If you’re going to tell silly braggy lies about yourself and your relatives, at least don’t include details that make the fictionality obvious.

On Tuesday, Trump conjured an especially odd imaginary tale – that linked his uncle with the late terrorist Theodore “Ted” Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber.

Trump was speaking at a Pennsylvania event about energy and innovation when he said he had to “brag just for a second” about his uncle’s intelligence. After wrongly saying his uncle was “the longest-serving professor in the history of MIT” (he was one of the longest-serving but not the very longest) and wrongly saying his uncle’s three university degrees were “in nuclear, chemical, and math” (two were in electrical engineering and one was in physics), the president claimed, “Kaczynski was one of his students.”

But of course he wasn’t, but before we get to that, let me just sigh heavily about that “having to” yammer about his uncle yet again when he’s done it before and been laughed at for doing it, and when it’s just a tedious windbag story of the kind that tedious windbags tell. I hate tedious windbaggery – guys (it’s always guys) who think they’re great story-tellers, and go into story-telling mode in the middle of what could have been a normal conversation. I’ve known a few, and they bring me out in a rash. Trump is like the Platonic essence of that guy.

(I think I’ve said all this before, in reaction to a similar Great Storyteller act of Trump’s from Season 1, so that makes me a bit of a tedious windbag too, but at least I’m not doing it live onstage.)

He went on to tell a story about having asked his uncle about what Kaczynski was like. “‘I said, ‘What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump. I said, ‘What kind of a student?’ And then 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.”

But that’s all horseshit.

First, the president’s uncle died in 1985. Kaczynski was publicly revealed as the Unabomber more than a decade later, in 1996, when he was captured; before that, he had lived as a recluse in the Montana wilderness. There is no apparent reason that Donald Trump would have been asking anyone about Kaczynski in 1985 or earlier.

Second, Kaczynski attended Harvard University and the University of Michigan, not MIT. 

Apart from that it’s all very plausible.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on the president’s tale.

Gee I wonder why.