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Donald Trump is focused this week on cracking down on the people he calls “insurrectionists”—but not so much on the ones who fought an actual armed rebellion against the U.S. government in the 1860s.
On Tuesday, Trump traveled to Fort Bragg, in North Carolina. When the base was established in 1918, it was named for Braxton Bragg, sometimes described as the worst Confederate general to serve in the Civil War. In 2023, the Defense Department renamed several facilities that had honored Confederates, giving Fort Bragg the admittedly uncreative name of Fort Liberty. In February, the Trump administration reverted to the old name—but with a twist. The base would instead honor Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a World War II veteran awarded a Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Georgia’s Fort Benning had a similar rechristening.
At Fort Bragg, Trump announced that he was changing back the names of another new round of bases. “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,” the president said. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts.” (The government began naming southern facilities for Confederate commanders during World War I, when the government wanted to encourage southern enlistment.)
Yet when the Pentagon released an official announcement, it said something subtly but significantly different: that actually the forts would, like Bragg and Benning, be named for other veterans with the same surnames. Instead of Robert E. Lee, the top Confederate commander, Fort Lee will honor Private Fitz Lee, a Black soldier who served in the Spanish-American War.
The discrepancy between Trump’s claim that the names of generals including Lee and A. P. Hill were returning and the official announcement reveals the puerile wink-and-a-nod trolling behind the re-renaming. The original names were replaced after a careful process had identified military figures who deserved recognition. The Pete Hegseth–led Pentagon, by contrast, appears to have found its new honorees by poring over lists of veterans in a superficial search to find any decorated veteran with the right surname. (This has apparently been a higher priority than finding a chief of staff for Hegseth’s tumultuous office or briefing the secretary on the legal justification for deploying Marines to Los Angeles.)
Reverting is an insult to the families of those people whose names were added and then removed. But refusing to own up to the goal here is a laughable equivocation from guys who like to talk about how strong they are. Trump clearly wants to bring back the Confederate names. Why won’t the Pentagon go along with it, or why can’t officials admit it? Isn’t this the “wokeness and weakness” that Hegseth has promised to eliminate?
Even under this same-last-name strategy, everyone can see that these names are intended as a nod to the Confederates. It’s not a dog whistle if everyone can hear it. The president doesn’t know much about history, according to a top former aide, or care that much for heritage. (I’d be curious to hear how many of the original Confederate honorees he could identify, beyond Lee and perhaps Pickett, whose charge made him infamous.)
But Trump knows that much of his political support is in what we might call the cultural American South: the swaths of the United States not necessarily in the old Confederacy where Confederate symbols are popular. One January 6 rioter carried a Confederate flag into the U.S. Capitol. Trump also previously resisted the idea of dropping the Confederate names in 2020, when Congress passed a bipartisan law to do so after the murder of George Floyd. He even vetoed the bill, but Congress overrode him.
Reverting to the old names now is an emblem of Trump’s broad campaign against anything that can be construed as woke. He is capitalizing on public dissatisfaction over some manifestations of DEI to attack any governmental gestures toward racial equity and reconciliation—whether symbolic and bipartisan, such as the fort names, or bedrock elements of the nation’s civil-rights enforcement. The clumsy approach has led to some embarrassments, such as flagging for deletion a photo of the Enola Gay, the airplane that dropped the first atomic bomb, apparently because gay was in the name.
Lionizing Lee ought to be nearly as embarrassing. After the surrender at Appomattox, Confederate apologists worked to cultivate a dignified impression of Lee as a tormented patriot reluctantly defending his home state and a brilliant general fighting a lost cause. But as my colleague Adam Serwer wrote in 2017, Lee, despite his reputation as a military tactician, botched the rebel strategy in the Civil War. More important, he was—despite the successful efforts of revisionists who have depicted him as a kindly, conciliatory man—a committed white supremacist and a cruel slaveholder, even by the standards of the time.
Where Trump distanced himself from Lee in 2018, his administration is more willing to embrace Confederate ideas today. Citing the writer Michael Lind, future Vice President J. D. Vance said on a podcast in 2021 that “American history is a constant war between Northern Yankees and Southern Bourbons, where whichever side the hillbillies are on wins,” positioning himself on the side of the southerners: “And that’s kind of how I think about American politics today, is like, the Northern Yankees are now the hyper-woke, coastal elites.”
This weekend, he appeared on the podcast of Theo Von, the comedian who memorably told Trump what it’s like to use cocaine. Von asked Vance, a Marine veteran, which side he’d have fought on during the Civil War, and the good news is that Vance said the Union. But he added: “I feel like something … happened like 10 years ago,” where “you have to think that every single person who fought for the Confederate side was an evil person, and I just think that’s so stupid.”
I’ve heard versions of this argument when I have written critically about Confederate commemorations in the past, but it’s a straw man. With Vance, the question is always whether he really believes this or if he’s just saying it cynically. But I don’t know who is arguing that every Confederate soldier was an evil person. I know of relatives of mine who fought on both sides of the war, though, I’m proud to say, more who fought for the Union. The point is not that all Confederate soldiers were bad people or personally committed to slavery, nor that anyone necessarily needs to be ashamed of each individual. It is that the Confederacy seceded to defend slavery and fought a treasonous war over it.
The U.S. government has no reason to celebrate the rebels or their leaders for their part in the war. To paraphrase a certain president: I prefer the war heroes who fought for the United States.
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Evening Read
Dare to Act Differently and Be Happier
By Arthur C. Brooks
In financial circles, the investment strategy many people pursue during chaotic times is known as the “flight to safety.” That means dumping risky assets such as stocks and buying safer ones such as government bonds. This is not just a financial strategy, but a human one. When things get chaotic, eliminate your exposure to risk and hunker down. That’s the safe bet.
Or is it?
More From The Atlantic
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- Two paths for the pop star
- A Stephen King adaptation with (almost) no scares
Culture Break
Spend time with a loved one. “In my household, Saturday is ‘Dad-urday,’” Jordan Michelman writes. It’s a father-daughter routine that has transformed his family life.
Celebrate. Music wouldn’t be the same without Brian Wilson. That’s not an overstatement, Spencer Kornhaber writes.
Stephanie Bai contributed to this newsletter.
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