President Donald Trump likes to boast about the brilliance of his late uncle John Trump, who spent decades as a professor of electrical engineering at the renowned Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). And when speaking about all manner of subjects, the president likes to make up stories filled with dramatic but fictional details.
On Tuesday, Trump conjured an especially odd imaginary tale – that linked his uncle with the late terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.
Trump was speaking at a Pennsylvania event about energy and innovation when he said he had to “brag just for a second” about his uncle’s intelligence. After wrongly saying his uncle was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT” (he was one of the longest-serving but not the very longest) and wrongly saying his uncle’s three university degrees were “in nuclear, chemical, and math” (two were in electrical engineering and one was in physics), the president claimed, “Kaczynski was one of his students.”
He went on to tell a story about having asked his uncle about what Kaczynski was like. “‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said, ‘Seriously, good.’ He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
For two big reasons, this story could not possibly be accurate.
First, the president’s uncle died in 1985. Kaczynski was publicly revealed as the Unabomber more than a decade later, in 1996, when he was captured; before that, he had lived as a recluse in the Montana wilderness. There is no apparent reason that Donald Trump would have been asking anyone about Kaczynski in 1985 or earlier.
Second, Kaczynski attended Harvard University and the University of Michigan, not MIT. An MIT spokesperson said in a Wednesday email: “We have no enrollment record or information that Ted Kaczynski ever attended MIT.”
Harvard has long allowed some students to register for classes at nearby MIT, but media outlets and MIT itself have found no sign that Kaczynski ever did that during his time at Harvard in the late 1950s and early 1960s – much less that Kaczynski, a Harvard mathematics major, studied under Trump, the MIT professor of electrical engineering. MIT reported on its website in 1996 that Kaczynski’s high school guidance counselor said Kaczynski had been offered admission to MIT in the 1950s but had chosen Harvard instead.
The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s tale.
What the president could have accurately said is that his uncle was an esteemed MIT professor. The MIT spokesperson said Wednesday that John Trump “remains among the longest-serving professors in our history and was a highly valued member of the MIT community throughout his tenure as a researcher, innovator, entrepreneur, teacher, and colleague.”
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