The More Moore Background Comes Out, the Less Wes Looks Like a Contender

I don’t know if everyone dreams of being president one day. 

Surely that’s part of the American legend. A Rockwell painting if there ever was one, as a mother leans down to soothe her child, sobbing through some sort of grade school disappointment or another. A ‘D’ visible on a crumpled piece of paper, held in a still chubby young hand, tears staining cheeks, sweaty and dirty from the after-school walk home.

‘Oh, little Johnny,’ (as they were all named), she’d coo. ‘You can still be president someday.’

And she kissed his head.

You just know the little guy would sniffle a minute longer, and, rubbing that dirty hand under his nose, nod the teensiest bit.

All his dreams of Oval Office glory were restored when his mom told him to go wash his hot little face and hands, and she’d have an Ovaltine waiting in the kitchen.

It was going to be alright.

Besides, by next week Johnny would be a cowboy when he grew up. They didn’t need ‘grades.’

Just a horse, a campfire and the wide open spaces.

That’s how most American kids’ dreams of presidential glory run. Those fleeting dreams don’t die as much as morph into the next thing they’re interested in because there’s so much in this wide world to do.

But there are a hyperobsessed, driven few, for whom nothing but 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue will suffice as an address in their lifetime, and everything they’ve done in life has been calculated to get there.

One such focused individual springs immediately to mind.

Happy birthday to this future president. pic.twitter.com/JT3HiBjYdj

— Hillary Clinton (@HillaryClinton) October 26, 2016

Came close, but no cigar.

At least she did get to live there for a while.

There are others who seem to have had similar aspirations, always climbing that ladder, eyes on the prize.

OBAMA: “The other side does the mean, angry, exclusive, us/them, divisive politics. That’s their home court. Our court is coming together.”pic.twitter.com/9Ph6hxHzUz

— Brandon Straka #WalkAway (@BrandonStraka) February 14, 2026

Then reluctant to let go gracefully once they attained it. Almost as if they felt it should have been their natural right.

When you’ve spent your whole life in pursuit, I guess everything afterwards is a bit of a letdown.

I wonder now, about some of those in pursuit – how far back do those dreams of the presidency go for them, and what they are willing to do to reach that pinnacle.

One of those guys whose name is often mentioned as ‘presidential’ is Governor Wes Moore of Maryland, and he carries himself so effortlessly well that you can see the confidence oozing from every pore. This is a guy who has goals, has achieved many of them, and feels he is on his way.

Many observers of the Democratic Party and politics in general apparently feel the same way. 

But, holy smokescreen – the question concerning his achievements is really becoming ‘has he’?

Moore is not some blustering buffoon like the risible Tim Walz, whom no one paid a lick of attention to until, in her quest for testosterone, Kamala Harris inexplicably chose the Minnesota meathead as her running mate. Walz’s stories of battlefield glory, part of the reason for Harris’s tapping him, fell apart from the very beginning, and he was devastated by his National Guard unit members coming forward to torpedo his flimsy explanations and excuses.

Moore’s trajectory has been different. Johns Hopkins grad, Rhodes scholar, decorated Army veteran, tall and imposing figure, and White House aide. Dream resume.

Or was.

The problem with resumes, regardless of how handsome you are or smart intellectually, is that they get more scrutiny the higher up you go in politics, and the larger your public (and potential) profile becomes.

There were already issues with Moore’s claim that he had earned a Bronze Star in Afghanistan, as his military records reflected no such award. Moore explained that he’d checked with his deputy commander, who’d said to include it on the application for the White House fellowship, as it had been approved up the chain, and it was just a matter of time.

The Biden Secretary of the Army apparently made sure to right what appeared to be an inadvertent administrative error, and Moore got his Bronze Star.

…In a statement, the governor wrote that he had been encouraged to fill out the application for the fellowship by his deputy brigade commander serving overseas in the Army. At the time, Moore said the deputy brigade commander had recommended him for the Bronze Star — and told him to include the award on his application “after confirming with two other senior-level officers that they had also signed off on the commendation.”

A year ago, they made sure that Moore’s chest had that bronze star. 

…The private ceremony at the governor’s residence in Annapolis, Maryland, on Friday was confirmed by the governor’s office.

Lt. Gen. Michael Fenzel, the governor’s close friend and former commander who had recommended Moore for the medal, pinned the Bronze Star for “meritorious service” onto the governor’s chest at the ceremony, The Washington Post reported.

Then, in December, someone thought to ask Oxford where the governor’s graduate thesis was.

Oxford said, ‘Damned if we know. Ask him.‘

Well, the Washington Free Beacon did and got called racist for their trouble, which is never a good sign. And so far, no thesis.

….Last month, a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon asked Rhodes Scholar Moore (I told you he was smart – Johns Hopkins grad, too) for a copy of his Oxford University master’s thesis. This thesis is the basis of Moore’s claim on that application that he was considered a ‘foremost expert on radical Islam.’

Well. Things get really squirrely after that.

