Missouri Senator Urges Trump to Award Medal of Freedom to Conservative Stalwart Buchanan

Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., has written to President Donald Trump expressing support for awarding Pat Buchanan the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Schmitt joins other conservative movement leaders asking Trump to honor Buchanan with the nation’s highest civilian honor awarded by the president. Public advocates for Buchanan have included Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va.

Notable recent recipients of the medal include Apple co-founder Steve Jobs, Olympic gymnast Simone Biles, anthropologist Jane Goodall, and Pope Francis. 

In his letter, Schmitt describes Buchanan as “a courageous intellectual and political trailblazer.” The Missouri senator praised the adviser to three Republican presidents, three-time presidential candidate, and founder of The American Conservative magazine for “challenging the elite consensus on behalf of the Americans he famously described as the ‘conservatives of the heart’—the working men and women who shared our beliefs and convictions, but had been abandoned by both parties in Washington.”

Buchanan, now 86, was an adviser to Presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford and served as White House communications director from 1985 to 1987 under President Ronald Reagan. He is also known for his three presidential bids in 1992, 1996, and 2000. After losing the Republican presidential nomination in 1992, Buchanan delivered a speech at that year’s Republican National Convention about America’s culture war that arguably proved prescient about American society for decades to come.

“There is a religious war going on in this country. It is a cultural war, as critical to the kind of nation we shall be as the Cold War itself. For this war is for the soul of America,” Buchanan declared in his 1992 address. 

Schmitt’s letter states that Buchanan’s commentary was a precursor to the MAGA movement that would propel Trump to the White House.

“His prolific columns, books, speeches, and television appearances reminded countless ordinary Americans that they were not alone in their beliefs—and provided the intellectual scaffolding for the America First movement that would go on to reshape the Republican Party under your [Trump’s] leadership,” the Missouri senator wrote. 

Buchanan made another unsuccessful presidential bid in 1996, failing to beat Sen. Bob Dole, R-Kan., who went on to lose the general election to Democrat Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton. In 2000, Buchanan made his final presidential run as a member of the Reform Party, a political group founded by American businessman Ross Perot and which briefly also included Trump among its ranks. Buchanan co-founded the influential noninterventionist magazine The American Conservative in 2002. Its contributors have included conservative leaders like now-Vice President JD Vance and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky.

“In awarding him with our nation’s highest civilian honor, you [Trump] would not only be recognizing the service of one man, but vindicating the cause he fought for—a cause which finally found its champion in your person. Such an honor would formally affirm that Mr. Buchanan is one of the great patriots of our time—a man who championed the forgotten Americans and laid the intellectual groundwork for the political realignment you led,” Schmitt explained. 

In a time of arguably ascendent Catholic influence on American political life, Buchanan was also a prominent member of the faith for decades in the public square.

“I think the Catholic faith is consistent with the kind of conservatism I believe in. You know, I’m a traditionalist, I’m a Latin Mass Catholic, and I hold to traditional views of responsibility,” Buchanan told the Jesuits’ America magazine in 2014.