New concerns about President Donald Trump’s mental state are being raised after he recounted a story purportedly involving his college professor uncle and the Unabomber that simply never happened.
Speaking in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday, Trump claimed that his late uncle John Trump taught Unabomber Ted Kaczynski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He then claimed that he quizzed his uncle about his supposed student.
“Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” Trump told the audience. “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John—Dr. John Trump? I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And he said, ‘Seriously good.’ He said he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
None of this ever happened.
Trump’s uncle died in 1985. While Kaczynski’s streak of homicidal bombings began in 1978, his identity was unknown to the public until his arrest in 1996—11 years after John Trump’s death.
Also, Kaczynski was not a student at MIT. He attended Harvard University and the University of Michigan.
“We have no enrollment record or information that Ted Kaczynski ever attended MIT,” a spokesperson told CNN.
The completely invented interaction gives renewed fodder to ongoing concerns about Trump’s mental state.
BUT WAIT – THERE’S MORE!!!
Trump was at Carnegie Mellon University for the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit. He should have passed. He was hard enough to understand at press gaggles before and after, and this middle was worse.
In less than 30 seconds, Trump was off the rails.
Trump: I went to school here, I went to college here and got to know it very well.
Trump went to Fordham University and then the University of Pennsylvania. He never went to school at Carnegie Mellon. I’m surprised that the University of Pennsylvania would have him. How many people did he pay to write papers for him?
Being Pennsylvania, Trump had to bring up the assassination attempt in Butler. Senator David McCormick of Pennsylvania was on the dias, and the two talked back and forth and how if McCormick had come up on stage he might have been shot.
Then it’s so great that NATO is now paying for Ukraine’s ammunition. Our country was dead, but now it’s the hottest.
Trump: We never even discussed who’s to be the leader of the pack. But boy, you are — it was one instruction, drill baby drill, right? And they are drilling, they are drilling. We have the EPA administrator, probably — I must say this, Doug. I hate to say it. Chris and Doug and all of you guys. The most important person on the dais today is Lee Zeldin. It’s called Environmental Protection because he’s the one who’s going to get you a permit. He’s going to get you a permit for the largest electric producing plant in the world in about a week, would you say? If you go nuclear, I promised I’d give him two weeks. Okay. Nuclear we’ll give him a little more time.
The Tangerine Mussolini is perfectly happy to let Lee Zeldin at the EPA run roughshod over the Environmental Protection Act. Nuclear power plants do take a long time to get approved. That’s because they are nuclear power plants. We almost had a meltdown at Three Mile Island. You want safe nuclear reactor designs. One week for coal and gas power plants is ridiculous. So is Lee Zeldin.
Next is the possibly the craziest thing Trump has ever said.
Trump: Also my uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, it was the longest serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math, that’s a smart man. Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius.
Ted Kaczynski was known as the Unabomber. He killed 3 people and injured 23 others with mailed bombs between 1978 and 1995. He went to Harvard and the University of Michigan. The two never crossed paths. Trump is making it all up.
Trump: But Kaczynski, I said what kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr. John Trump, he said “What type of a student?” And 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.
Recently, Trump has been making up dialogue of people speaking to him, him speaking to people, and now him making up dialogue between two people that never happened. He is exceedingly proud of his uncle, who indeed had a long streak of achievements. But, Donald talks about him as if he was the achiever, when he has never achieved anything. His imaginary thoughts about the Unabomber talking to his uncle is another serious sign of delusional thinking.
Trump: But I will say this that we have the greatest brains, we have the greatest power and we are going to have more electric. I said to some of the guys coming in, they wanted to hook up to the grid.
Multiple times, Trump says “electric” instead of “electricity.” The grid instead of building your own gas or coal-fired power plants right next to your AI or data center or whatever business needs a lot power, even crypto.
Trump: Take everything we have and double it. And actually, the number — that was even low, you need more than that. And to do that you’d have to hook up to an old grid, in many cases broken and certainly open to destruction from bombs and planes and from, frankly, storms. You see what happened, that horrible situation in Texas.
