Trump, 79, forgets who is with him on Pittsburgh trip and delivers rambling speech
Speaking at a Pennsylvania 'Energy and Innovation' event hosted by Senator Dave McCormick, Trump was delivering a characteristically weaving set of remarks about the permitting needed for power generation that will be required by artificial intelligence data centers when he admitted to the crowd he thought that AI was 'not [his] thing' when he first heard about it.
But it was some of the president's comments that drew attention. Trump claimed that his uncle, a noted physicist who helped develop radar systems during the Second World War, taught notorious future terrorist Theodore Kaczynski at MIT, despite none of it having actually happened. The 79-year-old president also forgot names and who was with him on the trip.
'I want to introduce Dan Meuser. Dan Meuser is here,' Trump said. 'Where's Dan?'
'They all stayed in Washington,' McCormick told the president.
'Oh, they're in Washington working on our next bill? Good,' a surprised Trump said.
U.S. President Donald Trump speaks during the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit, at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. There, he made several questionable statements. (REUTERS)
At one point, Trump invoked his late paternal uncle, Dr. John Trump, who he often describes as the 'longest-serving professor' to ever teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology even though the noted physicist did not achieve that distinction despite teaching there for 37 years as a professor and another 12 as a senior lecturer after mandatory retirement. John Trump died in 1985.
President Trump called the late Dr. Trump, a pioneer in cancer research who was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, a 'smart man,' citing his multiple scientific degrees, and claimed that one of his students was Theodore Kaczynski, a mathematics professor who became widely known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996 for a decades-long string of letter bomb attacks on figures in higher education and other industries.
'Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There's very little difference between a madman and a genius,' he said.
Trump then claimed to have asked his uncle about the murderous ex-academic.
'What kind of a student was he Uncle John? He said: 'What kind of a student — seriously, good ... 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 said.
The crowd did not show much of a reaction to the story, and it was unclear if the president was confusing Kaczynski, who died in a federal prison in 2023, with someone else. But it's highly unlikely if not impossible that any of what he said about his uncle and the notorious murder was true.
Not only did Kaczynski — whose undergraduate degree was from Harvard and earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Michigan — 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 1971 and 1995.
The University of California at Berkeley professor turned 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.
The White House did not immediately respond to a query from The Independent asking for clarification on how the events Trump described could have occurred.
Sen. Dave McCormick speaks with Trump at the Pittsburgh event. The president made several statements that are not supported by facts. (AFP via Getty Images)
At another point in his remarks, he seemed to have trouble remembering how to pronounce the name of a longtime aide, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Michael Kratsios.
Trump made the claim that he secured $16 trillion in investment in the U.S. economy - despite the total U.S. economy totalling just under $30 trillion.
As the program continued after he finished speaking, Trump appeared to be growing more and more somnolent as a succession of speakers droned on about various energy investments being made in the Keystone State.
Though his predecessor, former president Joe Biden, left the 2024 presidential race after a disastrous debate performance brought to the fore longstanding concerns about the then-80-year-old chief executive's age and capacity, Trump is now the oldest person to ever be sworn in as president at age 79 and will be nearly 83 when his second term ends in 2029.
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