ABC News has suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran after he tweeted shortly after midnight as the cable news channels were assessing peaceful and violent protests against ICE immigration enforcement efforts in Los Angeles. President Trump and his domestic policy adviser Stephen Miller were slammed as “world-class” haters.
“The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism. Yes, he is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy. But that’s not what’s interesting about Miller,” Moran argued on X early Sunday.
“It’s not brains. It’s bile. Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” the ABC News reporter added. “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
As for the president, “Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”
Moran later deleted the tweet, but not before it was widely shared and rebuked. Team Trump returned rhetorical fire. On Fox’s Sunday Morning Futures, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told Maria Bartiromo: “Hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated.”
“An ABC journalist [Terry Moran] posted this absolutely vile smear of Stephen Miller. It’s dripping with hatred. Remember that every time you watch ABC’s coverage of the Trump administration,” Vice President JD Vance posted on X.
ABC put out a statement that strained credulity:
“ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” a spokesperson said in response to CNN’s inquiry about Moran. “The post does not reflect the views of ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”
As our Geoff Dickens pointed out when President Trump accepted an interview request from Moran, this reporter has called Trump a “Fuhrer,” and accused him of “stirring racist fears,” with his “Neo-Nazi ways.”
In sharp contrast, Moran has been soft-hearted in his coverage of Democrats and progressives. In 2009, Moran gushed: “Barack Obama is the first president since George Washington to be taking a step down into the Oval Office.” In 2019, he hyped Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaign: “Will America feel the Bern?” adding that the Vermont Senator has “made democratic socialism cool for millions of voters.”
For his part, Miller tweet on Sunday morning: “The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America. For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose. Terry pulled off his mask.”
