The Preacher

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Governor Wes Moore doesn’t care about saving the Democratic Party; if anything, he thinks it has stood in his way. When we met up in May, he quoted Jay-Z: “Industry shady, it need to be taken over.” The 2001 track is about Jay-Z’s rise to fame, and the ways the recording industry tried to exploit and co-opt him because he was “raisin’ the status quo up.” Moore was talking about a failed political system, and a Democratic Party that, he told me, “tried as hard as they could to get me not to run.” Jay-Z describes himself as a “renegade,” and Moore would like to be seen in a similar light—as the outsider who got himself to the top.

Moore is the first Black governor of Maryland and the only Black governor serving in America today. At 47, he’s a relative newcomer to politics—he was the head of Robin Hood, a poverty-fighting foundation, until 2021—but he’s already being discussed as a possible presidential candidate in 2028. He’s just the kind of Bronze Star–winning, God-praising, son-of-an-immigrant Rhodes Scholar whom many Democratic voters would see as a dream candidate (although he denied to me that he was considering running). But so far, his tenure as governor has been far from smooth.

In May 2025, he surprised many people by vetoing a bill establishing a commission to study the economic effects of slavery and racism on the state’s citizens and to recommend policies that could include reparations. Black legislators were outraged, and the Maryland General Assembly eventually overrode his veto. Moore defended his decision by dismissing the commission as a body conducting mere academic research, when what people needed was real change: “I am not a believer in studies, commissions,” he told me. “I’m like, Are we doing the work or not?” He pointed to big investments in HBCUs and a mass pardon for cannabis convictions as proof of his progressive accomplishments.

[Richard D. Kahlenberg: The Democrats can’t let go of racial preferences]

Moore likes to portray himself as an independent actor, beholden to no one. He has signed legislation that prevents 16- and 17-year-olds from being tried as adults for some crimes, and also increased funding for the police. He has, he boasted to me, vetoed “more bills than any Democratic governor in the history of the state of Maryland” because he doesn’t believe in passing “unfunded mandates.” And he doesn’t care whether the party likes it or not: “I didn’t win because of the Democratic Party,” he said. “I won in spite of the Democratic Party.” He added: “I don’t come from nothing, and I didn’t need nothing, and I’m not owned by anybody. When I’m making my decisions, there is no party boss that I call.”

Although this message seems tailor-made for this moment, in which so many Americans are simultaneously highly partisan yet disgusted by both parties, Moore’s approval rating in Maryland has fallen below 50 percent for the first time. (He’s still expected to win easily in the November election—he won 88 percent of the vote in the June primary, and one of his staffers shared with me an internal poll that found a higher approval rating.) He’s facing a number of challenges, particularly the dogged perception that he lacks authenticity—that he hasn’t been honest about who he really is.

Moore has a politician’s powder-white smile and a bald head that shines like glass. I met him this spring, in Selma, Alabama, where he’d gone to commemorate the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, when about 600 civil-rights marchers were attacked on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. He began the weekend with a speech at Brown Chapel AME Church. “I know we are built for this, because I know what we are built of,” he told the mostly Black crowd. He listed heroes of the civil-rights movement and then said, “This is our time,” holding up his index finger like a Baptist preacher. Everywhere he went, lines formed. And he played his role perfectly.

A bear hug for Governor J. B. Pritzker of Illinois. A selfie for a Black teenager with braces. “Good morning! Good morning! Good morning! How’s everybody doin’?” Then, pulling on the words like a southerner: “Alllll riiiiiight.” An hour or so later, at the Historic Tabernacle Baptist Church, his words tipped toward preaching: “I know where my worthiness comes from, and it does not come from Washington, D.C.”

A few weeks later, on the Baltimore Orioles’ Opening Day, he stepped out of a black SUV wearing an orange jersey with his name on the back, and a man rushed up to him: “Sign my baseball for when you run for president.”

“Not going to happen,” Moore quickly responded—while signing his name.

Over the next few months, I watched Moore go from boat ride to baseball game to matcha tasting to college-graduation speech. In every situation, he knew exactly who to be. By the time he quoted Jay-Z to me, I understood that he had me pegged, too.

