Donald Trump seemed to tell a deeply weird fib on Tuesday, boasting that his uncle John Trump taught a notorious terrorist at university.
During an energy and tech summit in Pennsylvania, Trump took a detour from his remarks, telling attendees, “I have to brag, just for a second.” He told a story about his uncle, a noted scientist who taught for decades at the prestigious Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
“My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors,” Trump said. “51 years, whatever. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. That’s a smart man.”
“Kaczynski was one of his students,” he continued, apparently referring to the domestic terrorist and mathematician Theodore ‘Ted’ Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
“Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” Trump added.
The president then told a nearly impossible-to-believe anecdote about a conversation he claims he had with his uncle: “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr John Trump. He said, ‘What kind of a student? ‘Man,’ he said, ‘seriously good … He’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
John Trump died in 1985, a decade before Kaczynski was linked to the Unabomber attacks. The alleged conversation would had to have occurred years before the public knew Kaczynski was responsible for the bombings, which killed three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995.
Furthermore, Kaczynski didn’t attend MIT. He studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan and later took on an assistant professor role at the University of California at Berkeley.
He died by suicide in 2023 while serving a life sentence.
To add to the tangle of contradictions in Trump’s story, John Trump was not the longest-serving professor in MIT’s history. The president has been spouting that one for years, and it has been debunked by MIT itself.
The White House did not immediately return a request for clarification from the Daily Beast.
Trump’s rambling speech in Pittsburgh comes as he faces a tempest within his own base over his administration’s reversal on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files. While Trump has tried to smooth things over, high-profile allies have demanded the release of documents linked to the late sex offender.
Trump’s Kaczynski remarks prompted a blistering response from the Democratic National Committee.
“Donald Trump is fascinated by all types of seedy characters. The Unabomber. Hannibal Lecter. Kid Rock,” DNC rapid response director Kendall Witmer said in a statement to the Daily Beast.
“Which makes it all the more surprising that he suddenly takes little to no interest in Jeffrey Epstein and his list after campaigning on releasing the Epstein files for years. Makes you think.”
The president is evidently very proud of his uncle, who began working at MIT as a research associate after obtaining his doctorate from the university in 1933. Trump has repeatedly boasted about the professor’s tenure at MIT and claimed he was a “great super genius.”
John Trump was said to be very different to his brother, Fred Trump, and the future president.
“John was as different from his nephew as you can imagine, and so I don’t know why the DNA didn’t spread over to his brother Fred,” O. Robert Simha, who worked with John Trump at MIT in the 1960s, told the Daily Beast earlier this year. “We haven’t figured that one out yet.”
A 1985 obituary of John Trump in Physics Today described him as “remarkably even-tempered, with kindness and consideration to all, never threatening or arrogant in manner, even when under high stress.”
“He cared very little for money and the trappings of money,” it said.
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