Rep. Riley Moore (R-WV) sent a letter to President Donald Trump Thursday urging him to award Patrick J. Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom, The American Conservative has learned.
“Honoring Patrick J. Buchanan with the Presidential Medal of Freedom would recognize his role as one of the truest patriots of the past century,” Moore told TAC in an exclusive statement. “His unrelenting focus on the forgotten men and women of America paved the way for President Trump’s America First Movement. He was right about pretty much everything 20 years before most people realized it and should be honored for defending the American worker, family, and our national sovereignty.”
In the letter, available in full here, Moore praised Buchanan for his “clear-eyed warnings about porous borders, deindustrialization, foreign entanglements, and the decline of traditional values” and detailed his storied career from young editorial writer to senior White House advisor to three-time presidential candidate. Moore highlighted Buchanan’s influence on U.S. foreign policy as both a voice for peace and an aide to the former Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan.
“Though he never held elected office, his influence in shaping public conversation and awakening the political consciousness of millions is undeniable,” Moore wrote in the letter to Trump. “He was the America First movement’s early watchman, sounding the alarm long before others could see the storm.”
“Through The American Conservative, the American Cause, and his decades of commentary, Mr. Buchanan helped shift the political terrain, bringing once-taboo ideas into the mainstream,” Moore continued in the letter. “Together with his wife Shelley, herself a longtime White House staffer, he has lived a life of service, principle, and unshakable patriotism.”
During his first term, Trump awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to more than 20 individuals, both posthumously and during their lifetimes. They included Elvis Presley, Tiger Woods, and Rush Limbaugh. Trump has yet to indicate who is on the short list to receive medals during his second term.
Moore is not the first person to call for Buchanan to receive nation’s highest civilian honor. Calls for Buchanan to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom have appeared on TAC’s own digital pages as recently as 2024. (Buchanan cofounded TAC in 2002.) In January, First Things’ editor Rusty Reno declared that Buchanan should be at the top of Trump’s list for Presidential Medal of Freedom recipients: “He has been denounced as racist, fascist, and ‘extreme right’ by all the Good People—just like our incoming president.” The commentator Auron MacIntyre praised Buchanan as “the most prominent paleoconservative in American politics” in a May podcast titled “Let’s Build a Statue Honoring Pat Buchanan.” A prolific author who retired from writing in 2023, Buchanan has been identified by many Gen Z conservatives—who have no memory of his famous 1992 “culture war speech” at the Republican National Convention, as they weren’t even born—as a major influence on their political views.
“Not blessed with children, Buchanan has only ideological heirs,” National Review’s Michael Brendan Dougherty wrote in a column commemorating Buchanan’s retirement. “Why was he so different from other conservative columnists? His writing was not spiffy like George Will’s, or sweetly decorated like Peggy Noonan’s. In some ways, his style seemed at odds with his own intellect. Buchanan is a pessimist about Western civilization, deeply haunted by Oswald Spengler’s Decline of the West. And yet, his writing evinced a boyish thrill at the cut and thrust of daily politics.”
Both Trump and Buchanan were familiar figures on American television for decades. Mainstream media was delighted to point out that Trump wasn’t always a Buchanan fan after the president quoted him in a social media post in 2019. But as Gabe Guidarini wrote in TAC earlier in 2025, the president hasn’t been afraid to make references to Buchanan on the campaign trail.
“You know there was a man, Pat Buchanan, a good guy, a conservative guy,” he told a crowd of supporters in 2023.
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