Trump lied about the Unabomber

At a recent energy and innovation summit in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump captured the media’s attention with a lengthy anecdote about his uncle, Professor John Trump. Before beginning his tale, he warned the audience with a smile: “I have to brag for just a second.”

Trump then described, in startling detail, a conversation he allegedly had with his uncle about the infamous Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. On stage, Trump mimed an exchange in which he asked his uncle what it was like to have taught Kaczynski…

But this could never have taken place. John Trump died more than ten years before the Unabomber was arrested and identified in 1996. Moreover, Ted Kaczynski was never a student at MIT, where John Trump taught; instead, he attended Harvard and the University of Michigan.

What baffled many observers was that Trump not only invented this interaction, but also exaggerated his uncle’s credentials and accomplishments. He falsely claimed that John Trump was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT”, which is inaccurate. He also claimed that he held degrees in “nuclear, chemistry and mathematics”, when in fact he had two degrees in electrical engineering and one in physics.

Trump continued the anecdote by again imitating his uncle, recounting how he would have told him about the Unabomber, saying: “Seriously, good. He would go around correcting everybody”.