were seated one row in front of Ivanka, as depicted in several tweeted photos of the plane’s interior.
“He said ‘they ruin the country now they ruin our flight!’” Scheff wrote, noting that the flight had been delayed due to Trump’s boarding.
“He did not yell,” Scheff wrote, noting that the baby in Goldstein’s arms was “adorable and sharply dressed.”
“He was also not what I would describe as calm. Agitated, maybe. His husband behind him was very calm,” Scheff wrote of Matthew Lasner, who teaches urban studies at Hunter.
“I overheard Ivanka say [to JetBlue staff] ‘I don’t want to make this a thing.’ My assessment is that she was happy to let the man take his seat,” Scheff added.
“She handled the situation calmly and with class,” he said.
The morning flight was bound for San Francisco — and, inexplicably, the future first daughter, her husband, Jared Kushner, and their three children were seated in the plane’s main cabin for a connecting flight to Hawaii.
The Trump-Kushner clan were heading to the islands for a vacation, according to ABC News, which cited transition team sources. Still, security made the right call, Scheff said, despite his own strong anti-Trump opinions.
“This whole thing is a distraction from DT’s nuke announcement,” Scheff texted a New York Post reporter as the flight landed safely in San Francisco.
“That is my opinion,” he added of his view that Ivanka was intentionally put on a commercial plane because the resulting media buzz would distract from Trump’s tweet on Thursday that “The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes.”
Asked if Ivanka was doing well after the long, eventful trip, Scheff said, “She is.”
He did not speak to her, he added.