President Donald Trump claimed Tuesday that his uncle, John Trump, taught Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” terrorist who used mail bombs to kill his victims.
The tangent occurred while he was speaking at the Pennsylvania Energy & Innovation Summit and appeared to be prompted by a discussion on artificial intelligence.
“I have to brag just for a second,” Trump said Tuesday. “Because 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. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT.”
“Kaczynski was one of his students — do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” he added.
Trump’s comments sparked confusion on social media, as Kaczynski never attended the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan before teaching at the University of California, Berkeley, as an assistant professor.
Trump claimed his uncle knew the mathematics prodigy-turned-terrorist recluse, however.
“I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump,” the president claimed Tuesday. “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. Didn’t work out too well.”
Kaczynski anonymously mailed and hand delivered homemade bombs to people across the country from 1978 to 1995. He killed three people and injured 23 others, and warned in his 1995 manifesto that technology would destroy humanity and lead to full-blown totalitarianism.
Kaczynski died by suicide in 2023 while serving a life sentence in Butner, North Carolina.
Trump’s comments Tuesday appear to be unsubstantiated, however, as his uncle died in 1985 — a decade before Kaczynski was linked to the then-anonymous bombings — so it seems unlikely the discussion Trump referenced would have occurred.
And his uncle was not the “longest-serving” professor at MIT, according to an official there. John Trump, an inventor and electrical engineer, reportedly became a research associate at MIT in 1933, and taught there as an assistant professor, professor and senior lecturer from 1936 until his death. A spokesperson for the school told Newsweek that “at least 10 people” have taught there longer than that.
The Unabomber, meanwhile, has been a person of fascination for decades.