Trump is the Second President of the Confederacy

Get the Point!

If you follow me on Facebook, then you know that I often call Donald Trump the "Second President of the Confederate States of America" at least several times per week. I do so because of Trump's long and deplorable history of being racist in his business practices (housing discrimination), social activism (calling for the death penalty for five innocent Black teenagers accused of rape in 1989), first term in office (calling Black NFL players "ungrateful SOB's," calling Black neighborhoods "rat infested," calling Black nations "shithole countries"), and his unrelenting attacks on the accurate teaching of Black history and efforts to promote diversity in business, industry, academia, and the military.

Further cementing my derisive nickname for Trump is the fact that during his first term, Trump was a major supporter of preserving Confederate monuments and keeping U.S. military installations named after Confederate military leaders firmly intact.

As a historian and former military brat, Trump's affinity for the Old South simply further confirms my position that he is a true racist when considering that he is the descendant of Germans who immigrated to New York City long after the Civil War ended—thus, he has no personal ties to that era in American history.

But on my own personal level, when my father was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army after graduating from Florida A&M University in 1963, Jim Crow segregation was still in full effect across the South. Over the next 20 years, my father served (and my family lived) on several bases named for rebellious generals from the Confederate States of America—the same Confederacy that launched a war to preserve and expand the enslavement of our Black ancestors.

I had one sister born in 1967 at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia, which was named for John B. Gordon, one of Robert E. Lee's top commanders and stauch slavery supporter. I started pre-school in 1975 at Fort Benning, named for Henry Benning, a lawyer, jurist, and military general officer who also served under General Lee.

General Henry Benning in full Rebel regalia…

So, when the Army announced in 2023 that these Forts would be renamed, I was ecstatic because I knew fully well that they weren’t named for Generals Lee, Gordon, Benning, Braxton Bragg, John Hood and other Confederate military officers in honor of their service, but were done so during a time in the 20th Century when the NAACP and other Black advocacy groups were beginning their slow and arduous push for civil rights during the run up to World War II and the decades that followed.

Now, long before the Black civil rights push, Southern revisionist historians had already begun striving to paint the "Lost Cause" narrative which suggested that slavery wasn't the primary reason for the schism between the states, but claimed that "States Rights" was the cause of the “Cause.” I’ve always shaken my head at the sheer lunacy of this pseudo-intellectual position because to balance the historical equation, the South seceded from the Union to preserve a “states right to maintain slavery!”

But the lunacy became policy even among the very U.S. government that put down the rebellion, which is why those Forts were named for traitors. Which is also why I found it important to remove those names back in 2023 because no man or woman who fought to preserve slavery and its attendant horrors deserves to be honored 160 years after General Lee surrendered to General Grant at Appomattox Courthouse.

But alas, Trump is now president again and yesterday, his Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced that Fort Moore, the name for Fort Benning since 2023 that honors Vietnam War era General Hal Moore, will once again be named Fort Benning in honor of the unrepentant slaver who spilled blood to preserve and protect the so-called "Peculiar Institution."

I note this change this morning because there is a sickening skepticism among the unlearned and under learned classes who suggest that because Kanye, Snoop, or Floyd Mayweather take meetings and photo-ops with Donald Trump, that there's “no way that Trump can be called a racist.”

But again, Trump’s record of racism is long and pronounced, and acts like renaming bases for Confederate generals is merely the recrudescence of his raw brand of race baiting—and one additional reminder that his focus has NOT been on easing the financial suffering of his supporters and opponents alike since Inauguration Day, but to troll and needle racial minorities—while throwing racist red meat out for his blissfully ignorant base!