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.”
A Trump spokesperson did not immediately respond to a request for comment on lawmakers’ vow to fight his move.
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.
As part of the congressional mandate, the military renamed nine Army installations, including Fort Bragg, to remove the names of Confederate figures.
The effort to rename the bases was bipartisan and was approved by both chambers of Congress in 2020, even though Republicans controlled the Senate. But in tasking a commission with the work of renaming bases and removing other Confederate honors and gathering the opinions of local communities and other groups in the process, lawmakers gave themselves political cover over possible backlash.
The panel ultimately recommended new names for the nine installations in 2022, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin accepted the recommendations. The commissioners also cataloged other honors to be removed, including renaming of the USS Chancellorsville, a Navy cruiser named for a battle won by the Confederacy and removing a portrait of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee at West Point.
The Pentagon on Wednesday defended the process and said the renaming was “authorized by Congress” and made law, but a spokesperson would not address any future action.
Trump could make good on his pledge to return to Fort Liberty’s old name because the executive branch, through the Defense Department and individual military services, controls the naming of military installations, according to Paul Arcangeli, the former Democratic staff director to the House Armed Services Committee.
While the legislation that created the renaming commission directed the defense secretary to implement the panel’s recommendations, it did not change the branch responsible for base naming decisions. President Joe Biden could have changed the names of the bases without the commission if he had wanted, and so could Trump if reelected.
“It didn’t require legislation to make the change in the first place,” Arcangeli said. “The commission made the recommendations. The secretary implemented those recommendations. … I was involved in all of that, and it’s in the power of the executive.”
Trump isn’t alone among Republicans on the issue. Despite bipartisan support for scrubbing Confederate leaders’ names from bases, some conservatives still fought the commission’s work. Last year, the House rejected a proposal to defund the naming commission, though most Army installations had already been renamed by then. Lawmakers authorized a $2 million budget for the commission when it was created.
An initial report by the panel in mid-2022 that recommended new names estimated the total cost of renaming all nine bases and other assets on those installations, such as buildings and street signs, at $21 million.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, both promised that if elected president, they would change Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg while campaigning for the GOP presidential nomination.
Kori Schake, a member of the base renaming commission, said that Gold Star families chose the name Fort Liberty to honor the sacrifices of fallen service members. She argued that making a reversion would be inappropriate and disrespectful.
“The name emanated from the people who made the ultimate sacrifice for our country,” Schake, a defense scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute, said in a statement. “They chose it to honor our dead. And that seems much more fitting than naming it for a disgraced (and mediocre) general.”
