Trump Vows To Rename US Military Base After Confederate General Who Owned Black Slaves

Former President Donald Trump vowed Friday to restore the name of an Army base in North Carolina that formerly honored a Confederate general who owned enslaved Black people.

"I walked in, the first question that I asked, 'Should we change the name from Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg?'" Trump said during a Friday town hall-style campaign event in nearby Fayetteville, North Carolina. "So here's what we do: we get elected, I'm doing it. I'm doing it."

Trump — whose remarks were greeted with cheers and applause from the audience and several white supporters surrounding him — seemed to justify the plan by saying that the U.S. "did win two world wars from Fort Bragg," and that "this is no time to be changing names."

"We're going to get it back," he said of the original name, according to video posted online by C-SPAN. "We're going to bring our country back."

The Defense Department changed the name of Fort Bragg to Fort Liberty in 2023 as part of an initiative to remove Confederate names from nine Army posts across the southern U.S. following nationwide protests sparked by the 2020 police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis.

During a renaming ceremony, Lt. Gen. Christopher Donahue, the commanding general of the XVIII Airborne Corps and Fort Liberty, said the name change "made ourselves better," the Associated Press reported at the time.

The base was originally named in 1918 after slave-owning Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg, whose battlefield losses during the Civil War helped lead to the defeat of the Confederacy.

Also Friday, Trump falsely claimed to be "leading in all the polls" against Vice President Kamala Harris, who holds a national edge of 2.2%, according to the latest average compiled by the Real Clear Politics website.

In battleground North Carolina, Trump is narrowly ahead by an average 0.6% and he also leads in swing states Arizona and Georgia but is trailing in Michigan, Nevada and Wisconsin, with Pennsylvania a dead heat, according to Real Clear Politics.