But that isn’t the whole story either. While Trump’s myth-peddling might not tell us much about fighting terror, looking harder at what Pershing was really doing in the Philippines, and how the hamburger history Trump keeps using to rally his supporters got made, can tell us something more important about America, and what we might expect from our government in the months and years to come.

Start with Trump’s definition of terrorism, a word which—it should be clear by now—the president uses, and pretty much only uses, to mean violence committed by Muslims. But that word doesn’t make much sense in Pershing’s context. In the first decades of the 20th century, Muslim Filipinos weren’t targeting American cities or kidnapping tourists. They were attacking American soldiers for one simple reason: The United States had invaded and was occupying their home.

In 1898, the United States annexed the Philippines, with a full-scale invasion and a $20 million payoff to the Spanish, who had colonized the islands for the previous 300 years. U.S. officials, including President William McKinley and his imperialist assistant secretary of the navy, Theodore Roosevelt, saw an opportunity to colonize the islands and take their land, resources and markets for trade—a new outpost of expansion at a moment when, for the first time since the arrival of European settlers, there was nothing left to conquer on North America. From 1899 to 1902, U.S. troops battled Filipino nationalists on the predominantly Catholic northern and central islands, until the provisional government was finally captured and surrendered.

As thousands of Americans and as many as 220,000 Filipinos died in that phase of the war, the U.S. had mostly avoided conflict in the southern, predominantly Muslim islands, including Mindanao and the Sulu Archipelago. Locals there, whom the Spanish had called “Moros” (the Spanish word for “Moor,” as in the Muslims of North Africa who had once controlled Spain) were as wary of the Catholic nationalists, who spoke different languages and had long had designs on their islands, as they were the white invaders.

An initial treaty between the U.S. and Muslim tribes was brokered by the sultan of the Ottoman Empire. But once the Americans defeated the northern revolutionaries, the Americans decided to take control over the southern islands, changed the agreement, and a new war broke out. The so-called Moro Rebellion ushered in a second wave of guerrilla and counterinsurgency campaigns, in which Americans used tactics they had picked up in the earlier wars: search-and-destroy missions, waterboarding captives, and forcing civilians into concentration camps—a word Americans learned for the first time during the period.

The Moros did not want to wage a holy war against the invaders, scholars Patricio Abinales and Donna Amoroso wrote in their book, State and Society in the Philippines. Rather, “they did not want to pay the invader’s tax or be subject to his laws, and they did not know or believe that the Americans would respect their religion. They wanted to keep their way of life. If they had been left alone they would have remained in grudging, perhaps sullen and suspicious, peace.”