America has seldom had a president as enamored of the nation’s storied past as Donald Trump is, and never had a president as starkly ignorant of its actual past as Trump is, either.

Reopening Alcatraz. Making coal mining great again. Resurrecting our role as a colonial power, so that the only cross-border products we need come from lands we control. And reconstructing the world-class economy we enjoyed when our tariffs were highest, in the 1890s.

Where to begin? Doesn’t Trump realize how much coal miners hated their jobs, how unsafe and often deadly their work was, how often they went on strike, how violent their interactions with the mine owners were? Near the end of his nearly 40-year tenure as president of the United Mine Workers, John L. Lewis was asked about his program to mechanize many mining functions, even if that cost some members their jobs. "It will be a millennium," Lewis answered, "if men do not have to work underground, but can all work in God’s sunshine."

What was good about mining, and manufacturing more generally, was never the work itself; it was only the pay and benefits that unions won for their members between the 1930s and the 1970s, after which their compensation largely stagnated and their numbers declined. Trump envisions an America actually pining for that kind of work, even as he appoints officials at the Labor Department and the National Labor Relations Board devoted to weakening what’s left of the labor movement, even as factories are now so mechanized that they employ a small fraction of the workers they once employed.

So even the kind of economic autarky that Trump envisions wouldn’t bring back the manufacturing jobs by the millions he assumes it will, and won’t bring back good jobs at all in the deunionized America whose contours his acolytes shape.

Then there’s his broader equation of tariffs with economic prosperity, for which he adduces as proof the Gilded Age. "We were at our richest from 1870 to 1913," Trump said a few days after his second term began. "That’s when we were a tariff country."

That depends, of course, on who Trump means by "we." It’s true that it was in those years that the railroad, oil, steel, and banking industries were consolidated by a handful of moguls—Gould, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Morgan—whose towering share of the entire nation’s economy was unrivaled until the coming of the current generation of tech oligarchs. Both groups were singularly focused on amassing personal wealth, through worker suppression, monopoly control of markets, and tax avoidance. Trump puts the apex of Gilded Age prosperity in the 1890s, as that was the decade of our highest-ever tariffs. But the 1890s were also the decade of the deepest depression in our history, save only that of the 1930s. And in the 1890s, no New Deal legislation came along to provide work and sustenance to a heavily unemployed working class. For which reason, the 1890s saw more deaths from poverty than any decade in American history.

Trump’s romance with tariffs may be rooted more in self-interest than is commonly realized. By dating the end of his imagined great prosperity to 1913, he was signaling that that was the year of the 16th Amendment of the Constitution, which legalized the income tax. "And then they went to an income tax concept," Trump said. "But it would have been very much better" to have stayed with tariffs to fund the government. Of course, one reason the nation went to an income tax was its fury and revulsion at the power the Rockefellers, Morgans, and their silk-clad ilk exerted over the public’s business.

Trump’s rose-colored view of America’s past pays no heed to pervasive poverty, sweatshop work, child labor, short lifespans, and the political revolts, both populist and progressive, that brought the Gilded Age to an unceremonious if incomplete end. It pays considerable heed to the lifestyles of the age’s rich and sometimes felonious, which he’s done his best to ape.

His fascination with shiny objects, so evident in his current gilding of White House walls and bric-a-brac, is one subset of his immersion in symbols of our past with which he can relate. It’s not just the shiny symbols. Alcatraz famously treated its inmates like shit; that’s what we need to recapture. Schmutz in the air was a sign of industrial prowess; we need more of it.

Doctrines are exhumed, provided they comport with Trump’s need to claim victory over humiliated losers. Seizing our neighbors’ land once made us powerful (never mind Ulysses Grant’s view of the Mexican War, in which he fought, as "one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger against a weaker nation"); it’s still good policy. Charging the rest of the world for entry into the American market—once a device to enable our fledgling domestic industries to flourish—now has become a way to make others bow before us, much as that Zelensky guy should have done in that Oval Office meeting.

Borne back ceaselessly into a past, misremembered and reconfigured to meet Trump’s insatiable needs.