WASHINGTON Donald Trump is running for a second term as president of the United States, but in recent weeks hes spoken and written as if he wants to be the next president of the Confederacy.

Amid a national uproar over the recent killing of a Black man by a white Minneapolis police officer and an erosion in his own polling numbers, Trump has made the cornerstone of his response a vow to protect monuments and memorials to the leaders of the treasonous rebellion that cost 750,000 lives for the sole purpose of keeping Blacks enslaved.

In speeches, Trump has vowed to protect our heritage as protesters around the country call for the removal of memorials to Confederate leaders. He has even threatened to veto a major defense bill that includes a provision requiring renaming military bases that now honor Confederate commanders.

These Monumental and very Powerful Bases have become part of a Great American Heritage, Trump wrote in a June 10 statement he posted to Twitter.

Trump has even ordered Interior Secretary David Bernhardt to restore a statue of Confederate Gen. Albert Pike that had been torn down by protesters in Washington, D.C., according to NBC News .

He obviously thinks it plays with his base, said David Axelrod, the Democratic consultant who led the campaign of the first African American president, Barack Obama , in 2008.

In 2017, after neo-Nazis marched in Charlottesville, Virginia, and a counterprotester was killed when one of them drove his car into a crowd, Trump defended them for wanting to protect a statue of Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee and said that there had been very fine people on both sides of the violent rally. In 2019, Trump called Lee a great general.

White House officials would not respond to HuffPost queries about Trumps interest in the Confederacys heritage.

Rick Wilson, a GOP consultant from Florida who has been making ads for the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, said Trump is misreading the politics of the moment. He said an ad centered on the Confederacy called Flag of Treason is one of the most popular his group has made and aired.

He added that former Breitbart News publisher Steve Bannon, who ran Trumps 2016 campaign in its final months and was a top White House aide in Trumps first year, was the likely source of Trumps continued support for all things Confederate.

Bannon sold him on the whites are 62% of the electorate, and we need to simply top out their numbers to win argument very early, Wilson said of Trump. Plus, hes a racist.

Bannon did not respond to HuffPosts queries for this story.

Trumps Confederate Base

Though the president who freed the slaves during the Civil War was nominated by the party created specifically for that purpose, Republicans began courting Southern Democrats angry about legislation designed to help Blacks after the 1954 Supreme Court ruling in Brown v. Board of Education that led to the integration of public schools. The process accelerated following Lyndon Johnsons push for the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and then was formalized in Richard Nixons Southern Strategy in 1968.

Since then, Republicans have successfully relied on the former Confederacy as an electoral base for presidential campaigns, and Trump was no different.

In 2016, while the 11 former Confederate states accounted for 32% of the countrys population, they made up 48% of Trumps electoral votes, according to a HuffPost analysis of voting and population data.

Trump beat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton 147 to 13 in electoral votes from those states and won the popular vote 52% to 44%. Among the non-Confederate states, Clinton beat Trump 219 to 159 in electoral votes and won the popular vote 50% to 43%.

Overall, Clinton won the popular vote 48% to 46%, winning 3 million more actual ballots, but she lost in the Electoral College 306 to 232.

Yet Trumps vocal enthusiasm for monuments to the Confederacy, while it could help maintain support among a segment of his voting base, may well be turning off other groups.

Support for removing Confederate monuments has grown from 27%, according to a Reuters poll in 2017, to 52%, according to a Quinnipiac University poll last week.

The week before that, NASCAR long a bastion of fans waving Confederate flags and other iconography banned the symbol from its races. And Mississippi, which includes a Confederate battle flag in the upper left quadrant of its state flag, is moving toward changing it.