Trump, Cornered on Epstein Files, Invents Personal Connection to the Unabomber

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Real trouble this week for Mr. Donald Trump! After literally years of demanding the release of all legal documents related to the late sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein because right-wing voters had become convinced they would implicate high-ranking Democrats and other elite conspirators, the president has decided not to release these documents, and his supporters are mad! (My guess is he’s not doing it because it would be a big administrative pain in the ass and the documents don’t reveal anything sensational that wasn’t already public, but hey … maybe it’s a cover-up!)

Prong No. 1 of Trump’s crisis-PR strategy on this front has been to call his voters idiots, as he did Wednesday morning with another very long post about the matter on his Truth Social site, in which he claimed that the Epstein story was a Democratic hoax:

… my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!

Prong No. 2? Casually mention during a speech in Pittsburgh that your uncle mentored the Unabomber:

“My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, longest-serving professor in the history of MIT, three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math. That’s a smart man. Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a mad man and a genius,” Trump said, adding that he asked his uncle what kind of student Kaczynski was.

“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,” Trump said.

A few small caveats here:

• Ted Kaczynski did not attend or take classes at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

• Trump’s uncle John, the MIT professor, died in 1985—11 years before the FBI determined that the Unabomber was a math Ph.D. named Ted Kaczynski.

That aside though, what a story! So true about the thin line between insanity and genius—also, sounds like the Unabomber’s first crime was mansplaining, am I right?

OK, having had our laughs about the 79-year-old president who definitely has a solid grasp of what’s going on—he also told reporters today that he believed Joe Biden made a mistake by appointing Jerome Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve, which cannot be true for the simple reason that Trump appointed Powell himself in 2018. Here is a bit of serious analysis: Some of Trump’s supporters have always been hardcore partisan Republicans, but some of them are people who weren’t previously politically engaged despite holding conspiratorial, vaguely right-wing beliefs about society being controlled from the shadows by powerful, sinister actors. These people, some of whom I met in Michigan in 2024, became ardent Republicans because Trump validated and encouraged them; he was simply the only politician who ever spoke their language, as it were. The former group—the partisans—might go along with his “Democratic hoax” talking point. But the latter? The ones who were drawn in by signals of support for their beliefs about QAnon and vaccine microchips? I’m not so sure!

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