President Donald Trump announced on Tuesday that he plans to restore the names of seven Army bases that once honored Confederate leaders, relabeling them after soldiers who share the same last names.
“We are also going to be restoring the names to Fort Pickett, Fort Hood, Fort Gordon, Fort Rucker, Fort Polk, Fort A.P. Hill and Fort Robert E. Lee,” Trump said. “We won a lot of battles out of those forts, it’s no time to change.”
Trump’s announcement, during a speech to soldiers at Fort Bragg, follows a move during the Biden era to change the names of 10 installations to honor new, non-Confederate individuals. Those included changing Fort Hood to Fort Cavazos, for the Army’s first four-star Hispanic general.
The Army redesignated Fort Liberty, previously known as Fort Bragg, to its original name in February, but honoring Private First Class Roland L. Bragg, a World War II hero instead of the Confederate general Braxton Bragg. The service also redesignated Fort Moore, after Gen. Hal Moore and his wife Julia Compton Moore, for Fred G. Benning, who earned the Distinguished Service Cross during World War I.
The Army released a statement after Trump’s speech noting that they will use a similar arrangement when renaming the seven bases.
The Tuesday announcement came as a surprise to some in the Pentagon. One Army official, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak, said they were caught off guard by the rapid-fire developments, which could take months to implement. The Army did not immediately respond to follow up questions.
A congressional aide, who spoke on condition of anonymity to talk about closed-door policy talks, said Trump was using a “thinly veiled attempt” to get around the law that directed the Pentagon to remove the Confederate names by finding veterans who “just so happen” to have the same names as the Civil War leaders. The Senate overrode the president’s attempted 2020 veto of the law at the end of Trump’s first term.
The Trump administration insisted this year’s redesignations were in line with laws that prevent the Pentagon from naming bases after Confederate leaders or battles. But Ty Seidule, a retired Army brigadier general who was the vice chair of the Congressional Naming Commission — tasked with relabeling bases and U.S. military assets — said that Trump’s decision went against the spirit of the new rule enacted after the George Floyd protests in 2020.