White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt belittled a reporter during a July 17 press briefing as she struggled to defend a blatant lie President Donald Trump told at an event in Pennsylvania two days earlier.
In fact, she wasn’t able to, so she basically ignored the question.
Here’s what happened. Trump spoke at the “Inaugural Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Event” at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh on July 15, where he told a weird tale about late terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber, and his uncle John Trump, a professor of engineering at the distinguished Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or MIT.
Before launching into the bizarre story about his uncle, who died in 1985, and the Unabomber, Trump said he had “to brag just for a second” about his uncle’s intelligence, according to CNN. He called John Trump “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT,” but he wasn’t.
He also got his uncle’s degrees wrong, saying they were “in nuclear, chemical, and math,” but they weren’t. Two were in electrical engineering, and the other was in physics. And then he claimed Kaczynski was one of his students.
“‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then he said, ‘Seriously, good.’ He said, ‘He’d correct – he’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”
Kaczynski made bombs and delivered them to random targets over a 17-year period starting in 1978 until he was caught in 1996. During that time, he terrorized Americans, killed three people and injured many more.
So, was the president having a mental lapse or an impaired cognitive moment? Because the story is completely false. John Trump died more than a decade before Kaczynski was caught, and Kaczynski was never a student at MIT.
And that’s why a reporter for The Independent, Andrew Feinberg, asked about Trump’s strange tale at Thursday’s White House press briefing, pointing out the very discrepancies just mentioned.
Maybe Leavitt was trying to buy time initially as she danced around the question.
“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, but I’m willing to give you an answer, nevertheless,” she lectured him.
She ignored his question because, after all, it’s a bit difficult to explain Trump’s frequent falsehoods and embellishments.
The president’s uncle did, in fact, teach at MIT. He was a very intelligent professor. The president’s very proud of his family. In fact, the president has a letter from his uncle on the MIT letterhead that sits in the Oval Office dining room,” Leavitt continued.
“Maybe he will let you see it sometime,” she taunted.
Critics called Leavitt for deflecting and avoiding answering the question.
“Bullshit Barbie dodging questions again,” one critic wrote on X. “Karoline just dismisses the question on how the timeline doesn’t match up w/Ted attending MIT that trumps uncle was a professor at. Not to mention Ted and attended Harvard so that in itself is a question mark❓No one was disputing that his uncle was a professor at MIT,” another person wrote.
