President Donald Trump this week issued a “Make American History Great Again” Executive Order 911 at a press conference at the White House Rose Garden. The EO sets out Trump’s K-12 American history standards. “I’m declaring a total history emergency. It’s a five-alarm fire — so terrible, the worst.”

Trump explained the EO begins now, with a mandate to start with his history. It will highlight the president’s heroic, he calls it epic policy making. “Nobody has seen anything like my presidency. It’s been that good, so beautiful. So much better than Lincoln. I didn’t start a war with my fellow citizens. Who does that? Lincoln did that.” Trump added, “Everybody’s talking about my presidency. They tell me it’s history like no one has ever lived before. Bigger than the Great Depression. So much bigger.”

Though history is generally past or present, Trump’s EO version covers the future as well. He’s included facts that will happen. As he asserted, every nation on the planet is playing the “art of the deal” around his tariffs, threatened or otherwise, but “no one compares to me. These tariffs will change the nation. We’ll never be looted again. That’s my history. We won’t be anyone’s dumping ground. We’re going to leave dumping grounds where they belong, in Africa and Asia, especially Indonesia. I understand Indonesia is an excellent place for dumping. I’ll probably give Indonesia some slack on tariffs because of their excellent work as our dumping ground. That’s the new history.”

An Associated Press reporter asked the president whether he considered the effect of our history on other countries such as Vietnam when he set up his history-making standards. “I don’t see why, at all,” the president answered. “Vietnam went communist. They didn’t respect us. The Vietnam war wasn’t even that long, only about 10 years. Afghanistan was so much longer. Vietnam took help from China and you know what I think of China. The Chinese make it their business to get into everyone else’s business. Even now, they’re all over Panama. And that’s not right because we built the canal. Jimmy Carter, a horrible president, should’ve never given away our canal. He just gave it away and they took it. We built it and he gave it away. Unbelievable. It was unbelievable. And now they want Greenland? I heard from someone they want Greenland. That’s a non-starter, by the way.”

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A New York Times reporter asked about the historical basis for diversity, equity and inclusion programs and whether DEI ideas are in the history standards. “DEI is the worst thing that ever happened to America,” Trump argued. “Some say the war of aggression against the South was the worst thing, but I don’t think so. That’s where the people in our radical, some say red or at least pinko, universities get it wrong and that’s why my standards are so excellent.”

Trump elaborated, “The war of aggression against the South should’ve never happened. Slavery was doing good things for the country, right? Cheap products for the North, so what was their beef? The South just wanted their rights. So many were killed in that war. So many good Americans. Not so much in my family because we weren’t here yet, but in so many other families. I would’ve worked with the South. Some sort of compensation. Release and rehire. For the North, tariffs, there’s always tariffs. I would’ve saved so many lives, so many precious, beautiful lives.”  

A reporter from National Public Radio stood up thinking Trump called on her. When she started to ask her question, Trump brushed her off. “I didn’t call on you,” he said. “It’s the White guy next to you.”

“I’m from Breitbart News,” the reporter said, “and we thought it was very important that you called out the riots of the 1960s in Black cities as race riots. How did you come to that conclusion?”

Trump put his hand over his heart. “When I was young, I looked out my bedroom window in Queens and saw that smoke from Harlem. It floated over the river. I watched Watts burn up the next summer. Both times there was so much fire. It almost made me cry to see those buildings in flames. It marked me. You know how much I love buildings. And there was so much violence. Even Martin Luther King, who was a very great man, even Martin Luther King talked about that rioting. He must’ve spoken about it at least once or twice. And you know, Martin and I do have many things in common. He was assassinated and someone tried to assassinate me. Thank God I lived. But you don’t get over that. You never get over it.”

A journalist with Reuters asked if there was some event or person in history that historians get consistently wrong. “Custer. They get Custer wrong. They say it was Custer’s last stand at the Little Bighorn, but it was just the beginning. Look where we are now. Custer won in the end. That’s the real American history. I’m thinking about making a Custer holiday. That’s how we make our history great again.”

Paula Noonan owns Colorado Capitol Watch, the state’s premier legislature tracking platform.