Within seconds of taking the stage for a town hall at the Crown Arena in Fayetteville on Friday evening, former President Donald Trump vowed to change the name of nearby Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg if he is reelected.

"I walked in — the first question that I asked — should we turn the name Fort Liberty, back to Fort Bragg? First question," he said to cheers from the crowd. "Right, so here's what we do — we get elected, I'm doing it. I'm doing it.

"And we're leading in all the polls. We should get elected. But remember this, they cheat like hell. We gotta … too big to rig, we need too big to rig."

The storied Army installation heralded as home of the airborne and special operations forces, was renamed Fort Liberty in June 2023. The change came amid the redesignations of nine posts named for Confederate soldiers whose ranks lost to the Union Army during the U.S. Civil War. Fort Bragg was named for Confederate Gen. Braxton Bragg who was a slave owner and lost battles during the Civil War.

"We did win two world wars from Fort Bragg, right?" Trump continued, "so this is … this is no time to be changing names. But we're gonna do that. We're going to do everything we can. We're gonna get it back. We're gonna bring our country back."

Some 20 minutes into the town hall, a person who identified himself only as Austin, "an active-duty soldier here at Fort Liberty," was booed by the crowd until the moderator, Anna Paulina Luna, Republican U.S. representative to Congress from Florida, corrected him.

"He meant Fort Bragg, right," she said.

Austin explained he was at the town hall in a personal capacity and asked Trump about creating an Iron Dome for America like Israel has. The name refers to Israel's detection and tracking radar for incoming enemy rockets.

Trump said he would consider a program like that for the U.S. but before returning to the topic, he revisited the idea of changing Fort Liberty's name.

"I think I just learned the secret to winning absolutely and by massive margins. I'm gonna promise you, as I said at the beginning, that we're gonna change the name back to Fort Bragg," Trump said, "because, I think when that word gets out I just see this great-looking soldier just accidentally said Fort Liberty and he got almost booed the hell out of the place."