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Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have committed to stopping former President Donald Trump from changing the names of military bases back to their Confederate names.
Trump revealed on Friday that he intends to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg, which would reverse the actions of a congressional renaming commission.
“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 in Fayetteville, North Carolina.
In 2021, legislators greenlit a process to remove the names of Confederate leaders from military bases, against the wishes of then-President Trump, who was in the last few days of his presidency.
Republican Nebraska Representative Don Bacon spearheaded the legislation to create the panel.
“The law was you had to get rid of the Confederate names, and the commission was to determine what those names should be,” he told Politico.
“The law was passed, it’s not going to go backward,” he added.
Democratic Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren led the Senate version of the legislation.
She told the outlet in a statement that “the last time Donald Trump tried to block the base renaming, Congress overrode him with strong bipartisan support.”
“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,” she added.
Fort Bragg was named after Confederate general and slave owner Braxton Bragg. It was one of several bases in the South that was named after a Confederate leader long after the Civil War had finished. Even during the First World War, bases adopted names of Confederate leaders to increase the 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 told Politico.
Congress took steps in 2020 to create the commission to rename the outposts and to locate other military property that pays homage to the Confederacy, including Navy ships, memorials, and buildings. The measures came after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis in May of that year.
Trump vetoed annual defense policy legislation because the bipartisan commission was a part of it, but Congress overrode the then-president.
The Trump White House said at the time he “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 military renamed nine Army installations to remove the names of Confederate leaders.
As they unsuccessfully ran for the Republican presidential nomination in the GOP primary, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis and former Vice President Mike Pence said they would change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg if they were elected.
Commission member Kori Schake told Politico that Gold Star families chose the name Fort Liberty to honor those who died while serving the country and that it would be inappropriate to change it back.
“They chose it to honor our dead. And that seems much more fitting than naming it for a disgraced (and mediocre) general,” she told the outlet in a statement.
