General Robert E. Lee may have passed away long ago, yet the essence of the Confederacy seems to persist robustly. In a recent move, the Trump administration has decided that federal contractors will no longer have explicit prohibitions against racially segregating their dining facilities, waiting areas, and water sources. A memorandum released on 15 February 2025 by the General Services Administration, the federal government’s procurement entity, has formally rescinded these restrictions.
“Any current solicitations that include any of the provisions or clauses mentioned above should be revised to eliminate those provisions and clauses,” the memo stated. Beyond merely ceasing race-based affirmative action and diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives, Team Trump appears eager to regress to the societal norms of the 1950s, if not earlier. The specter of Jim Crow seems to be smiling.
On January 6, the Confederate flag was prominently displayed around the US Capitol, alongside makeshift gallows for Mike Pence and a sea of Trump flags. Since launching his 2016 presidential campaign, Trump’s connections to the Confederacy and white supremacy have been alarmingly close.
During his first campaign, he was hesitant to distance himself from David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan. Following the notorious 2017 white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, Trump defended the “very fine people” present on both sides. He even publicly praised Lee, the commander of the defeated army during the US Civil War.
In response to the removal of a statue of Lee from the Virginia state capitol in 2021, Trump swiftly came to Lee’s defense posthumously. “Robert E. Lee is regarded by many generals as the greatest strategist of them all,” Trump commented. “But for Gettysburg,” he claimed, Lee would have won the war, according to the 45th and 47th president. Trump also referred to Lee as a unifier for the nation.
Concerns regarding civil rights legislation have been simmering within the Republican party for more than a decade. In 2010, Rand Paul, then a Senate candidate, speculated that it should be legally acceptable for a privately owned restaurant to refuse service to a Black patron.
“Do you believe a private business has the right to deny service to Black customers?” Rachel Maddow inquired. Paul responded affirmatively, while simultaneously denouncing racism and discrimination.
But the controversies didn’t stop there. In 2013, Paul lost his media aide and co-author Jack Hunter after it was revealed that Hunter was the “Southern Avenger,” a radio talk show host who donned a Confederate mask and authored articles praising John Wilkes Booth, the assassin of Lincoln. Hunter even boasted about having celebrated Booth’s birthday.
Paul could only lament that Hunter was “unfairly treated by the media and was targeted as a racist, which is not the case.” The old embers remained aglow.
Fast forward to April 2020, during the onset of Covid-19. Brian Westrate, then treasurer of the Wisconsin Republican party, posted in a private Facebook group urging anti-lockdown protesters to refrain from bringing Confederate flags or semi-automatic weapons to an upcoming demonstration. He wished to avoid giving mainstream media the chance to portray them as racists or extremists.
Significantly, Westrate also attempted to detach the Confederacy from slavery, stating that “the Confederacy was primarily about states’ rights rather than slavery.”
Over time, a nostalgic view of the past has gained traction among Republican elites. In their book *Justice on Trial*, published in 2019 regarding Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation, conservative judicial activist Carrie Severino and Federalist editor-in-chief Mollie Hemingway appeared to undermine the legal foundations of *Brown v. Board of Education*, the 1954 Supreme Court ruling which rendered state-sponsored school segregation unconstitutional.
They opined that such decisions “may have been correct in their results but were based on sociological studies rather than legal principles.” Note the use of “may.”
This was a novel perspective, albeit too egregious and incorrect for any of Trump’s three Supreme Court nominees to endorse. Amy Coney Barrett referred to *Brown* as a “super-precedent … unthinkable” to overturn. Kavanaugh echoed the sentiment, while Gorsuch acknowledged it was rightly decided.
Undeterred, in 2021, Hemingway took aim at the 1964 Civil Rights Act in *Rigged*, her critique of the 2020 election results. In her work, she resurrects the argument put forth by the late Barry Goldwater, the unsuccessful 1964 Republican presidential nominee, asserting that the Civil Rights Act represented “an unconstitutional usurpation of power by the federal government.”
Hemingway also disparaged Lyndon Johnson’s advocacy for civil rights as a transparent ploy to gain Black voters. Her recollection seems selective.
During the discussions surrounding the Civil Rights Act, congressional Republicans provided LBJ with the necessary votes to counteract Dixiecrat opposition. Representative William Moore McCulloch, a conservative Republican whose forebears opposed slavery, played a critical role in facilitating the bill’s passage. Illinois Senator Everett McKinley Dirksen supported Johnson’s efforts in the Senate to overcome the southern-led filibuster.
Goldwater was decisively defeated by Johnson a few months later. That would mark the last time a Democrat achieved such a victory – or won the “white vote” for that matter.
In 1973, the Nixon Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Trump, his father, and their business for illegal housing discrimination. After two years of legal battles, Trump reached a settlement with the government. The past has resurfaced.