Planes, Trains and Automobiles. The power grid is susceptible to terrorism. Planes taking out an electricity grid. Were the bombs dropped from the planes, or by a suicide bomber, or Ted Kaczynski?
Trump goes on babbling about businesses building their own power plants, calling the business an “electric plant,” not the power plants itself. Then he also calls them “electric business.”
Trump: Well, we just started, but we’re going to actually end up doing more than them and it’s going to be done privately and you’re going to own your own electric plants and they’ll be powered by maybe nuclear, maybe gas, maybe coal. You know, we brought coal back in. They won’t be powered by wind because it doesn’t work. I hate to say it just doesn’t work. It’s rather intermittent. You don’t want it, causes a lot of problems.
Trump is hell bent on building polluting power plants because he doesn’t like the wind farm he can see from one of his golf courses in Scotland. That’s the problem for Trump. They put wind farms where there is nearly constant wind. But, Donald just loves his “clean beautiful coal.” He it goes on forever about the advantages of building your own power plant.
Trump: These are friends, these are warriors, they just passed the Great, Big, Beautiful — I added the word great, so I like to say, because it was really supposed to be Great, Big, Beautiful — they call it the Big, Beautiful, but I had great — they took the word great out. I was on a show called Deface the Nation, or something like that.
He goes on about his great accomplishment on Face the Nation of coming up with the name of the bill, while never finishing the phrase and saying the word “bill.”
Trump: You know, you have a 10-year period, last time we had a one year period, now we have a 10-year period. And that’s what made the first one.
Absolute total gibberish.
Trump: And the biggest thing, and the biggest reason for the success was the deduction. You’re allowed to do it, and this time, we’re including structure, so you’re able to deduct those big structures that you’re building.
Structure out of infrastructure? No, he’s talking about buildings or manufacturing plants or whatever houses a business. Great to have that deduction. Then he goes on to talk about Rand Paul, calling him Rand Paul Jr because he voted against the bill. Then he talks about other people that voted against the bill, but he doesn’t want to mention their names. He probably doesn’t remember. He starts talking about artificial intelligence and then gets lost.
Trump: And we are way ahead of China, I have to say, we’re way ahead of China and the plants are starting up, the construction is starting up. And did you notice that two days ago they announced that they had a budget surplus of $25 billion in this country. Right, Howard? They never saw anything like that. Everyone’s saying where did that — that’s been like decades, $25 billion and that’s peanuts compared to what’s it’s — and it’s good business practices.
He wanted to say that the tariffs that Americans are paying allowed a budget surplus to happen. “They” announced “they” had. Still more gibberish. Then he goes on about tariffs and how happy countries are and he likes Indonesia and India not so much. Then about China.
Trump: And one of the advantages they have is they show the electric, that they have it. They’re opening up coal-fired power plants all over the place and we’re entitled and allowed now to do that too. We took coal, it was taken out of the chain and coal is actually very, very powerful — I say you’re not allowed to call it coal. You have to call it clean, beautiful coal. You’re not allowed, John, to call it just coal because people don’t understand. We call it clean, beautiful coal.
I call it dirty coal because it always will be. EPA’s Lee Zeldin is going to give coal-fired power plants a pass on smokestack emissions. There are ways to cut them down, but that costs money and that gets in the way of businesses. China is building coal-fired power plants at a prodigious speed, so we’ve got to build to close the coal gap, and make climate change worse. And this type of pollution makes AI possible.
Trump: And as I said before, it’s an expression I used all during the campaign and screamed it out. We’ll drill baby drill. And people went crazy. We had big crowds, as you probably heard, biggest ever, biggest in history.
No change in Donald. Crowd size is his biggest achievement, but it’s really not. People applauded the “drill baby drill” only because it was something Biden was preventing. They, for some reason, loved anything that put Biden in a bad light. Trump’s propaganda worked then. It’s not working so well now.