Don Smallwood for The AtlanticMoore and his wife, Dawn, speaking to families at their official residence in June.

I was fascinated by Moore’s ability to adapt to his different audiences. I grew up having to do the same, and although I appreciate that I can connect with people from both elite and underprivileged backgrounds, I wish I were as much of a natural as he is. Even as a journalist at The Atlantic, I still find myself sometimes intimidated, my voice trembling. Moore moved like water.

But this may be one reason some voters struggle to trust him. When I asked people I know in Maryland, many of them Black, what they think of the governor, I heard things such as He doesn’t say what he means and We don’t know what his agenda is. They thought it was weird that he won without having any political experience. That distrust has been fueled by persistent negative reporting from conservative media outlets.

At the Orioles game, a white man in a USA shirt said, “I appreciate you, Gov,” as Moore autographed his collection of baseball cards. Then Moore walked onto the field, and many people in the stadium booed. He smiled and clapped for himself, and seemed to take no notice of the crowd’s displeasure.

About that Bronze Star.

Moore has been accused of making what The Washington Free Beacon called “a litany of false statements about his family history, his upbringing, and his academic, athletic, and military achievements.” The accusations range from minor to significant, and begin with his hometown. The text on the back cover of his 2010 book, The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates, reads: “Two kids named Wes Moore were born blocks apart.” Both “grew up fatherless in similar Baltimore neighborhoods and had difficult childhoods.”

In fact, Moore’s first years were spent in Takoma Park, Maryland—a nice suburb of Washington, which I know because I live about five minutes away. The book itself does mention that his family home was on “the border of Maryland and Washington, D.C.” But many people who read the book still come away with the impression that Moore was born and raised in Baltimore.

It’s true that he grew up fatherless. Moore was 3 when his father died of a virus; he believes that a racist health-care system gave him shoddy treatment. His mother moved with Moore and his sisters to the Bronx, to be closer to her family. He attended the elite Riverdale Country School, but after his grades dropped and he got caught with a smoke bomb in the locker room as a prank, his mother sent him to Valley Forge Military Academy, in Pennsylvania. (His grandparents took out a second mortgage to help pay the tuition.)

He moved back to Baltimore only as a college student, to go to Johns Hopkins University. He was living there in 2015 when the city erupted in protests following the death of Freddie Gray, who suffered a spinal-cord injury while inside a police van. Moore co-authored an account of that period with Erica L. Green, Five Days: The Fiery Reckoning of an American City. (“I am from Baltimore,” he wrote in that book.) He later kept a home in the city while commuting to Robin Hood in New York. After his Baltimore bonafides came under scrutiny in 2022, his campaign said that he had asked his publisher to correct the promotional text on The Other Wes Moore, and it did for later editions.

Moore quickly learned to be more careful: “I’m not a Baltimorean by birth, but I’m a Baltimorean by choice,” he told a crowd in 2022. But a pattern had been established—or at least a line of attack.

In 2010, Stephen Colbert described Moore, a guest on The Colbert Report, as a recipient of a Bronze Star for his service in Afghanistan, where he’d served in 2005 and 2006. The trouble was that he didn’t have a Bronze Star. When reporters raised questions about the medal, Moore’s staff insisted that he’d never told anyone that he had won it, and so he wasn’t responsible for the error. But in 2024, The New York Times obtained Moore’s application for a White House fellowship in 2006 in which he’d written, “the 82nd Airborne Division have awarded me the Bronze Star Medal.” He had an explanation for that too: The senior officer who had helped Moore write the application told him that he was going to get the medal, and so he should include it; the fact that it never actually arrived was embarrassing, but not unusual in the chaos of wartime. And after the controversy surfaced, the military did indeed award him a Bronze Star—just 18 years late.

