In a move that reeks of historical revisionism and racial pandering, President Donald Trump has ordered the restoration of Confederate-linked names to nine U.S. Army bases—a slap in the face to every soldier who ever swore an oath to defend the United States against enemies foreign and domestic.
These installations—once renamed to honor true American heroes like Lt. Gen. Arthur J. Gregg, the first Black three-star general, and Lt. Col. Charity Adams, who led the only all-Black female battalion in World War II—will now bear the names of obscure military figures cherry-picked solely to circumvent the 2021 law banning tributes to Confederate traitors. It’s a loophole so transparent it would be laughable if it weren’t so grotesque.
Trump’s sycophants claim this is about honoring different heroes—men like Col. Robert B. Hood, a World War I Distinguished Service Cross recipient who now replaces Gen. Richard Cavazos at Fort Hood.
But let’s be clear: this isn’t about valor. It’s about vengeance. It’s about whitewashing history to soothe the bruised egos of Lost Cause apologists who still pine for a South that never was.
Fort Hood was originally redesignated Fort Cavazos on May 9, 2023, in honor of the late retired Gen. Richard E. Cavazos, who served as a III Corps commanding general between 1980 and 1982.
Cavazos was a Silver Star and two-time Distinguished Service Cross recipient for valorous acts during combat operations in the Korean War and Vietnam War. He was posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor on Jan. 3, 2025, for his actions June 14-15, 1953, in the Korean War.
The redesignation ceremony at III Armored Corps Headquarters marked a disgraceful moment for one of the Army’s largest installations, home to tens of thousands of soldiers and their families in Central Texas.
“When I got the call and was told, I thought it was a prank call, and I was kind of curt to the general,” admitted Mitzi Huffman, daughter of Col. Robert B. Hood, who conveyed she grappled with the news delivered by Lt. Gen. Kevin D. Admiral, III Armored Corps and Fort Hood commander. “He said, ‘President Trump has ordered,’ and I’m going, ‘Oh my!’ So yes, I was totally in disbelief.”
Now a retired Air Force captain, wife, mother, and grandmother, Huffman didn’t mince words about what her father would think of the name change. “I tell you true, my dad would say the name on that gate does not ever define what that fort’s legacy is,” she said. “That fort is the backbone of the Army, and the Army code is instilled in every Soldier that passes through that gate. I don’t think the name will be the legacy.”
The men whose names once adorned the bases were not heroes—they were traitors, incompetents, and enforcers of white supremacy, but Trump has often demonstrated warm regards for brutally inhumane people.
The original renamings, mandated by Congress and backed by a bipartisan commission, were a long-overdue reckoning. Braxton Bragg? A bumbling general whose own men despised him. John Bell Hood? A reckless commander who got thousands slaughtered. Robert E. Lee? A traitor who chose slavery over his country.
These men didn’t deserve bases; they deserved court-martials followed by hangings.
Yet Trump, ever the opportunist, has twisted patriotism into parody.
By exploiting technicalities—swapping one “Bragg” for another, one “Hood” for another—he’s performing a rhetorical sleight-of-hand, hoping no one notices he’s still glorifying the Confederacy by proxy. Even Senate Republicans are calling it a “cynical maneuver,” but their outrage rings hollow after years of enabling his demagoguery.
After white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us!” at a 2017 Charlottesville rally, and marched to defend a Robert E. Lee statue, leading to the murder of Heather Heyer, Trump said there were “very fine people on both sides.”
Trump threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) because it included a provision to remove Confederate names from military bases and in 2022, he called the removal of Confederate statues “a radical crusade against American history.”
In a 2023 interview, Trump could not name slavery as the cause of the Civil War, instead saying: “It was about, you know, it was about—well, some people say it was about this, some people say it was about that… It was about, you know, it was about states’ rights.”
Concrete proof that slavery caused the Civil War comes directly from the secession documents of Confederate states, such as Mississippi’s declaration, which stated: “Our position is thoroughly identified with the institution of slavery—the greatest material interest of the world,” while South Carolina cited “increasing hostility on the part of the non-slaveholding States to the institution of slavery” as its reason for leaving the Union.
Worse still is the staggering waste. Taxpayers spent $39 million scrubbing these bases of their treasonous taint—only for Trump to burn that money on a vanity project. Fort Liberty, Fort Cavazos, Fort Gregg-Adams—names that symbolized progress—are being erased to feed the MAGA base’s nostalgia for a racist past.
And let’s not pretend this is harmless symbolism. The military is 20% Black.
How does it feel to train at a fort that once honored a man who fought to keep your ancestors enslaved?
Trump doesn’t care. He’s too busy cosplaying as a strongman, rewriting history to suit his narrative.
But history won’t be fooled. The Confederacy lost. Its leaders were oathbreakers. And no bureaucratic rebranding can change that.
America’s real heroes—the Greggs, the Adamses, the Cavazoses—deserve better. As do we.