Trump: It’s a green new scam, greatest scam in history, the greatest in history. Well, the autopen, I think, is a bigger scam if you want to know the truth. Actually, I believe that. Today we’re pleased to report that a $15 billion investment…
No transitions at all. Scam, autopen and then investment. How do people follow him along and then applaud their own stupidity?
Trump: And on day one, I ended the green new scam. I also ended Biden’s war on clean, beautiful Pennsylvania coal, totally ended it. Coal has equal if not greater status. It’s very powerful — it’s a powerful thing, coal. China — it’s sort of interesting. China makes windmills, but how many wind farms do you see in China? I haven’t seen any lately, it’s sort of crazy.
How many times can he say coal in a single sentence? It’s like he’s going for a record. But coal is powerful. Because coal is powerful, coal is good. If it’s powerful, Trump loves it, because he is so weak. We also make wind turbines in America. You just canceled all the incentives for manufacturers to make them. You’re forcing us back onto fossil fuel dependency.
Trump: I signed historic executive orders to expedite the construction of brand new nuclear power plants, which is very hot.
Yeah, Donald, nuclear power plants are hot. That’s how they make steam to run turbines to make electricity. If they weren’t hot, they wouldn’t work. Dork.
Trump talks about Westinghouse being the new Westinghouse, and they’re going to build 10 new nuclear power plants, because there won’t be any regulations to stop them from making stupid design changes. Then Trump brings up a reporter named Salena Zito, because he’s supposedly going to do an interview with her after the summit.
Trump: Let me to the interview after this this way. Be right on time. Where is Selena?
McCormick: She’s up here.
Trump: Oh, she’s great. You can’t be angry with me, now, Selena, because I’ll be with you.
Right next to him on the dais, but he doesn’t know she’s there, or he doesn’t know what she looks like. Except he was most likely introduced to everybody before they sat down. Nope. No excuses.
He talks about Nippon and US Steel and how Nippon is going to invest a billion dollars and they won’t put it on a boat and take it away. Then he talks about the Mon Valley Works.
Trump: And we did keep a golden share. You know who has the golden share? I do. I have the golden — does everybody know what a golden share? A lot of these people from the Middle East, they don’t have to worry about golden shares, but we have a golden share, but Nippon’s going to do a fantastic job.
All that glitters Is not gold, except if you’re Donald Trump. For him, everything has to be gold. The Oval Office, the FIFA trophy, the bathroom fixtures. He never does explain what a golden share is. It gives you unique voting rights over a company’s action. So nice of Donald to let us know that, not.
Trump: I think we have a true golden age for America. We’ve been showing it and it truly is the hottest country anywhere in the world.
Again, with the golden. And the weather is hot across the United States right now. It’s summer. But he talks about the United States like it was a woman. And you know what he does to women. That’s what’s happening to us.
Trump: So enjoy yourselves. And I look forward to hearing from some of your geniuses speak, if that’s okay. I’ll stay around. All right. Okay. Thank you.
He’s already forgotten about the two interviews he had scheduled after speaking at the summit. It’s like at the FIFA Cup team celebration, they just couldn’t get rid of him trying to steal the limelight.
Then, the other speakers, speak about as long as Trump did all by himself.
So, he had to get in the last word.
Trump: So, it’s an honor to be with you. I used to do what a lot of you guys did. I like this better though. I don’t care. [laughter] …So, good luck to everybody, and if I can help you, let me know. Thank you very much.
The man couldn’t remember the university he went to. Made up Dr. John Trump conversations, the Unabomber was smarter than the whole class in the wrong place at the wrong time. The beautiful coal that’s going to kill us. Everything is golden and the crowds are always big.
Do I need to say that Donald is short in the brains department? These lapses in understanding reality show up more everyday. This is worse than the impromptu press gaggles where he has to shift gear with each question. Here, his mind does it automatically, but without reason. It was not supposed to do anything with politics. But he couldn’t pass up talking about the autopen. He couldn’t pass up calling renewable power the green new scam.