[From the July 2026 issue: Being Black in Pete Hegseth’s military]

Then the Free Beacon ran a story questioning Moore’s account that his great-grandfather had moved to Jamaica because he’d been targeted by the KKK, based on the fact that reporters couldn’t find contemporaneous newspaper or archival accounts to verify it. This charge seemed more than a little forced—as did the many stories about Moore’s thesis at the University of Oxford. In that same White House fellowship application, he wrote that he’d received his degree in 2003 or 2004, but it wasn’t formally recorded until 2005. He also listed the title of his thesis as “The Rise and Ramifications of Radical Islam in the Western Hemisphere,” but it was later titled “Radical Islam in Latin America in the Late 20th Century and Its Middle Eastern Roots.” Also, the thesis is not stored in Oxford’s Bodleian Library—though there is no requirement for theses to be kept there, and many aren’t. Moore told The Baltimore Sun that he wasn’t “going to spend a second of my time trying to dig” a copy up.

Marvin Joseph / The Washington Post / Getty Moore officially receives the Bronze Star Medal in 2024. 

If you’re a little bored, you’re right to be. Some people have compared Moore to Barack Obama, and the demands for him to release more records to back up his past inevitably reminded me of the “birther” conspiracy. At least that conspiracy had some stakes. How much should anyone care that in 2006, Moore said he’d been named to the Maryland College Football Hall of Fame when in fact he had been honored only by a College Football Hall of Fame affiliate called the National Football Foundation?

Moore expresses regret for not being clear about the Bronze Star, but when I asked him about the attacks on his truthfulness in general, he dismissed them. “Do you know who has never attacked my military record? The United States Army,” he said. He told me he lived by a code: “You do not lie, cheat, or steal.” In fact, he said, he was being accused of dishonesty precisely because he was so honest. “It’s basic laws of warfare: You go after your opponent’s strength.” And he pointed out that these accusations surfaced only after he started gaining support. “I went a whole year on a campaign, and no one had a word to say about me,” he said. “And then out of nowhere, it was like the deluge began,” and people from “the right wing started putting stuff out.”  

The Baltimore Sun, which has devoted much space to these controversies, has indeed moved rightward under a new owner, the television magnate David Smith, and the conservative Free Beacon’s tagline is a promise to cover “the enemies of freedom in the way the mainstream media won’t.” Moore told me that Obama had given him advice on surviving these kinds of attacks as a politician, saying, “Listen, this is the part of the game that everyone hates.” But if the questions about Moore’s honesty have been amplified by his opponents, they still trace back to an uncomfortable set of facts: Moore allowed people to call him a Bronze Star–winning Baltimore kid, when the story was more complicated.

In April, one of Moore’s biggest legislative priorities—a redistricting plan that could have helped Democrats pick up a seat in the midterms—died when William Ferguson, the Democratic president of the state Senate, refused to bring it up for a vote. It was “too risky,” Ferguson argued: The new map could be challenged, and a ruling could leave their party worse off.

Ferguson is now pushing to get a constitutional amendment before Maryland voters in November that would better shore up any new map from legal challenges. Moore has framed the legislature’s caution as timidity, but Ferguson has a different take. He told me that Moore had created confusion by waiting months before coming out in favor of the plan, and suggested that the governor embraced it only after Gavin Newsom gained national attention for pushing through a new map in California. “I don’t think that timing was a coincidence,” Ferguson said, adding that Moore tends to emphasize “messaging” over governing. “Comms is dictating policy, and policy is not dictating comms.”

He did, however, credit Moore with working to speedily rebuild the Francis Scott Key Bridge. Its collapse, in 2024, killed six people and is the most significant catastrophe Moore has weathered as governor. The port of Baltimore was expected to be shut down for many months, but the state got it open again after less than three.

Chip Somodevilla / GettyGovernor Moore speaking at a commemoration ceremony at the Francis Scott Key Bridge, March, 2025.

Moore is expected to win a second term in November, but the public’s mistrust has taken a political toll. The Sun and others have accused him of not being forthcoming about the state’s budget, which has seesawed from deficit to surplus to deficit again during his tenure. His vetoing of the reparations bill made some of his core supporters feel that he had misled them. When Moore’s approval rating declined, poll respondents listed the budget and the governor’s trustworthiness among their top concerns.