Neither Moore nor the Bodleian Library at Oxford has this thesis. And his ‘graduation dates’ are all over the map.

Now, seven months later, just like a bad penny, the hue of the metal on that medal is coming back to haunt Wes Moore.

Keep in mind how the Biden administration’s Sec. of Defence, Christine Wormuth, made sure – at the request of Moore’s friend, the general – that the governor got the performance award he reportedly had earned but not received while in theatre.

A picture of Captain Wes Moore receiving his performance award – receiving it (!) – in Afghanistan has been published by The Baltimore Sun. Capt Moore has just had a medal pinned to his chest, only it’s not the Bronze Star he claims he earned – it’s an Army Commendation Medal. 

I mean, it’s still a nice personal award, but it’s definitely a step below.

On Mar. 1, 2006 — just days before the headquarters of the 1st Brigade, 82nd Airborne Division, completed its deployment to Afghanistan — Capt. Wes Moore stood in formation at Forward Operating Base Salerno for an end-of-tour awards ceremony.

The brigade’s commander, then-Col.… pic.twitter.com/nK2EXUDYMK

— The Baltimore Sun (@baltimoresun) June 28, 2026

…The brigade’s commander, then-Col. Patrick J. Donahue, trooped the line, presenting military medals and badges to soldiers and officers. Each award citation was read aloud by an announcer.

When Donahue stopped in front of Moore, the award presented to him was not a Bronze Star Medal.

Holy smokes, what have we here?

…A photograph provided to Spotlight on Maryland by retired Army Lt. Col. James “Jamie” Gottschling, Moore’s first-line supervisor during the deployment, shows Moore standing in formation with the medal pinned to his desert uniform.

“The picture clearly shows Moore receiving an ARCOM, not a Bronze Star,” Gottschling said.

That photograph now sits at the center of a controversy Moore has carried since 2022: his repeated claim that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan. A claim he made to a White House Fellows selection committee and intentionally allowed to stand publicly for nearly two decades without correction.

In a three-hour sit-down interview, Gottschling told Spotlight the photograph and the ceremony confirm what he has known since first seeing Moore’s military falsehoods in news coverage.

“I knew this day would come. It’s been on my mind for years.”

According to the LtCol, it made perfect sense for the ARCOM because Moore had only been with the unit for half of the deployment. He hadn’t done a full unit tour and noted that a major in a similar situation to Moore’s also received the same award.

…Gottschling, 57, said he has spent years watching Moore’s public accounts of his Afghanistan service grow farther from what he knew Moore actually did while working for him at FOB Salerno.

Spotlight asked why Moore received the ARCOM and not the Bronze Star.

“He was junior and he did not do the entire deployment. He did about half. That would make sense…length of service matters,” Gottschling said.

When Gottschling was asked if Moore — despite his shorter tenure in Afghanistan — did anything in his view that would have merited a Bronze Star, he said he did not.

“The Bronze Star without valor is a meritorious-service award in a combat zone. For a field-grade officer [major through colonel] in a yearlong deployment, it might be relatively standard. For a junior brigade staff officer there for half the deployment, I would say there is virtually nothing he could have done in that job to justify a Bronze Star in the normal course.”

Gottschling also told Spotlight about an infantry major he knew in the brigade — a field grade officer — who, like Moore, was not there for the full deployment. He also received an ARCOM as his end-of-tour award.

And the man who later became a general and then hotfooted it up to SecWormuth to get Moore the Bronze Star he claimed he had?

It very much sounds as if he was massaging Moore’s resume rather than righting a wrong.

…The ARCOM revelation also creates a problem for retired Army Lt. Gen. Michael R. Fenzel, Moore’s friend and mentor, who arranged Moore’s deployment to Afghanistan and led the effort with the Army to orchestrate Moore’s retroactive Bronze Star award in 2024.

Fenzel, who was a lieutenant colonel in 2006, has made inconsistent statements supporting the claim that paperwork for the Bronze Star had been lost and that Moore should have departed Afghanistan with the award.

Fenzel told The New York Times in Aug. 2024 that he told Moore that he and others had approved the Bronze Star and that Moore should include it in his White House Fellows application. In the same article, Fenzel also claimed he saw a fully approved Bronze Star application, a DA Form 638 Recommendation for Award, for Moore.

“I had never seen it signed by all of the appropriate individuals and then not be processed,” Fenzel said.

But Fenzel later gave a different account to U.S. Marine veteran and author, Rye Barcott, for his 2026 book, “Courage Can Save Us,” claiming Moore’s Bronze Star had been approved by verbal orders confirmation, or “VOCO” in military terminology.

Army awards are not approved by voice communication. Under federal law and Army regulation, an award does not legally exist until an official, written, permanent order is published and signed by an authorized approving authority.

Spotlight has found no evidence supporting either claim — and the photograph of Moore receiving the Army Commendation Medal calls Fenzel’s explanations into question.

The picture proves the lie.

And Moore went along with it.

I am gobsmacked at this.

Editor’s Note: The Democrat Party has never been less popular as voters reject its globalist agenda.

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