Earlier this week, President Donald Trump told a story that, even for the least honest president in American history, was notable.

During an energy and technology summit in Pittsburgh, Trump claimed that his uncle John Trump, a former professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, taught the Unabomber, Ted Kaczynski. “My uncle was at MIT, one of the great professors,” Trump said. “Fifty-one years, whatever. Longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical and math. That’s a smart man.”

Though Trump has claimed for years that his deceased uncle is the longest-serving professor at MIT, it’s not true, and it has been repeatedly debunked. But Trump was only getting started. Kaczynski was one of his uncle’s students, Trump said. He then asked the audience, “Do you know who Kaczynski was?” and cryptically noted, “There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius.”

According to the president, he once had a conversation with John Trump about Kaczynski: “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John?’ Dr. John Trump,” Trump asked. “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.”

This is an interesting story, but what is most notable about the president’s digression is that none of it was true.

First, Kaczynski attended Harvard, not MIT, so it would be unusual, though not impossible, that this uncle would come in contact with the...

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