Lawmakers Vow to Fight Trump if He Restores Confederate Base Names

Lawmakers from both parties are vowing to fight back if former President Donald Trump makes good on his pledge to put a Confederate general’s name back on an Army base if he’s reelected.

Trump’s Friday endorsement of changing the name of the Army’s Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg — undoing the work of a congressional renaming commission — and the bipartisan backlash signal a fresh culture-war fight between him and Congress if he’s victorious in November.

“I think I just learned the secret to winning absolutely and by massive margins. I’m going to promise to you … that we’re going to change the name back to Fort Bragg,” Trump said on Friday during a town hall in Fayetteville, North Carolina.

Lawmakers in 2021 approved a process to remove the names of Confederate leaders from nine bases over Trump’s objections in the final days of his presidency. If Trump tries to reverse it, lawmakers could use legislation to attempt to stop him.

“The law was you had to get rid of the Confederate names, and the commission was to determine what those names should be,” Rep. Don Bacon (R-Neb.), who led legislation to create the renaming panel, said in a brief interview. “The law was passed, it’s not going to go backward.”

Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who spearheaded the legislation in the Senate, also argued the renaming is a done deal.

“The last time Donald Trump tried to block the base renaming, Congress overrode him with strong bipartisan support,” Warren said in a statement. “This latest rant is a desperate political stunt meant to distract and divide us. Trump should listen to military leaders who have honored generations of loyal servicemembers by supporting the renaming of these bases.”

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Fort Bragg was originally named after Braxton Bragg, a Confederate general and slave owner known primarily for his battlefield failures. Many southern bases, including Fort Bragg, were named after Confederate figures well after the Civil War, before and during World War I to rally support for the war effort in the south.

“This was a deal made with the Jim Crow South, between 1910 and 1930 roughly, and I’m not a Jim Crow South guy,” Bacon said.

In 2020, Congress moved to create a commission to rename the posts and identify other military property that honors the Confederacy, such as a pair of Navy ships, buildings and memorials. This decision followed widespread social justice protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd by police in Minneapolis.

The bipartisan commission was included in annual defense policy legislation in 2020 and was one of the main reasons Trump vetoed the bill. The former president said at the time that he would “not even consider” the move — even though then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and then-Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy were open to it. Congress overrode Trump’s veto of the defense bill, setting the yearslong renaming process in motion.

“President Trump has been clear in his opposition to politically motivated attempts like this to rewrite history and to displace the enduring legacy of the American Revolution in service of a new leftwing cultural revolution,” the White House said of the legislation at the time.

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