Trump launched into a completely bungled rant about the Civil War, noting that Jackson hated the war and would’ve concocted a solution had he still been president. In other words, Trump seemed to think Jackson was still alive during the war, or perhaps had died just before it began — and furthermore that it was a war Jackson apparently opposed.

“I mean, had Andrew Jackson been a little later, you wouldn’t have had the Civil War,” Trump said, “He was really angry that he saw what was happening with regard to the Civil War.” In the real world, Jackson died in 1845 — almost 16 years before Confederate artillery under Brig. Gen. P.G.T. Beauregard opened fire on Fort Sumter.

In an effort to reverse-engineer Trump’s ignorance, loyalists have correctly noted that the existential debate that led to the war went on throughout the first half of the 19th century. But Trump was much more specific, citing the war by name. He wasn’t talking about the debate over slavery, otherwise he would have said “the debate over slavery.” Trump was talking about the war itself, Jackson was long dead before secession fever ignited after the 1860 election, rapidly disintegrating into unprecedented carnage. It’s almost like saying that Franklin D. Roosevelt hated the Vietnam War, or that Richard Nixon opposed the Iraq invasion.

Case closed. Trump knows nothing, right?

But wait, there’s more. Trump went on to claim that Jackson had said, “There’s no reason for this” — “this” apparently meaning the Civil War. Um, no. Andrew Jackson never examined the circumstances of the Civil War because, to repeat, he was dead.

“People don’t realize,” Trump continued, “you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out?”

To make matters worse, Jackson was a slave-owning Southerner with absolutely zero interest in the rights of African-Americans. If Jackson, per Trump, had said, “There’s no reason for this,” it was probably because, by the time he was inaugurated, he owned 150 people, including women and children.

Not to bury the lede here, but Andrew Jackson did something Trump openly dreams of doing: He defied the Constitution by overruling a decision of the Supreme Court. The result was the forced removal of the Cherokee people from their ancestral lands in Georgia, a notorious act of genocide committed with total impunity.