“Late Show” host Stephen Colbert on Wednesday said President Donald Trump’s event a day earlier “went off the rails pretty darn quick.”
Trump was supposed to discuss new investments in AI and energy, but then derailed himself with a long, strange ramble about his uncle, John Trump, who was a professor at MIT.
The president boasted that his uncle was “one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, longest-serving professor in the history of MIT, three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math.”
“Brace yourself,” Colbert warned his audience after playing the clip. “None of that was true.”
Trump’s uncle was not the longest-serving professor at MIT. He had one degree, not three, and it was in electrical engineering not “nuclear, chemical, and math.”
Trump also said his uncle taught Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber” terrorist who killed people via mail bombs. The president told a whole story about asking his uncle what kind of student Kaczynski was.
His uncle, Trump claimed, told him that the future Unabomber was “seriously good” and would correct the other students’ work.
“None of that is true either,” Colbert said.
Kaczynski went to Harvard, not MIT.
“Even more insane,” Colbert said, Trump’s uncle died more than a decade before Kaczynski was ID’ed and arrested.
“So why on Earth would Trump have asked his uncle about him?” Colbert wondered, then broke out his impression of the president to envision how it might have happened.
“Hey, Uncle John, Uncle Professor Dr. John Trump, professor, sir, uncle. You know that random guy who isn’t famous at all and lives in the woods and machines his own screws?” Colbert asked in his Trump voice. “What was it like when you didn’t teach him?”
See more in his Wednesday night monologue:
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