ABC News Suspends Terry Moran After He Calls Donald Trump & Stephen Miller ‘World-Class’ Haters

Dan Clarendon June 8, 2025, 1:57 pm

ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran has been suspended at the news organization after lambasting White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller and President Donald Trump.

In a now-deleted X post he shared just after midnight on Sunday, Moran called Miller “a man who is richly endowed with the capacity for hatred” and said that both Miller and Trump are “world-class” haters, as seen in a screenshot from CNN’s Brian Stelter.

Breaking: ABC News says senior national correspondent Terry Moran “has been suspended pending further evaluation.” This since-deleted tweet is the reason for the suspension: pic.twitter.com/IeGSZFdzoY

— Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) June 8, 2025

The post drew rebukes from both Miller and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.

“The most important fact about Terry’s full public meltdown is what it shows about the corporate press in America,” Miller wrote on X Sunday morning. “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.”

Leavitt said on X on Sunday that the White House had “reached out to ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable,” and she said on Fox News’ Sunday Morning Futures she hoped Moran would “either be suspended or terminated,” as Stelter reported for CNN.

Later in the morning, ABC News announced Moran’s suspension. “ABC News stands for objectivity and impartiality in its news coverage and does not condone subjective personal attacks on others,” a spokesperson said in a statement, per Variety. “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.”

The Moran controversy comes just months after Disney, ABC News’ parent company, paid $15 million to settle a defamation suit Trump filed after anchor George Stephanopoulos inaccurately said on air that Trump had been found civilly liable for raping writer E. Jean Carroll, per the Associated Press. (In actuality, Trump was found liable for sexually abusing and defaming Carroll, the AP added.)

As Variety reports, mainstream news outlets have been cautious about their White House reporting after the Trump administration’s public clashes with the AP and CBS News.

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Moran joined ABC News in 1997 and previously served as chief White House correspondent, Nightline co-anchor, and chief foreign correspondent for the news organization. He also interviewed Trump for ABC News this April.

His full tweet, per Stelter’s screenshot, reads:

“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. 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. You can see this just by looking at him because you can see that his hatreds are his spiritual nourishment. He eats his hate. Trump is a world-class hater. But his hatred only a means to an end, and that end his [sic] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.”