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 his own glorification.”
“That’s his spiritual nourishment,” added Moran.
In a statement, a spokesperson for the network said that Moran was suspended pending an evaluation over 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, and called 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.”
Last night, in a since deleted post, so-called “journalist” @TerryMoran went on a rampage against Stephen Miller and called President Trump “a world class hater.”
This is unhinged and unacceptable.
We have reached out to @ABC to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry… pic.twitter.com/HsgusJEIvH
— Karoline Leavitt (@PressSec) June 8, 2025
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 detachement to quell the protests.
