Overview

• President Trump told a Pittsburgh summit audience that his late uncle, MIT professor John G. Trump, taught Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber.
• Institutional records confirm John G. Trump died in 1985, more than a decade before Kaczynski’s crimes began, and Kaczynski attended Harvard, not MIT.
• Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the president by pointing to a private MIT-letterhead document in the Oval Office and admonished reporters who challenged the story.
• Comedians and opinion writers have ridiculed the anecdote’s impossibility and linked it to a broader pattern of the president’s exaggerated or false statements.
• Commentators say the episode underscores mounting questions about President Trump’s mental acuity and the media’s role in fact-checking the administration.