White House struggles to defend Trump’s ‘Unabomber’ anecdote amid ridicule

Donald Trump was in Pennsylvania this week, speaking at an energy and innovation summit, when his comments veered off on an odd tangent.

“I have to brag just for a second,” the president said, before talking at some length about his uncle about having taught Ted Kaczynski — better known as “Unabomber” — while John Trump was a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

The president talked about a conversation he had with his uncle about Kaczynski, before concluding, “It didn’t work out too well for him, didn’t work out too well, but it’s an interesting life.”

The conversation he referenced couldn’t have happened — in part because John Trump died more than a decade before Kaczynski was caught and identified, and in part because Kaczynski was never a student at MIT.

While this was certainly not the first time the president had shared details of a conversation that never actually occurred, this latest example quickly sparked mockery — the ridicule on “The Daily Show” was especially pointed — and added to a list of recent incidents in which Trump appears to have had cognitive lapses.

It was against this backdrop that The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg asked White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt what in the world the president was talking about.

After admonishing Feinberg for asking about an issue she deemed trivial, the president’s chief spokesperson added, “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 be sure, as Trump White House controversies go, this doesn’t move the needle much on the scandal-o-meter, but there are a few relevant angles to this.

First, Leavitt might’ve dismissed the line of inquiry as trifling, but given that Trump has recently invested time and attention in talking about his golf game and Coca-Cola’s ingredients, it’s tough to argue that the question was somehow out of line.

Second, Leavitt’s answer was completely disconnected from the question: No one has suggested that Trump’s uncle wasn’t an MIT professor. What made the president’s anecdote notable was that the conversation he claims to have had with his uncle about Kaczynski clearly could not have happened. The White House press secretary appeared to miss the point entirely.

But stepping back, I continue to think this story is emblematic of a larger conversation about the incumbent president’s mental acuity and the frequency with which Trump says and does things that raise relevant questions that deserve good answers.

As of this week, it appears the White House doesn’t yet have those answers.