A journalist who lost his job at ABC News after describing top White House aide Stephen Miller as someone “richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” has said he published that remark on social media because he felt it was “true”.
“It was something that was in my heart and mind,” the network’s former senior national correspondent Terry Moran said Monday on The Bulwark political podcast. “And I would say I used very strong language deliberately.”
Moran’s comments to Bulwark host Tim Miller about standing by his statements came a little more than a week after he wrote on X that Stephen Miller – the architect of Donald Trump’s hardline immigration policies – “eats his hate”.
“His hatreds are his spiritual nourishment,” Moran’s post read, in part. He added that the president “is a world-class hater. But his hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification”.
Moran subsequently deleted the post, which had been published shortly after midnight on 8 June. ABC News initially suspended Moran pending an investigation, citing a policy against “subjective attacks on others”. But then the network announced it would not be renewing his employment contract, effectively dismissing him.
Among the polarizing reactions which stemmed from Moran’s deleted post was one from Stephen Miller, a white nationalist, which read: “The most important fact about Terry’s full 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.”
But Moran on Monday maintained that he is “a proud centrist” who opposes “the viciousness and the intolerance that you feel when we argue politics”.
Tim Miller asked Moran whether he was drunk at the time of the post. Moran replied that it had actually been “a normal family night” that culminated with him putting his children to bed before he wrote out his thoughts about Stephen Miller.
“I typed it out and I looked at it and I thought ‘that’s true’,” said Moran, who had been at ABC since 1997. “And I hit send.
“I thought that’s a description of the public man that I’m describing.”
Some of Trump’s most high-profile allies took verbal aim at Moran before his departure from ABC News was announced. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt appeared on Fox News and said Moran’s post was “unacceptable and unhinged”, and JD Vance said it was a “vile smear”.
Nearly six months earlier, ABC News had agreed to pay $15m to a Trump presidential foundation or museum to settle a defamation case that he brought after the network’s anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly asserted that Trump had been found “liable for rape” in a lawsuit filed by columnist E Jean Carroll. Trump had actually been found liable for sexually abusing Carroll.
Moran by Monday had joined the Substack publishing platform as an independent journalist. He told Tim Miller that he was hoping to interview members of the Haitian community in Springfield, Ohio.
Members of that community were politically villainized after Trump boosted debunked stories about Haitian immigrants eating pets ahead of his victory in November’s presidential election.
Moran alluded to how the vast majority of the Haitian immigrants in Springfield were there legally through a temporary protected status that had been allocated to them due to violent unrest in their home country.
They generally arrived in Springfield to work in local produce packaging and machining factories whose owners were experiencing a labor shortage after the Covid-19 pandemic. And many are facing the prospect of being forced to leave the US by 3 August after the Trump administration decided to end legal visa programs for Haitians such as humanitarian parole and temporary protected status.
“The town had come to depend on them,” Moran said. “That town was falling flat and now had risen.”
