White House stonewalls when pressed to explain Trump's implausible Unabomber story

Independent

17-07-2025

The White House stonewalled Thursday when pressed for an explanation as to why President Donald Trump told a group of business leaders an implausible tale about his late uncle, a noted MIT professor, once teaching Unabomber Theodore Kaczynski.
The Independent asked Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt about the president's bizarre anecdote during a routine press briefing, two days after Trump insisted that Kaczynski, who earned a bachelor's degree at Harvard and a master's and a PhD at the University of Michigan before going on his deadly terror spree, had been a student of his famous uncle.
Leavitt attempted to deflect by claiming surprise that The Independent would be interested in the matter despite having received a query about the president's claims by email within minutes of him making the remarks in question on Tuesday.
She proceeded to cite the late Dr. Trump's history at MIT and called the late physicist — a pioneer in cancer research who was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ronald Reagan in 1983 — a 'very intelligent professor.'
'The President's very proud of his family. In fact, I have a or the President has a letter from his uncle on the MIT letterhead that sits in the Oval Office dining room. Maybe we'll let you see it sometime,' she added.
Leavitt did not attempt to explain how John Trump — a physicist and electrical engineer — could have taught Kaczynski at MIT when the future terrorist had been enrolled at Harvard as a mathematics student.
The story, as told by Trump, raised eyebrows because it is highly unlikely that any of what he said about his uncle and the notorious murderer was true. Not only did Kaczynski — whose undergraduate degree was from Harvard — never attend MIT, but even if the president's uncle had crossed paths with the future terrorist, he could not have known that Kaczynski had been responsible for 16 bomb attacks between 1978 and 1995.
'Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There's very little difference between a madman and a genius,' Trump said at carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh Tuesday, before adding that he'd once discussed the infamous bomber with his father's brother.
Before being recognized as the Unabomber, Kaczynski earned an undergraduate degree from Harvard in 1962, having entered at the age of 16, and Master's and Doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Michigan by 1967.
Kaczynski taught as an assistant professor at the University of California at Berkeley, until 1969, before making a deliberate shift away from academic life and mainstream society, living in a remote cabin near Lincoln, Montana. He began delivering handmade explosives to university and airline executives in the late 1970s, killing three and injuring 23 as part of a campaign aimed at collapsing modern society.
The murderous recluse was one of the country's most wanted fugitives until 1996, when his brother David Kaczynski, turned him in to the FBI after reading the now-infamous manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, after The Washington Post published it at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh.
He pleaded guilty to multiple federal charges and was sentenced to life in federal prison in 1998. He hanged himself in a Colorado prison cell in June 2023, three months after he stopped treatment for a cancer diagnosis he'd received two years earlier.
Kaczynski's manifesto makes no mention of Prof. Trump, MIT, or any figures associated with that institution, and his autobiography and prison interviews — which contain detailed recollections of his education and professors — do not include any references to Trump's uncle or his time at MIT.