Trump Wants to Make the Confederacy Great Again

With the expansive program laid out in Project 2025 roughly half-complete just six months into the second Trump administration, the Trumpified GOP is setting its sights on completing its conquest of the American past. It’s the logical next move for a movement dedicated to making the country “great again,” and it offers many prime opportunities to keep MAGA followers supplied with fresh red meat while President Trump is reduced to trying to distract people from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal by taking weird constitutionals on the White House roof.

On Tuesday, the administration announced that the National Park Service will be restoring a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that was toppled and removed during the 2020 George Floyd protests in Washington, DC. The service is presently cleaning the statue, which protesters had defaced, and plans to return it to its former home near Judiciary Square, a few blocks from the National Mall, in October.

The move, which comes two months after Trump announced he was restoring Confederate names to US military bases that had replaced them, carries a personal meaning for the grudge-prone president. At the height of the Floyd protests in Washington, Trump dispatched troops to break up a demonstration at Lafayette Square near the White House; he proceeded to use the occasion to stage a supremely awkward, and decidedly counter-Christian, image of himself brandishing a Bible as federal officers menaced peaceful protesters. Three weeks later, on the night of Juneteenth, demonstrators brought down the Pike statue. Trump—who reportedly asked then–Secretary of Defense Mark Esper whether officers could open fire on the protesters at Lafayette Square—called for the DC police to come down hard on the Pike statue’s assailants. “These people should be arrested immediately,” he tweeted then. “A disgrace to our country.”

Pike was far from deserving of such righteous ire on his behalf. Indeed, activists and advocacy groups had been trying to get his statue removed long before the advent of the Floyd protests. In addition to being a traitor and a racist, he was forced to resign his military commission after less than two years, after the Native American soldiers under his command were accused of scalping Union troops. Three years before the Civil War began, Pike endorsed a circular in his home state of Arkansas urging that free Black citizens be expelled from the state, deploring the “evil” of “the existence among us of a class of free colored persons.”

Pike was a prominent Mason, and his statue bears a plaque citing “his 32 years as Sovereign Grand Commander of the Ancient Rite of Scottish Freemasonry.” (His fascination with the recondite ceremonies of Masonry fueled speculation that he was also involved in the organization of the similarly secretive Ku Klux Klan, though no evidence supports a formal Klan affiliation; one scholar does contend that he was the author of the Klan poem “The Wolf Is on the Desert.”) Pike’s statue was installed at the Judiciary Square site in 1901, during a nationwide agitprop campaign to place Confederate monuments in public venues to mark the triumph of apartheid rule in the South after the abandonment of Reconstruction.

The ideological brief behind the Confederate monument complex is a central historical detail that never gets mentioned in MAGA’s restorationist crusade. That’s because it completely undermines appeals to a mythic Lost Cause “heritage” on behalf of the former Confederacy—in reality, the mass distribution of Confederate memorials served the anything-but-antiquarian aim of shoring up the spread of white supremacist Constitutions in the South. As George Orwell famously observed of similar projects undertaken by the ruling party in 1984, “Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.”

This is also why the MAGA assault on actually existing history is only getting started. As he visited Israel during Congress’s summer recess, House Speaker Mike Johnson announced his intention to retire the term “West Bank” in reference to the Occupied Territories in favor of the biblical names Judea and Samaria—reaching back millennia into another ideologically charged version of the region’s past for the sake of buttressing the legitimacy of another contemporary apartheid regime. (Johnson cribbed this idea from legislation directing schools and universities in Arkansas to use the same nomenclature, which was signed into law this spring by Governor Sarah Huckabee Sanders, who was tagging along with him on the same junket.)

Nor is the revisionist drive of today’s GOP confined to the remoter stretches of the past. Trump’s bid to whitewash and memory-hole the failed coup of January 6 has been an act of historical erasure worthy of Josef Stalin—and was crowned last week by the Senate confirmation of Emil Bove, a former Department of Justice official who fired a group of prosecutors who brought charges against the insurrectionists, as a federal appellate judge. And Trump’s director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, has jump-started a parallel bid to replace the tangled chronicle of Russian efforts to influence the 2016 election with a just-so fable of outraged Trumpian innocence, not long after a Senate web page chronicling congressional inquiries into the Russia campaign was purged. Trump’s quisling attorney general, Pam Bondi, has followed suit with an announcement that she’s impaneling a grand jury to pursue potential criminal charges against… well, history, so far as I can tell.

All this frantic rewriting of history probably won’t achieve the prime directive of creating mass amnesia when it comes to Trump’s decade-and-a-half-long friendship with Epstein; indeed, Bloomberg News’ Jason Leopold reports that Trump’s name has been redacted from some of the more than 100,000 documents in the FBI’s file on the pedophile and sex trafficker. The past has a funny way of overtaking you even as you are furiously trying to recast it in your own image.