The Trump administration has spent the last month on a tear, using President Donald Trump’s newfound power in multiple departments and agencies for a goal that seems bewildering at first glance: deleting history.
Under the guise of eliminating diversity, equity, and inclusion policies, the administration has literally erased government-maintained documents honoring and remembering key figures and moments from U.S. and world history.
The Department of Defense removed a photo of the Enola Gay B-29 bomber because it contains the word “gay.” Arlington Cemetery scrapped then reinstated a tribute to Jackie Robinson, the first Black man to play Major League Baseball and an Army lieutenant.
Photos and histories of people of color, women, and the LGBTQ+ community are being purged, and nearly every day some new erasure is being uncovered. When caught in the act, the Trump administration has offered up the claim that these cases were merely mistakes—“malicious compliance” from bad actors within the government.
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But the excuses don’t pass the smell test, since Trump and his allies—like multibillionaire Elon Musk and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth—have well documented histories of open bigotry against anyone who isn’t a straight, wealthy, white man.
But there is one unique period in U.S. history that Trump and his cronies are very interested in preserving and promoting: the Confederacy.
Quick reminder: The Confederates, attempting to preserve the practice of enslaving Black people, illegally declared war against the government of the United States—starting the Civil War that killed hundreds of thousands—and ultimately was utterly defeated and humiliated.
The administration has most notably advocated on behalf of the pro-slavery Confederacy that rebelled against the U.S. government by reinstating the names of Confederate figures at military facilities. Under the Biden administration, it was determined that it was best to remove names honoring a racist, traitorous group that declared war on the country. Trump feels otherwise.
Trump brought back Fort Benning, named after Henry Lewis Benning—a lover of slavery—and renamed Fort Liberty to Fort Bragg, named after a Confederate general. The administration has played cute with this restoration of names and attempted to argue that the “new” names honor servicemembers, but the true intent to restore the Confederacy is quite clear.
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Trump’s love of the Confederacy isn’t new. During his first term, he railed against local and state efforts to move Confederate monuments out of the public eye.
So intense is Trump’s admiration for the pro-slavery Confederacy that he has frequently attacked one of the country’s most revered leaders, Abraham Lincoln. Trump—who failed to pass an infrastructure bill or get his southern wall built—has complained that Lincoln failed to prevent the Civil War.
But this isn’t just a Trump thing. For decades, conservatives have embraced the mythology of the Lost Cause. After losing the Civil War, many Confederates and their descendants have desperately tried to rewrite the causes of the war and the treasonous actions of the Confederate military and its leaders.
They argue that the secessionists were fighting for a noble, lost cause—usually something about taxation and states’ rights—omitting the central argument behind the Confederacy: It wanted enslaved Black people pick cotton and do other jobs for free.
This is directly tied to the origins of the modern conservative movement and the Republican Party. In 1964, conservatives took full ideological control of the GOP with candidate Barry Goldwater, who was opposed to the Civil Rights Act and lost in a landslide to Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, who signed the law with Martin Luther King Jr. at his side.
King warned voters of the dangers of Goldwater, in an extraordinarily unusual step into electoral politics, highlighting his opposition to the bill.
According to Johnson aide Bill Moyers, when the president signed the bill he said, “Well, I think we may have lost the south for your lifetime—and mine,” referencing the fact that conservative southern Democrats were vehemently opposed to the bill and would turn away from the party.
And Johnson was right. Those voters became Republicans as the party moved further to the right, and their ideology forms the core of the MAGA voters who have backed Trump in the last three elections.
When the rest of the country moved forward on racial issues, resulting in the election of the first Black president, Barack Obama, in 2008, the right did not. Trump led the racist birther movement, which falsely argued that Obama was ineligible to be president.
But even after Trump won, the push for racial justice did not stop. Protests like the Black Lives Matter movement emerged with Trump in the White House, and no matter how much he fumed about it, they didn’t relent.
The right is in a quandary. It has political power, but it still cannot force millions of Americans to concede to the white supremacy that motivates much of conservative politics. That’s why it’s so driven to erase history.
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When Trump and his administration push for the Confederacy and try to disappear the diverse past, they are delivering on the political primal scream that the right emitted after Obama won.
It’s doubtful that Trump will succeed in erasing the country’s collective memory, but like the men who tried to keep chattel slavery legal, Republicans are willing to give their crusade one last Confederate try.
