President Donald Trump unexpectedly summoned reporters to the Oval Office to watch him sign a proclamation rolling back longstanding environmental regulations to permit more aggressive fishing in American waters, but before taking press questions he had one of his own to be answered.

“So, tell me, how do they define that? Because in most industries, like you have policemen, policemen, you call them fishermen and fisherwomen. I haven’t heard of that one before we, how are the women? Do they want to be designated as fisherwomen? Does anybody want to answer that question?”

One of the fishing industry representatives arrayed behind him chimed in to reply that one could use either term — or the gender-neutral term “fisher” if one wants to be “politically correct.”

The president interjected with another question, asking whether the term “fisher people” would work before dismissing the entire topic as “crazy.”

At that point, another attendee spoke up to cite Google results which he claimed had indicated that most women involved in the fishing industry prefer the term “fisherman” because “they feel like they’re strong individuals, and they can do the work of a man.”

Trump later returned to the subject of the regulatory rollback proclamation by grousing about how the “Obama-Biden administration’s radical environmentalists” had “drastically restricted access for fishermen and coastal communities.”

“What a bunch of dopes. Those decisions close off vast resources, and really, the richest fishing grounds, they say, anywhere in the world destroyed livelihoods and made the United States more dependent on foreign products,” he said.

He continued riffing about the supposed unfairness of the regulations and suggested that both Canada and Japan — the latter of which is nowhere near the Atlantic coast of the U.S. — were unfairly being permitted to fish off the coast of Maine.

“You weren’t allowed to fish, but Canada was, Japan was. They all came in fish, but our people weren’t allowed to fish there. That was put in by Barack Hussein Obama. Have you heard of him? Barack Hussein Obama and Sleepy Joe Biden, and it’s a shame,” he said.

The proclamation that was the impetus for Thursday’s Oval Office ceremony will restore commercial fishing access to approximately half a million square miles in the Pacific Ocean by rolling back protections for three of what were declared national marine monuments — the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument near Hawaii, the Islands Unit of the Mariana Trench Marine National Monument located east of the Philippines, and the Rose Atoll Marine National Monument in American Samoa.

Trump suggested the monument protections, which were established by the previous administration, had been wholly ruinous for the wealthy commercial fishermen and fishing executives he’d assembled behind him.

He asked them: “When they destroyed your whole life and your family and your business, and everything else, did you ever think you would have somebody who would come along and save it?”

The president’s latest action follows a similar proclamation last April, which restored fishing access to 400,000 square miles of the Pacific Ocean that had been covered by the Pacific Remote Islands Marine National Monument.