ABC News suspended senior national correspondent Terry Moran after he wrote a social media post criticizing Donald Trump and White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller, describing each man as a “world-class hater.”
“Miller is a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred. He’s a world-class hater,” Moran wrote late Saturday night on X, formerly Twitter, adding, “You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate.”
Moran called the president “a world-class hater” whose “hatred [is] only a means to an end, and that end [is] his own glorification.”
Moran later deleted the post.
ABC announced Sunday that it suspended Moran. “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” an ABC spokesperson said in a statement. “The post does not reflect the views of others at ABC News and violated our standards — as a result, Terry Moran has been suspended pending further evaluation.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to Moran’s post by calling it “unhinged and unacceptable.”
“We have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable,” she posted on X.
Miller himself weighed in. “For decades, the privileged anchors and reporters narrating and gatekeeping our society have been radicals adopting a journalist’s pose,” he said.
Moran wrote that Miller “is one of the people who conceptualizes the impulses of the Trumpist movement and translates them into policy.”
Miller, a key contributor to Project 2025, is the mind behind many of the administration’s cruelest immigration policies, including deportations of undocumented immigrants to an infamous prison in El Salvador and the new travel ban on nationals entering the U.S. from twelve countries. He has reportedly set a goal that Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) arrest no fewer than 3,000 immigrants per day and has threatened to oust officials who get in the way of reaching that goal. Miller also talked to Fox News in November 2024 about a plan to use executive orders from “the moment President Trump puts his hands on that Bible.” Since taking office, Trump has signed executive orders to empower law enforcement while protecting them from accountability, advance his anti-transgender agenda, end birthright citizenship, revoke abortion rights, and strip federal funding from NPR and PBS, among others.
This incident is just the latest in the Trump administration’s battle with ABC News. The network agreed in December to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit Trump brought against them after host George Stephanopoulos inaccurately said Trump had been found civilly liable for the sexual abuse and defamation of E. Jean Carroll. Stephanopoulos wrongly said on air that Trump was “found liable for rape” and “defaming the victim of that rape.”
Staffers reacted to the news by telling Rolling Stone in December that it was “frightening” to see the outlet’s “capitulation” to Trump.
“My fear is this sets a tone for the next four years, and that the tone is: Do not upset the president,” one staffer said.
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