Kathrine Frich
This is hardly the first time the president has stretched the truth about his uncle.
Family stories have a funny way of growing taller over the years.
What starts as a proud memory around the dinner table can easily morph into a grand legend.
When you repeat that tale in front of live television cameras, however, millions of strangers are ready to check the history books.
A bold family boast
Donald Trump ran into a swift online reality check on Saturday after bragging about his family tree, the Irish Star reported.
Speaking beside first lady Melania Trump after casting an early ballot in Florida for the 2026 midterm elections, the 80-year-old president claimed his late uncle, Dr. John G. Trump, had “invented radar.”
While discussing US military strikes in Iran, the president connected the operation directly to his relative.
“They’ve knocked out all of the, actually some of the things that my uncle invented My uncle invented radar, can you believe it?” Trump told reporters, according to the Irish Star.
“From MIT, Dr. John Trump. I mean he’ll probably be angry at me but I knocked out their radar, I knocked out all of their different things,” he added.
Independent journalist Aaron Rupar posted the video clip on X, where users quickly flagged it under the platform’s Community Notes system.
That crowdsourced tool states that “Readers added context they thought people might want to know” whenever enough users from different viewpoints agree a post needs correction.
History says otherwise
Underneath Rupar’s video, the added warning was blunt. “Donald Trump’s uncle did not invent radar. The ‘first practical radar system’ was patented by Sir Robert Watson-Watt, who built on the work of others such as Heinrich Hertz and Christian Huelsmeyer,” the note read.
A second flagged clip explained that while John G. Trump helped develop and deploy World War II radar at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), earlier scientists actually created the technology.
This is hardly the first time the president has stretched the truth about his uncle’s decades teaching engineering at MIT, the Irish Star noted.
Last year at a Pennsylvania energy event, Trump claimed that domestic terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, known as the Unabomber, studied under his relative. “Kaczynski was one of his students,” Trump said then, recalling how he had asked his uncle about him.
That timeline fell apart quickly. John Trump died in 1985, whereas authorities only unmasked and arrested Kaczynski in 1996 after years hiding in Montana.
Furthermore, Kaczynski studied at Harvard University and the University of Michigan, prompting an MIT spokesperson to state: “We have no enrollment record or information that Ted Kaczynski ever attended MIT.”
