Confused Trump, 80, Asks Professor ‘Did You Know My Uncle?’

Politics admin June 22, 2026 0 Comments

Confused Trump, 80, Asks Professor ‘Did You Know My Uncle?’

President Donald Trump had an awkward interaction when he randomly asked an internationally renowned physicist if he happened to know his uncle during a bizarre exchange in the Oval Office.

The president, 80, had gathered administration officials, scientists and tech company leaders in the Oval Office to sign two executive orders related to the government prioritizing quantum technology.

Among those in attendance was Nobel prize-winning physicist and professor John Martinis. The professor jointly won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2025 for the groundbreaking research that was originally published in a 1985 paper.

First, the president awkwardly asked Martinis if he should share how long ago it was, to which the professor said with a smile, “about 40 years ago.”

The president responded that it was “pretty good” and then admitted “I’ve been waiting for one of them too,” referring to the Nobel Peace Prize he has long coveted, before complaining “they don’t think eight wars is enough” and claiming bizarrely that “even though nobody’s ever done one.”

But moments later, the president’s interaction with Martinis took an even stranger turn.

The president, who remained seated at his desk, had been talking about oil and the Strait of Hormuz, when he suddenly turned back to the professor standing over his shoulder with a completely unrelated inquiry.

“Did you know of my uncle at all?” Trump asked, sounding exhausted.

Martinis turned to his right in confusion, as if to see who the president was suddenly speaking to, but Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was standing right next to him, gestured back, indicating that Trump was asking Martinis the question.

“No, no,” Martinis said with a smile.

“You didn’t?” Trump repeated, to which Martinis responded, “No, sorry,” as those around them laughed.

Martinis awkwardly joked about how the University of California, Berkeley, which was where he received his doctorate and conducted research, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where Trump’s uncle was a professor, were on opposite coasts of the U.S.

Trump looked like he was about to respond for a moment, but then he changed his mind and called on Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick to speak instead.

The president has repeatedly boasted for years, often in exaggerated or completely inaccurate terms, about having a brilliant uncle, John Trump, who was a professor at MIT.

While the elder Trump was an MIT professor, he taught electrical engineering and was not a physicist like Martinis. Professor Trump also died in 1985, the same year Martinis’ original joint paper, which eventually earned him the Nobel Prize, was published while he was a student at Berkeley.

The obsession with his uncle has repeatedly surfaced in Trump’s public appearances, including when speaking about—bizarrely—the Unabomber. In July 2025, he told a long and rambling story claiming that Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski had been one of his uncle’s students.

“Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius,” Trump added. The president then told an impossible-to-believe anecdote about a conversation he claims he had with his uncle: “I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. He said, ‘What kind of a student? ‘Man,’ he said, ‘seriously good … He’d go around correcting everybody.’ But it didn’t work out too well for him.”

The alleged conversation would had to have occurred years before the public even knew Kaczynski was responsible for the bombings, which killed three people and injured 23 others between 1978 and 1995. Kaczynski was arrested by the FBI in April 1996. He pleaded guilty in January 1998.

Furthermore, Kaczynski didn’t attend MIT. He studied at Harvard and the University of Michigan and later took on an assistant professor role at the University of California at Berkeley.