You have to hand it to Donald Trump: The man is always learning on the job. Just this week, he learned that impeachment, which he compared to lynching, was “a very ugly word” because “it really means a high crime and misdemeanor.” During an open cabinet meeting on Monday, he referred to the “phony” emoluments clause, which prompted some news outlets to post the full text of the clause, which is part of the Constitution of the United States. In that same cabinet meeting, he revealed some other facts he’d recently learned. For example, he was actually not that different from George Washington, the country’s first president. “I don’t know if you knew it, but he actually ran his business simultaneously when he was president,” Trump said. “George Washington was actually considered a very rich man at the time… George Washington, they say, had two desks. He had a presidential desk and a business desk.”

It seems Trump was trying to say that even George Washington, one of the closest things the American republic has to a secular saint, was more corrupt than Trump, who made a big show of handing off his businesses to his sons. Unlike him, Trump implied, George Washington was still formally doing business while serving as president—and employing an elaborate eighteenth-century ritual to appear to keep his duties as the president separate from his work as a plantation owner. Maintaining two desks, Trump seemed to think—and was likely told—had been Washington’s sly workaround.

Almost immediately after Trump shared his insights, Mount Vernon, Washington’s estate, was forced to issue a statement. It was true that Washington was one of the country’s wealthiest men: He oversaw a prosperous agricultural estate, worked by 300 enslaved people. And when he became president, he did not sell off the plantation. Instead, he entrusted his nephew to run it in his absence and stayed as closely involved as he could, demanding reports from his overseers. But that bit about the desks? Well, the Mount Vernon people weren’t sure what the current president was talking about.

“There are two desks that I know of associated with George Washington’s presidency,” Mount Vernon’s research historian, Mary Thompson, said in the statement. “The first has been known as Washington’s presidential desk. I do not know where it is now.” Evidently, Washington had a second desk made for him as he was preparing to hand over the presidency, a desk that was specifically intended for use at Mount Vernon. It was not a “business desk,” nor was it used simultaneously with what Trump called the “presidential desk.” What’s more, Thompson speculated that the floor plan in the Philadelphia house occupied by President Washington for most of his tenure probably couldn’t accommodate two desks anyway: “I am not aware of Washington having had two desks in the study in the presidential mansion, which was a fairly small room.”

It is a remarkable thing to have watched over the past three years. Trump, a deeply and proudly ignorant man, is also the world’s most excitable yet solipsistic student, completely sure that whatever piece of historic arcana that he’s come across is unknown to most of humankind. Just recall his “discovery” of Frederick Douglass, who, Trump noted, “is being recognized more and more.”

The historical fact he discovers is often not new, not a fact—it was clear from Trump’s comments about Douglass that he mistakenly thought the abolitionist was still alive—and is predictably warped to serve his own political interests. In a Monday night interview with Fox News's Sean Hannity, for instance, Trump dispensed some more presidential history. Having compared himself favorably to Washington already that day, he noted that the only president who got more unflattering press attention than him was Abraham Lincoln. “You know who’s covered worse than me, they say?” he asked Hannity. “Abraham Lincoln. I’ve heard the one person—it used to be five or six, now it’s down to one—Honest Abe Lincoln. They say he got the worst press of anybody. I say, I dispute it.” The discovery? Abraham Lincoln, the freer of slaves, the savior of the Union, was as savagely covered by the press as Trump is today. The point? He went down in history as another secular American saint, a misunderstood martyr—and so will Trump. The veracity? Let’s just say Trump and Lincoln got bad press for very different reasons.