Karoline Leavitt Insults Reporter, Then Shamelessly Dodges Question About Trump’s Incomprehensible Unabomber Theory

President Donald Trump recently made an impossible claim about the Unabomber, and when White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked about it, she responded by insulting the reporter and completely dodging the question.

During his remarks at Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh Tuesday, Trump claimed that his uncle, John Trump, who taught at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had Theodore Kaczynski as a student.

Kaczynski was nicknamed the “Unabomber” by the media during his decades-long spree of domestic terrorism, sending mail bombs that killed three people and wounded 23 others between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski mailed a 30,000 word “manifesto,” criticizing modern technology and the destruction to the environment that it caused, to media outlets in 1995, helping lead to his arrest the following year. He pled guilty to all charges against him to avoid the death penalty, and died in 2023 after he hanged himself in his cell while serving multiple life sentences.

At the event in Pittsburgh, Trump brought up his professor uncle and made the remarkable claim that he was connected to Kaczynski:

I have to brag just for a second 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. 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.

But Kaczynski, I said, “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr. John Trump?” He 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. Didn’t work out too well. But it’s interesting in life.

Trump made several significant incorrect claims in the above-quoted comments.

For starters, Kaczynski did not attend MIT and therefore was not a student of Dr. Trump’s. By all accounts, Kaczynski was extremely intelligent and was regarded as a “seriously good” student — graduating high school at 15, attending Harvard and the University of Michigan, and later working as a mathematics professor at Michigan and then the University of California, Berkeley — but he had no known connection to MIT.

Furthermore, the timeline does not work at all. Dr. Trump died in 1985, when the Unabomber’s identity was still very much unknown. It wasn’t until his manifesto was released in 1995 that even Kaczynski’s family began to suspect he might be responsible.

Trump was also wrong about his uncle being the longest-serving professor at MIT, an error he has made before.

John Trump earned his doctorate of electrical engineering in 1933 from MIT, and stayed there as a research associate before being hired as an assistant professor of electrical engineering in 1936. He was promoted to professor in 1952 and retired in 1973, after hitting the mandatory retirement age of 65 that MIT enforced at the time, and continued to work as a senior lecturer/professor emeritus until he died.

An MIT spokesperson confirmed the dates to Newsweek in January 2024. Dr. Trump held the title of professor or professor emeritus for 49 years, and was a staff member at MIT for 52 years, but that does not make him the longest-serving professor at the university.

“From the records we’ve kept since 1990, we do know that at least 10 people have been (or continue to be) professors at MIT for at least 53 years, so although Prof. Trump would not be the longest-serving faculty member in the history of MIT, he was certainly a valued member of the community for many decades and among the longest-serving faculty,” the spokesperson told Newsweek, which separately found at least two professors with longer tenure than John Trump.

There is one more minor inaccuracy; Trump claimed his uncle earned “three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math.” Dr. Trump never got a degree in any of those fields. He had a B.S. in electrical engineering, an M.S. in physics, and then a doctorate in electrical engineering.

All that being established, Andrew Feinberg, the White House correspondent for The Independent, asked Leavitt during Thursday’s press briefing about Trump’s “impossible story” — and got an insult, a response that didn’t answer the question, and a dodge.

“So on Tuesday, the president told a very detailed story about his uncle, noted scientist John Trump and Theodore Kaczynski, the late Unabomber,” said Feinberg. “He said that Dr. Trump taught Ted Kaczynski, Ted Kaczynski was not identified as the Unabomber until 1996, 11 years after John Trump passed away. It would have been impossible for John Trump to have ever discussed the Unabomber with the president. So what was he talking about? And I have one follow up –”

“Andrew, with so many issues going on in the world, I’m a little bit surprised you would ask such a question, although I’m not sometimes, coming from you, I will say,” scolded Leavitt, “but I’m willing to give you an answer, nevertheless.”

Leavitt then said the following words, none of which addressed Feinberg’s question about the president making a claim about his uncle and the Unabomber that was “impossible”:

The president’s uncle did in fact teach at MIT. He was a very intelligent professor. The president is very proud of his family. In fact, I have a or rather 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.

To give the president and his loyal press secretary the benefit of the doubt, there may yet be one possibility that Feinberg did not consider. If Trump wants to insist that his uncle knew the Unabomber, then that leads to some new questions.

Both MIT and Harvard are in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with their campuses only about a mile apart. Kaczynski attended college during the period that Dr. Trump was a professor at MIT and already renowned worldwide for his research on cancer treatment devices. It’s theoretically possible a bright young Harvard student would be aware of a famous professor at the university down the road and might want to meet him and seek to be mentored or tutored by him.

But this would be perhaps more disturbing than the president having problems with his memory or telling the truth: it would suggest that Dr. John Trump conspired with a deadly domestic terrorist.

When Dr. Trump died in February 1985, not only was Kaczynski’s identity as the Unabomber not publicly known, he had not sent a bomb in almost three years. The majority of his bombs — including all of the fatal ones and the ones that caused the most devastating injuries — were sent after Dr. Trump’s death.

For Dr. Trump to know who Kaczynski was in 1985 would mean that he helped conceal the identity of a domestic terrorist who would go on to murder three people, a secret that federal investigators would not discover for more than a decade.

Realistically speaking, of course, Dr. Trump did not meet Kaczynski, much less tutor him, so this is all just entertainingly unhinged pondering.

But if the president is going to insist on making these inherently ridiculous claims about his uncle, then reporters should match absurdity with absurdity and demand that he answer what his uncle knew about Kaczynski and when did he know it, and why didn’t he stop this mad bomber before he killed anyone? 

Watch the clip above via CNN.

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.