Trump To Restore Confederate Military Bases

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it a million times over: For a party that places so much importance on the history of Democrats supporting slavery, Republicans sure spend a lot of time fighting tooth and nail to honor the Confederacy.

On Tuesday, President Donald Trump announced that he will restore the original names of seven military bases honoring Confederate officers. Trump made the announcement at North Carolina’s Fort Bragg, which became Fort Bragg again in February after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made it among his top priorities to change the fort’s name back to one that honors the time in America when Black people knew their place was under a white slave owner’s heel or at the end of his whip. (I mean, Hegseth didn’t say all that, but none of them are ever willing to admit that’s exactly what they’re seeking to commemorate.)

“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” said Trump, who has expressed contempt over the renaming of the bases numerous times in the past because he also loves the immortalization of pro-slavery warriors. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts. It’s no time to change. And I’m superstitious, you know? I like to keep it going.”

Nah, Trump, that’s not superstition — you, Hegseth and all of your ilk are white suprema-sticious, but that’s about it.

Hegseth made a similar argument to Trump’s back in January when he was campaigning to change Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, insisting that, for whatever reason, changing the name changes the entire history of everything that ever happened at that military compound.

“We should change it back by the way,” he said on a podcast. “We should change it back. We should change it back. We should change it back, because legacy matters. My uncle served at Bragg. I served at Bragg. It breaks a generational link.”

In reality, though, the restoration of Fort Bragg’s title was so arbitrary that most people didn’t even notice that a different Bragg carries the namesake.

When Fort Liberty’s title was scrapped and reverted back to the original, Fort Bragg was no longer meant to honor Confederate General Braxton Bragg. Instead, it was announced that Fort Bragg is now Fort Roland L. Bragg, named for a private first class with the 17th Airborne Division and World War II veteran who died in 1999. 

In fact, it was so important that Ronald be honored as the new Bragg of the fort that his family wasn’t even notified by the government. Bragg’s daughter, Debra Sokoll, told NPR she didn’t know about the honor until it had already happened and reporters called her asking about it.

So, what about Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon and the rest? Are Trump and Hegseth about to start scouring military data bases to find alternative Picketts and Polks so they can pretend it’s all about preserving the brand, as opposed to preserving the legacy of Black people being torn from their families, ripped from their heritages, regarded as human property and confined to intergenerational servitude under threat of terror, torture and brutally violent death?

But hey, the entire Trump administration has been serving as one giant ode to white supremacy since January anyway; we might as well make the military “great” again too, right?

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