Earlier this week, President Donald Trump told a story that, even for the least honest president in American history, was notable.
During an energy and technology summit in Pittsburgh, Trump claimed that his uncle John Trump, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. “My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors,” Trump said. “Fifty-one years, whatever. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. That’s a smart man.”
What is most notable about the president’s digression is that none of it was true.
Though Trump has claimed for years that his deceased uncle is the longest-serving professor at MIT, it’s not true, and it has been repeatedly debunked. But Trump was only getting started. Kaczynski was one of his uncle’s students, Trump said. He then asked the audience, “Do you know who Kaczynski was?” and cryptically noted, “There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius.”
According to the president, he once had a conversation with John Trump about Kaczynski: “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump,” Trump asked. “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.”
This is an interesting story, but what is most notable about the president’s digression is that none of it was true.
First, Kaczynski attended Harvard, not MIT, so it would be unusual, though not impossible, that this uncle would come in contact with the future Unabomber. (Students at both schools do cross-enroll on occasion, though NBC News reported the courses Kaczynski took were taught at Harvard, not MIT.)
Second, John Trump passed away in 1985. Kaczynski committed bombings that killed three people and wounded nearly two dozen others from 1978 to 1995. He was finally arrested in 1996 and sentenced to life in prison in 1998. If both the president and his uncle knew that Kaczynski was the Unabomber more than a decade before his arrest … now that would be a story!
Asked about Trump’s making up this story, White House press secretary Katherine Leavitt admonished and deflected. “That with so many issues going on in the world, I’m a little bit surprised you would ask such a question,” said Leavitt.
Trump’s Unabomber tale is yet another example of the what can feel like an increasing disconnect from reality. Yet, as with so many of Trump’s recent and unsettling statements, too many in the mainstream media seem uninterested in covering the story. Trump’s Unabomber story has received scant coverage, despite reflecting a repeated pattern of confused and exaggerated statements.
For example, the day after his bizarre digression in Pittsburgh, Trump complained once again about Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell and publicly stated, “I was surprised he was appointed.”
The person who appointed Powell was Donald Trump in 2017.
On Monday, at a White House Faith Office summit, he called Powell “a knucklehead” and a “stupid guy,” derided the intelligence of other politicians, including his former energy secretary Rick Perry, and said former President Joe Biden “wasn’t faithful enough and sought to persecute religious leaders.”
At the same gathering, Trump asserted that gas prices have “gone to the lowest level in decades. You’re seeing $1.99, $1.98, I saw $1.95 at certain states.”
Trump has made this claim repeatedly — two weeks ago and several times in April. In fact, the average national gas price has never fallen below $3 a gallon since Trump took office in January, and it is currently around $3.16.
Trump also appears at times to have very little idea of what’s happening within his own administration.
Trump’s Unabomber tale is yet another example of the president’s increasing disconnect from reality.
In the run-up to passage of his massive tax and spending bill, he repeatedly claimed that it would eliminate taxes on Social Security — a claim that massively exaggerates the impact of the bill. Of even greater concern is a story that received almost no attention. NOTUS reported that, only days before the legislation was signed into law, Trump told House Republicans that if the party wants to win elections, it shouldn’t cut Medicaid, Medicare and Social Security. According to three sources, one GOP member had to tell Trump, “But we’re touching Medicaid in this bill.”
Additionally, Trump made an exceedingly odd comment when asked why his administration had paused military aid shipments to Ukraine, going so far as to ask a reporter whether she knew who had ordered the halt. One might conclude from this compendium of stories that America is in the midst of a governing crisis. The president of the United States is making up stories, repeatedly making false claims and attacking other public officials. Yet there’s been little reporting connecting these incidents. What makes this lack of attention even more ironic is that it was just under three months ago at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner that Axios reporter Alex Thompson was given the Aldo Beckman Award for Overall Excellence, in recognition of his “aggressive reporting on President Biden” that “revealed the President’s cognitive decline was impacting his ability to do his job, information the White House tried to conceal.” Thompson, along with CNN anchor Jake Tapper, wrote a bestselling book that further explored the president’s alleged decline and the White House’s attempt to conceal his impairment. In receiving this honor, Thompson upbraided himself and his fellow reporters for dropping the ball on the Biden story. “President Biden’s decline and its cover-up by the people around him is a reminder that every White House, regardless of party, is capable of deception. But being truth-tellers also means telling the truth about ourselves. We, myself included, missed a lot of this story, and some people trust us less because of it. We bear some responsibility for faith in the media being at such lows.” Yet, right now, as we speak, the president of the United States is showing substantial, arguably greater public evidence of possible cognitive decline. Trump at times is unaware of what is happening inside his administration, can seem clueless about major policy events, and doesn’t always appear to understand the very legislation that he is promoting. One can certainly debate the extent to which Biden was truly experiencing cognitive decline. But if reporters are going to argue that the media dropped the ball in not giving that story greater coverage, then how does one explain not even talking about what is happening right now? To quote Thompson, where are the truth-tellers about the current occupant of the White House?
Michael A. Cohen is a political writer and a fellow with the Eurasia Group Foundation. 
