Wes Moore was expected to be a historic figure after being elected the first black governor of Maryland in 2022. The Washington Post, evidently sensing that Moore might be the second coming of Barack Obama, ran a rare banner headline celebrating his inauguration in January of 2023. Coming from a famously left-wing state where he seemed unlikely to meet much resistance from the overwhelmingly Democratic legislature, a glide path to the 2028 presidential race seemed to be in the cards, but to say many a roadblock has arisen on his way to the White House would be an understatement.
Though no one seems to fully understand why, Donald Trump has a bee in his bonnet about Gov. Moore, specifically excluding him from his recent meeting with governors of both parties, saying he was “unworthy” of inclusion. He then castigated Moore over his “gross mismanagement,” which led to one of the largest sewage spills in American history in the Potomac River, even though it is, by law, a federally regulated body of water. The president said in a social media post that he "cannot allow incompetent Local ‘Leadership’ to turn the River in the Heart of Washington into a Disaster Zone. … There is a massive Ecological Disaster unfolding in the Potomac River as a result of the Gross Mismanagement of Local Democrat Leaders, particularly, Governor Wes Moore, of Maryland."
But that is hardly the only controversy surrounding Gov. Moore.
Wes Moore – A Tim Walz Redux?
Fabulism is a word often associated with politicians. It means inflating or embellishing your resume or simply making things up that you believe will attract voters. The most prominent example of recent vintage is Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, who, as the VP nominee for Kamala Harris, made demonstrably false claims about his military record, about being in Tiananmen Square during the uprising there in 1989, and even regarding his time as a football coach. And now Moore has a similar problem.
Putting his relationship with Trump aside, in applying for a White House fellowship during the George W. Bush administration in 2006 following a one-year deployment for the Army to Afghanistan, Moore declared in his ultimately successful application that, "As a Rhodes Scholar, I took advantage of the opportunity and examined radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere … my research has led me to be touted as one of the foremost experts on the threat." But in the small world of scholars of Islam in the West, his name had never popped up, as reported by the Washington Free Beacon in its article entitled “Wes Moore 2028 Drowning in River of Bulls--t.” Moore claimed to have been a doctoral candidate after he received his master's degree, but his thesis has never been produced, and there's no evidence he was ever a doctoral student.
Gov. Moore also claimed that he had been inducted into the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame, an organization that doesn't exist; that he received a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, which he had not; and that he was born in Baltimore, which he was not. He claimed to have had "a difficult childhood in the Bronx and Baltimore" despite attending New York City's elite, private Riverdale Country School – which John F. Kennedy attended. It turns out he was actually born in Takoma Park, MD, a comfortable DC suburb.
Moore’s Biggest Whopper of All
Beyond those episodes of shameless and dishonest self-promotion comes Moore’s most spectacular debunked claim, which he first made in his 2014 memoir and has since made repeatedly. In an apparent effort to claim some measure of victimhood, he says that his great-grandfather, Rev. J.J. Thomas, was forced to leave South Carolina in the 1920s with his family in the middle of the night due to threats from the KKK and fled to Jamaica. But detailed records from the archive of the Episcopal Church where he preached indicate that his great-grandfather made an orderly and public transfer from South Carolina, and contemporaneous reports from the time include no record or mention of trouble with the Klan.
So, having been called out by the president and conservative journalists doing the work elite media refuses to do, Moore has now resorted to what might be called the last refuge of fabulists: the race card. While refusing to actually call Trump a racist, Moore all but declared to the the Associated Press on Wednesday that the president is exactly that: “We’re talking about a person who has been sued from his earliest days from his treatment of Black tenants … one of the originators of birtherism … a person who has now spent his time trying to ban books about Black history … who has spent his time now doing the greatest assault on unemployment of Black women in our nation’s history.”
Even the one element of Moore’s governorship that figured to be a lock, the full support of Maryland’s progressive legislature, has not gone well. In an attempt to appear relatively moderate in the run-up to 2028, the Maryland governor vetoed a number of bills that would have made him look excessively left-wing if he had signed them. But legislators have overridden a whopping 19 of his vetoes, including one on reparations that sparked particular anger in the legislature, as revealed on Thursday by Axios and now making its way into broader political circles.
Guard the Silverware
For all the talk about his blackness, it’s not like Moore has broken some kind of glass ceiling. Barack Obama served eight years as president. And in 1990, across the Potomac River in Virginia, Doug Wilder became the first African American to serve as governor of a U.S. state since the Reconstruction era. Deval Patrick was elected in 2007 and served two terms as the chief executive of Massachusetts. David Paterson (no relation to LN’s National Security Correspondent) ascended to the governorship of New York in 2008 following the scandal-induced resignation of Eliot Spitzer.
In an interview with CBS News, Moore declared that he is "a person of honor and integrity" who was "raised right" by his family. This brings to mind a couple of old tropes. The first is the warning about a person you invite to dinner who speaks glowingly and gratuitously about his own honesty, which should lead you to “guard the silverware.” And Gov. Wes Moore is learning the hard way about the second one: Oh, what a tangled web we weave when we practice to deceive. The question is whether his naked and repeated fabulism over many years will be enough by itself to derail his hopes of becoming the leader of the free world.
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