In the ABC debate between Trump and Harris, the VP brought up some historical examples of Trump’s racism. Trump responded in part by saying: “This is a person that has to stretch back years — 40, 50 years ago — because there’s nothing now.” But there are a lot of more recent things about Trump being racist. They are mostly statements and actions connected to the Civil War. Trump, despite being a northerner, is a Neo-Confederate.

I have frequently gotten the impression that many Americans are confused about the Civil War. People think it was about states’ rights and not slavery and racism.

The Confederacy and its symbols were and are about slavery and racism. The Confederacy was not about states’ rights as some have claimed. Those behind its birth complained that northern states had anti-slavery laws. At one point, the Confederacy’s leaders briefly considered ending slavery to get military support from Europe — support that probably would have meant victory for them. They decided to keep slavery, meaning that it was more important to them than independence. And there was at least one incident where Black Union soldiers captured by the South were executed instead of being taken to POW camps as were the White Union soldiers.

The Confederacy’s claim that it had been oppressed by the North is nonsense. States that became part of the Confederacy (“Confederate states”) had, at the Federal level, more political power per free person than those states that stayed in the Union (“Union states”). This is because of the way that the Senate creates total electoral equality between the small states and the big states, which is in violation of the idea of one person, one vote. Also, when it comes to the South and slavery and political power, there is the 3/5 Compromise, where it was decided that when it came to apportionment of House districts, slaves would count as 3/5 of a person. This created who knows how many extra House districts in slave states (looking at data from the 1820 census, when Texas, Florida and Arkansas were missing, roughly 38% of the average Confederate state’s population were slaves), which also meant more votes in the Electoral College. Even with the extra House districts, the Confederate states were, on average, smaller than Union states (the average Confederate state had, in 1860, eight votes in the Electoral College and the average Union state had 10). This all means that Confederate states got an unjustified, undemocratic boost in political power per free person in the U.S. Senate, and to a lesser degree in the House and also, in the Electoral College (the extra House-connected votes and the two extra Senate-connected votes, which created a small but undemocratic degree of equality between the small states and the big states).

When Donald Trump needed a new Secretary of Veterans Affairs in 2018, the position was filled by Robert Wilkie, who had a history of involvement with the Neo-Confederate movement. In 2020 Trump passionately opposed re-naming military bases named after Confederate military leaders, including one such leader responsible for the incident when Black POWs were executed. In 2017 Trump, talking about the Civil War, said that the former 1800s President Andrew Jackson would have handled the slavery issue better than Lincoln did and the Civil War would have been avoided. Jackson was a passionate opponent of abolitionists and likely would have compromised with the South, meaning slavery could have continued with (at most) minor changes to its geographic scope and/or lifetime, and/or there may have been minor changes in how slaves were treated. Or he may have done absolutely nothing about slavery — if it were up to Trump, I believe slavery might still exist today, especially since Trump said roughly the same thing in January 2024 that he said in 2017.

Trump is a Neo-Confederate. And what makes it even more glaring is that he is usually very quick to dismiss people who lose — apparently his positive opinion of what the Confederacy did is great enough to compensate for the fact that they lost.

Tom Shelley lives in Gunbarrell.