Something about Moore does feel protean. He’s hard to place. His background can be confusing. Although he’s often compared to Obama, his education was far less rarefied. Obama was the president of the Harvard Law Review; Moore went to junior college before landing at Johns Hopkins. He describes his upbringing as working-class—“a very hardworking family, but it was definitely a working-class family.” Perhaps by income, but by few other definitions. Both parents were college graduates. His father was an anchorman at a radio station and his mother wrote for radio and TV. Although Moore frequently says that she didn’t have a job with benefits until he was a teenager, she had won a Peabody Award and taught journalism at Howard University before he was born. Still, he saw himself as an outsider, and wouldn’t invite his friends from Riverdale back to his neighborhood. He told me that he thought very strategically about fitting in: “Okay, how do I adapt and adjust so I don’t stick out?”

At Valley Forge, he was taught how to mingle with the powerful—how to walk, eat, and speak. As a high-ranking cadet, he attended lunches with former presidents, including Gerald Ford and George H. W. Bush. He said he eventually learned to accept that he was different and to be “comfortable in my own skin.” In two separate conversations, he quoted the same Jay-Z line: “I’m comfortable, dog, Brooklyn to Rome.” But he enunciated every word, in a way that sounded stiff. Despite his charisma onstage, up close, he has no swag.

Where he seemed most at home was at the matcha café in Baltimore owned by an old friend of his, who surprised him with a Jamaican sorrel—a tart iced drink. “This right here would make my grandmother proud,” he said. Once, I made a Bernie Mac reference, and he got it immediately, and we shared a knowing laugh. Above all, he was comfortable talking about religion.

“I come from a whole long line of preachers and teachers,” he said. “My great-grandfather was a minister; my grandfather was a minister.” In the summers, he used to stay in his grandfather’s parsonage in Brooklyn. When he told his grandmother that he was running for office, she said, “When you’re done with that, maybe you can become a minister.”

“Asking me not to talk about or to acknowledge God is like asking me not to breathe air,” he told me.

Don Smallwood for The Atlantic

When I asked his mother, Joy Moore, if she thought he would run for president, she said: “I think his faith will take him wherever he’s going to eventually go.” She seemed more annoyed by the questions about his honesty and integrity than Moore was. “They question things that are so personal,” she said. She felt as if the articles interrogating their family history were accusing them all—her grandfather, her father, herself, her son—of being liars. And the Oxford thesis? “I mean, if he knew he was going to one day run for governor, don’t you think he would have kept stuff like that?”

[Read: Something is happening in the Democratic base]

Moore says he’d had no plans to go into politics before 2022. It was his wife, Dawn, who was the political operative, a campaign strategist who’d worked for two lieutenant governors. She and Moore eloped when he was on leave from his service in Afghanistan. While they were dating, she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, and I was curious about whether she found divulging it to him hard. After all, I know plenty of men who wouldn’t stick around for the common cold. She said she asked him: “How would you feel if you had to take care of me for the rest of your life?” And he said: “How would you feel, if you had to take care of me for the rest of my life?”

Some of the questions regarding Moore’s authenticity amount to a nebulous discomfort with how he comes across, a discomfort I recognize from all the times I’ve encountered it myself. Many people who work in elite careers after growing up relatively disadvantaged, as well as Black people who spend time in primarily white spaces, are accused of not being true to themselves. This is a false dichotomy. We can be true to ourselves while also understanding that success requires us to be supple and adaptable, and to present different aspects of our personalities at different times.

There’s a famous poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar called “We Wear the Mask,” about the way Black Americans shield themselves from racism. I mentioned it to Moore, and he recognized it immediately.

“The mask is heavy,” he said. Moore says he wears his own mask around many people, “not because it makes me more comfortable—it’s because it makes them more comfortable.” Being in spaces where people are “not used to seeing you” is a burden, he said. Being “an enigma” is a burden. “To some people, your presence is inspirational. To certain people, your presence is offensive. To certain people, your presence means progress. To certain people, your presence means we’ve lost something.” You’re a first, or you’re a threat. “That weight does sit on you,” he said. “And it’s heavy.”

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