Bluesky

If, as the old Beltway saw has it, a gaffe is when politicians say what they really think, the journalistic corollary in the Trump era is that saying the obvious is a fireable offense. That’s the chief takeaway from the ritual sacrifice of longtime ABC News national correspondent Terry Moran for a late-night social post about the leading White House merchants of hate.

The fateful post went live on June 8, and Moran deleted it not long afterward. Yet its brief half-life on X was enough to stoke days of performative rage on the MAGA right. The White House press secretary weighed in with an X post deriding Moran as a “so-called ‘journalist,’” describing his comments as “unhinged and unacceptable,” and demanding disciplinary action from ABC. White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller, the main subject of Moran’s post, followed up with a post of his own denouncing Moran’s “public meltdown” while recurring to the MAGA media-baiting playbook with this snake-in-the-grass refrain: “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.” JD Vance, ever keen to purge public discourse of any residual memory of his own tour of duty as a paid Never Trumper commentator on CNN, called out Moran’s comments as a “vile smear” and demanded that the network give Miller a personal apology.

So what, exactly, was the nature of Moran’s thoughtcrime?

“The thing about Stephen Miller,” Moran wrote, “is not that he is the brains behind Trumpism.” He then went on to explain:

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 that 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 is only a means to an end and that end his [sic] his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

As they say on social media, spot the lie.

Moran’s miniature character study was noteworthy for its genuine insight; Miller’s rage against immigrants, trans people, and his political opponents does have a clear devotional quality. The conviction that Miller speaks for and defends a perennially embattled “real America”—besieged by non-white opportunists and criminal types—was imprinted on him from childhood, when he broke off friendships on grounds of Latino descent. In high school and college, he would throw trash on the floor and loudly demand that the janitorial staff pick up after him. As Nation columnist David Klion writes, “there was something fundamentally malevolent about Miller from the start.”

That something went on to define Miller’s political career, as a staffer for hard-right Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions, and then as an early and influential recruit to Trump’s first presidential run. As Miller was presiding over Trump’s first Muslim travel ban and the administration’s brutal family-separation policy, he sent a stream of emails to Breitbart News that teemed with links to white nationalist agitprop on far-right sites such as VDare and American Renaissance, while also lauding The Camp of the Saints, a racist work of fiction that’s a foundational text for adherents of the “Great Replacement” theory, according to a 2019 report from the Southern Poverty Law Center.

In any robust and democratically minded mediasphere, in other words, the designation of Miller as an impassioned “world-class hater” wouldn’t be remotely controversial—indeed, the real failing of our national political press is how slavishly it bows and scrapes before this heinous figure on no other grounds than his job title. For an illustration of how the media should treat a bad-faith bigot and liar like Miller, it’s necessary to look to the foreign press—notably, Chilean reporter José María del Pino calmly challenging Miller’s bogus talking points about Venezuelan migration as the hatemonger melts down into an incoherent tirade.

Yet as they also say on social media, here we are: a veteran news anchor is deemed unprofessional and worse for speaking the simple, abundantly documented truth. In a predictably content-challenged statement on ABC’s decision not to renew Moran’s contract, a network spokesperson burbled that “we hold all of our reporters to the highest standards of objectivity, fairness and professionalism, and we remain committed to delivering straightforward, trusted journalism.”

No you don’t, actually.