Conservative icon Pat Buchanan has been recommended by Sen. Eric Schmitt, R-Mo., for the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
Schmitt wrote Saturday in a letter to President Donald Trump that Buchanan, 86, who served as White House communications director in the Reagan administration and was a three-time presidential candidate, has been “a courageous intellectual and political trailblazer” for more than a half-century.
“While he never held political office, Mr. Buchanan has had a profound influence on America,” Schmitt wrote. “His three presidential campaigns, though ridiculed and attacked by the establishment, proved that millions of Americans hungered for the very ideas and policies that you championed in your historic road to victory two decades later.
“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 leadership.”
Schmitt joins a growing list of conservatives who are urging Trump to present the award to Buchanan, including Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts and Rep. Riley Moore, R-W.Va., as well as the Center for Renewing America and the New York Young Republican Club.
“Mr. Buchanan was a prophetic voice on the defining issues of our time: immigration, trade, foreign policy, and the ‘cultural war’ that the Left was waging in America,” Schmitt wrote. “While these issues were ignored or dismissed for decades by Washington, they were all too real for Americans in towns like the one I grew up in. As I noted in a speech I gave urging support for your America First trade reforms earlier this year, the elite consensus that both you and Mr. Buchanan opposed ‘sent our children and our wealth overseas to defend the borders of distant nations, while throwing open our own borders to a tidal wave of mass migration here at home.’
“That is precisely why Mr. Buchanan’s message resonated with millions of Americans: His unapologetic defense of the American worker, the American family, and the sovereignty of the American nation spoke for them and their interests, when no one else would.”
Schmitt wrote that the award would vindicate the cause for which Buchanan has long fought.
“A cause which finally found its champion in your person,” he wrote. “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.”
Trump awarded the medal 24 times in his first term, the fewest of any president. The honor was created by President John F. Kennedy in February 1963, months before his assassination. Although Trump has yet to present it in his second term, he said last week he will award the medal to former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani after his longtime political ally was seriously injured in a car crash in New Hampshire.
Newsmax reached out to the White House for comment.
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