ABC News suspended journalist Terry Moran on Sunday after the veteran reporter posted tweets describing the president and his top adviser, Stephen Miller, as “world-class haters”.
Moran, in two tweets, described Donald Trump and Miller, the architect of the president’s mass deportation policy, as filled with hatred of their respective political enemies. But Trump’s, Moran said, was “a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”
“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred,” Moran wrote of the White House aide. “He’s a world-class hater. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
"The thing about Stephen Miller is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism," Moran added. "It's not brains. It's bile.”
In a statement, a spokesperson for the network said that Moran was suspended pending an evaluation of his ability to be objective and impartial as a journalist.
"ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others. 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," a spokesperson told The Independent.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt weighed in on the situation on Sunday morning, calling on ABC to suspend or fire Moran.
“We have reached out to ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable,” she wrote on X. “Hopefully this journalist will either be suspended or terminated.”
Miller, for his part, responded directly by asserting that Moran’s tweets were evidence of greater liberal bias within the media.
“[T]he most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America,” said Miller.
A senior national correspondent for ABC, Moran has been with the news agency for decades. He interviewed the president one-on-one in the Oval Office in April, during which the president became testy and resorted to personal attacks against his interviewer several times.
The two clashed over photos of Kilmar Abrego Garcia shared by the Trump administration that had been doctored to falsely depict the wrongfully deported Salvadoran migrant and Maryland resident as having gang tattoos. Refusing to look at the photo evidence, Trump leaned in to attacking Moran’s reputation: “I picked you because, frankly, I never heard of you, but that’s OK.”
Moran’s commentary came as the Trump administration, apparently at Miller’s direction, has ramped up deportation efforts even further in the past several weeks and directed ICE raids in cities around the country. Raids across Los Angeles this past week sparked protests that turned violent in some cases, which centered around the Los Angeles Federal Building after rumors of detainees being housed in the building spread through local communities.
On Saturday evening, the situation dramatically escalated when the president announced that he was taking control of California’s National Guard detachment to quell the protests.
Trump has also included ABC on the list of mainstream media organizations facing attempts to punish them for their reporting. His campaign settled with ABC News in December after anchor George Stephanopoulos falsely said that the president had been found “liable for rape”. In reality, a jury found Trump liable for the sexual abuse of E. Jean Carroll, a writer, in 2023.
