‘One Big, Beautiful Bill’: The Pickett’s Charge of Trumpism

We are living through the second revival of the Great Lost Cause.

Print of General Pickett, on horseback, receiving orders from a resigned General Longstreet, at the battle of Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, July 3, 1863 | Jones Brothers & Company-Ogden, Henry Alexander, 1900, Library of Congress

When I grew up in Mississippi, the Fourth of July was a muted holiday. July 4, 1863, was the day Vicksburg fell to Grant. On July 3, 1863, the 11th Mississippi Regiment, with the University Grays of the University of Mississippi, led Pickett's Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg. They reached the stone wall of the Union defenses, the furthest advance of Lee's army. The Mississippi casualty rate was 90 percent. The Flag captured that day belonged to the 11th Mississippi Regiment, now on display at Richmond's Museum of the Confederacy.

In the living room of my house in Vermont is a large wooden chest that a relative used to pack belongings when moving into the Vicksburg caves that served as bomb shelters during the siege. On the inside of the top, my many-times-great-aunt marked each day of the siege with a precise line carved into the hardwood. There are 47 lines.

I've been thinking a lot about those days in 1863, a hinge in history that changed the world, as did another summer day in 1944 on the beaches of Normandy. If my ancestors had prevailed, what kind of country would we have today?

Strangely and sadly, the Trump-led Republican Party is trying desperately to answer that question. It was Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi of the 39th New York Infantry who captured the 11th Mississippi Regiment's flag at that stone wall in Gettysburg, where the Confederacy began to die. Today, another New Yorker is fighting to reverse the Union victory by reviving the glory and values of the Confederacy.

At its core, Trump and Trumpism are rooted in the assumption that America is divided into a permanent natural order of racial classes, with whites, of course, at the top. Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi fought with the Garibaldi Guard, a collection of immigrants named for Giuseppe Garibaldi, the hero of the battles that unified Italy. The defeat of the Confederacy made possible the country that welcomed immigrants and tried to uphold the values that "all men are created equal," enshrined in a document signed on another July 4, four score and seven years earlier.

The Confederacy was founded by wealthy white men desperate to hold on to their power and secure their fortunes. In 1860, Mississippi was the fifth-wealthiest state in the nation. By 1866, it was the poorest state and remains so today. Trumpism is driven by wealthy white men desperate to hold on to their power and secure their fortunes. As was the case with the Confederacy, they have convinced enough non-wealthy whites to join them in their battles to create a powerful movement.

With the passage of the Republicans' "Big Beautiful Bill," it is the foot soldiers of Trumpism who will suffer, just as almost all of the 280,000 Southerners who died fighting for the cause of wealthy men were poor. The states of the old Confederacy depend most upon the federal government that they tried to destroy. The ultimate Welfare Queens are states like Mississippi, South Carolina, and Louisiana that receive upwards of 40% of their state budgets from Washington. Slash Medicaid, close Social Security offices, strangle the VA health system, and who is hurt the most? Poor people.

Just as the slave-owning white planter class would have benefited the most from a Confederate victory, so it is with the wealthy in Trump's Confederacy. The rich will pay less in taxes. Medicaid could end tomorrow, and it would not affect their families. They have private, "concierge" medical care. When Trump's moronic Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said that his 94-year-old mother-in-law would "wouldn't call and complain" if she didn't get her Social Security check, he was being honest. The closing of Social Security offices will not affect her or the lives of wealthy individuals.

When the Supreme Court allowed states to ban abortion, it was only a ban that applied to the non-rich. If Ivanka Trump needs an abortion, Florida laws are not going to stop her from flying on a private jet to seek medical care. Walk through any VA hospital and count the millionaires. Good luck; you won't find many.

Sometimes when I have posted a rant against Trumpism on social media, some MAGA wag will shoot back a variation of "Cry your heart out, you lost." They don't get it. Odds are pretty good their life is being negatively impacted by their vote, while, ironically, Trump seems determined to improve my standard of living. I could stand in front of a Home Depot in South L.A. for the next year, and ICE would not go after me. I'm the same color as the Crayola crayons I grew up with labeled "Flesh." And if they did try to detain me, I could lawyer up with more legal talent than Sean Combs.

My hatred of Trump and Trumpism isn't about me, but it is about a loved one called America. We are living through the second revival of the Great Lost Cause, that nostalgia for a world in which the purpose of organized society was to make life better for white people. I'm named for a relative who was named for the Confederate cavalry general Jeb Stuart. He was a traitor, just like the seven Confederate generals whom Trump, the draft-dodging Yankee, hails as heroes.

I believe we will look back on July 4, 2025, as the Pickett's Charge of Trumpism. There are more decent Americans standing on the same side of the wall as Sergeant Ferdinando Maggi than on the side where my relatives died trying to preserve slavery. There will be bad, awful days ahead, more dark defeats for liberty like the Battle of Chickamauga, but J.D. Vance is wrong: America is an idea with extraordinary power. America will continue to welcome the children of first-generation immigrants like Usha Bala Chilukuri Vance, despite the hate of their fathers.

We are right and Trumpism is wrong. There are more of us than them. On this Fourth of July weekend, let us celebrate the July 4 victories of 1776 and 1863 and go forward with the confidence and courage that the evil of Trumpism will die the same fate as the evil of slavery.

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