Donald Trump appeared not to recall having been the president who first appointed Federal Reserve Board of Governors Chair Jerome Powell to the position he has held since 2018 — the second year of Trump’s first term.
Trump, who has been flirting with the notion of firing the central bank boss over his failure to cut interest rates, was speaking during an Oval Office press opportunity alongside the Crown Prince and Prime Minister of Bahrain when he was asked whether he was seriously considering the move, as has been reported.
He replied with a derisive set of remarks in which he assailed Powell for not pushing the central bank’s board to cut interest rates, citing the European Central Bank’s multiple rate cuts in recent months, and accusing Powell of only having assented to cuts during last year’s election to benefit the Democratic candidate, former vice president Kamala Harris and calling him “a terrible Fed chair” before expressing surprise that he had been named to the position in the first place.
“I was surprised he was appointed,” Trump said.
In his next breath, the 79-year-old president possibly remembered that he was the one who nominated Powell to the job as a successor to Janet Yellen during his first term, and added that he had been surprised by Powell’s re-appointment to a second term by his successor and predecessor, President Joe Biden.
“I was surprised, frankly, that Biden put him in and extended him,” he said.
The president’s apparent gaffe came just one day after he delivered a rambling speech in Pittsburgh in which he claimed that his uncle, a noted physicist who helped develop radar systems during World War II, taught notorious terrorist Theodore Kaczynski at MIT, despite none of it having actually happened.
During his meandering remarks at Carnegie Mellon University, Trump invoked his late paternal uncle, Dr. John Trump, who he often describes as the “longest-serving professor” to ever teach at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, even though the noted physicist did not achieve that distinction despite teaching there for 37 years as a professor and another 12 as a senior lecturer after mandatory retirement. John Trump died in 1985.
President Trump called the late Dr. Trump, a pioneer in cancer research who was awarded the National Medal of Science by President Ronald Reagan in 1983, a “smart man,” citing his multiple scientific degrees, and claimed that one of his students was Kaczynski, a mathematics professor who became widely known as the Unabomber when he was arrested in 1996 for a decades-long string of letter bomb attacks on figures in higher education and other industries.
“Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There's very little difference between a madman and a genius,” he said.
Trump then claimed to have asked his uncle about the murderous ex-academic.
“What kind of a student was he Uncle John? He said: “What kind of a student — seriously, good ... he’d go around correcting everybody. But it didn't work out too well for him. Didn't work out too well, but it's interesting in life,” Trump said.
The crowd did not show much of a reaction to the story, and it was unclear if the president was confusing Kaczynski, who died in a federal prison in 2023, with someone else. But it’s highly unlikely if not impossible that any of what he said about his uncle and the notorious murderer was true.
Not only did Kaczynski — whose undergraduate degree was from Harvard and earned his Masters and Doctoral degrees in mathematics from the University of Michigan — never attend MIT, but even if the president’s uncle had crossed paths with the future terrorist, he could not have known that Kaczynski had been responsible for 16 bomb attacks between 1971 and 1995.
The University of California at Berkeley professor turned murderous recluse was one of the country’s most wanted fugitives until 1996, when his brother David Kaczynski, turned him in to the FBI after reading the now-infamous manifesto, Industrial Society and its Future, after The Washington Post published it at the recommendation of then-Attorney General Janet Reno and FBI Director Louis Freeh.
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