Donald Trump's uncle is the scientist who examined Nikola Tesla's secret research after it was seized by the US government.
When Tesla died in 1943 his research was seized by the Department of Justice Alien Property Custodian Office, even though he was a US citizen.
John Trump was an electrical engineer, inventor, and physicist who was tasked with assessing Tesla’s work and reporting his findings to the FBI.
“I had an uncle went to MIT who is a top professor. Dr. John Trump. A genius. It’s in my blood,” Donald Trump said.
John Trump “would tell me many years ago about the power of weapons someday, that the destructive force of these weapons would be so massive, that it’s going to be a scary world.”
Declassified FBI documents show Tesla was working on an invention "whereby an impenetrable ‘wall of force’ can be erected around the United States’ borders which would render helpless any military attack”
According to a 1940 article in the New York Times “[Tesla] stands ready to divulge to the United States government the secret of his ‘teleforce,’ of which he said, ‘aeroplane motors would be melted at a distance of 250 miles, so that an invisible “Chinese Wall of Defence” would be built around the country against any enemy attack by an enemy air force, no matter how large. ’This ‘teleforce’ is based on an entirely new principle of physics, that ‘no one has ever dreamed about,’ different from the principles embodied in the in his inventions relating to the transmission of electrical power from a distance, for which he has received a number of basic patents.”
Tesla's wall of force has drawn comparisons with Donald Trump's proposed wall along the Mexican border.
However, according to John Trump much of Tesla's work in his later life was speculative or philosophical in nature.