Trump Reveals an Absurd Personal Anecdote Regarding the Unabomber

President Donald Trump appeared at an event in Pennsylvania on Tuesday to promote investment in artificial intelligence. But in classic Trump fashion, he veered into a story that had nothing to do with AI. The story involved Trump’s uncle and the Unabomber, but it’s filled with so many inconsistencies that people have no real idea what to make of it.

“When I first heard about AI, you know, it’s not my thing, although my uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, he was the longest serving professor in the history of MIT, three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math,” said Trump.

The president was referring to John G. Trump, who was the brother of Donald’s father, Frederick C. Trump. John wasn’t the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT, according to Newsweek, and it’s not clear what a degree in “chemical” is supposed to mean. But those aren’t even the weirdest falsehoods.

Trump went on to explain that “Kaczynski,” presumably referring to Ted Kaczynski, was one of his uncle’s students at MIT. Kaczynski was better known as the Unabomber, who killed three people and injured 23 others in a mail bombing campaign from 1978 until 1995.

“Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was?” Trump said. “There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius. But Kaczynski, I said, what kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr. John Trump? He said, what kind of a student? And then he said, seriously, good. He said he’d go around correcting everybody, but it didn’t work out too well for him. Didn’t work out too well, but it’s interesting in life.”

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u_tG_Q3GORw[/embed]

Where to begin? For starters, the president’s uncle John died in 1985 at the age of 77. The public had no idea who the Unabomber might be until he was captured in 1996. There’s basically no way that Donald would know to ask his uncle about Kaczynski in any exceptional way before his identity became publicly known. Kaczynski’s brother helped identify him after the Washington Post published his anti-technology manifesto (promising to give up terrorism if they did) and recognized the arguments in Industrial Society and Its Future as the work of his brother.

There’s also the fact that Kaczynski got his bachelor’s at Harvard and then went on to earn graduate degrees at Harvard. There’s no evidence Gizmodo can find that Kaczynski studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where John Trump taught. And it doesn’t appear that John Trump ever taught anything at the University of Michigan or Harvard, as best as we can tell. Kaczynski killed himself by hanging in prison in June 2023.

What does it all mean? It probably means President Trump is losing his mind. Trump likes to brag about his uncle being a genius, largely because he thinks that this kind of family lineage obviously means he’s a genius too. But there’s just no way that Trump could’ve conceivably talked about the Unabomber with his uncle, who, again, died a decade before anyone knew his identity.

It’s the kind of bizarre claim that would define the legacy of any other presidency during normal times. But it’s just another day that ends in Y here in the second Trump era. And there’s only going to be more weirdness to come. We can pretty much guarantee that part.