Terry Moran’s MAGA Critics Accuse Him of ‘Radical Left-Wing Bias.’ Here’s What His Tweets Actually Reveal About His Views.

ABC News senior national correspondent Terry Moran is MAGA Public Enemy Number One this week, after he wrote a now-deleted tweet criticizing President Donald Trump’s longtime adviser Stephen Miller. Moran has been “suspended pending further investigation” by ABC News, but Trump allies are unsatisfied, accusing him of harboring “radical” liberal views and demanding his firing.

But a closer look at Moran’s tweets reveal far more nuanced views that do not neatly fit into any partisan category, on the left or right.

Wrote Moran in the deleted tweet:

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 his own glorification. That’s his spiritual nourishment.

MAGA world outrage included Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeting that the White House had “reached out to [ABC News] to inquire about how they plan to hold Terry accountable.” Many accused ABC News and Moran of exhibiting “radical left-wing bias,” like this tweet by Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, calling for Moran to be “fired from the network immediately.”

But scrolling through Moran’s timeline finds evidence contradicting these allegations of radical leftism easily — almost immediately, in fact.

His pinned tweet from November 18, 2024 is a long and detailed post-election analysis of Trump’s electoral victory — which shocked many Democrats — and gives respectful credit to Trump’s appeal to voters.

“Donald Trump ignited a populist revolt the moment he came down that escalator,” wrote Moran. “Millions of Americans demanding change—not sure of what it might look like, bringing along their own ideas and resentments—found in this man their instrument.”

Trump had won over “converts” in “every election,” he continued, and was part of why he thought he had been able to correctly predict the last three elections:

As a reporter (one who covered Brexit in 2016), it was clear to me from the start that Trump was not an ordinary American politician and his movement not an ordinary American political coalition.

No. This was our nationalist moment.

In 2016, I told colleagues Trump would win. (People thought I was crazy.)

…This year I said it felt like Trump would win again. Why? Not polls (it seemed to me they never really caught up with the constant growth of the Trump Movement.)

But because almost everywhere I looked—in my own neighborhood, out on the campaign trail, on social media and old media—you could see and sense that millions of *new converts* were joining this movement.

Latinos. Young men. Black men. Working-class people of all backgrounds.

You could feel all of that.

“How many suburban women are there?” I’d jokingly ask friends who were convinced Harris would win.

Not enough, it turns out.

Moran assessed Trump as outside the usual definitions of Republican vs. Democrat, conservative vs. liberal, and instead representing a nationalist view, and did criticize him as being “like many nationalist leaders, he is a man with an authoritarian cast of mind and a personality to match.”

“I’m describing all this, not endorsing any political point of view,” Moran concluded, but “authoritarian cast of mind” is a comment that can fairly be described as critical, but it follows a calm and logical discussion — the antithesis of the accusations of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” the president’s supporters frequently try to pin on his critics.

He’s written other tweets along this theme, like this one saying Trump “leads the most consequential political movement in the US in a century,” and he’s back in the White House because that was what the voters wanted.

Overall, Moran’s recent tweets display some views that align with the Trump administration, some with the president’s critics, and others that are more complicated to categorize.

In this tweet he expressly praises Trump as saying “a very wise thing” regarding foreign policy issues connected to his diplomatic trip to the Middle East.

Here’s a tweet reporting that Kilmar Abrego Garcia was returning to the U.S. and “faces serious criminal charges,” but also offering a fact-check that the news “proves what Trump admitted to me in the Oval Office: He always had the power to get him back.” That is a fact check, not an endorsement of a viewpoint regarding Abrego Garcia’s fate.

Moran tweeted an article from The New York Times about swastikas and other racist graffiti defacing murals depicting Jackie Robinson and Minnie Miñoso, baseball stars who broke color barriers, calling the unknown vandals “lowlife racist traitors.”

The White House is not endorsing swastikas or racist graffiti. This is neither a criticism of Trump nor a leftist view.

In this tweet, Moran denounces the “monolithic liberal culture at many universities” as something that “has been a catastrophe for higher education.”

This tweet shares a thread from Judd Legum criticizing Trump’s budget proposal for cuts to programs that benefit poor children. This viewpoint is not a radical liberal one, as the proposed cuts were also criticized by moderate Democrats and conservatives.

In this tweet, Moran argued emphatically against claims that those who want stricter immigration enforcement are racist by definition. This is an argument that the Trump administration — including Stephen Miller — has made.

Immigration was currently “the decisive electoral issue” in many developed countries, wrote Moran. “People have a right to have a say in who comes into their country, and at what pace they are admitted. That’s not racism. It’s self-government.”

He directly criticized liberal rhetoric on immigration, said “turning migration into a moral demand, a matter of right rather than policy” had “ignited a backlash, one driven mostly by ordinary and legitimate economic and democratic concerns, and to a lesser extent by some uglier attitudes,” adding that racism was “not the driver of these events.”

“It is one of the deepest and most honorable human emotions to love the land you’re from, and to hold it precious and protect it,” he wrote, and it was understandable that “the loss of control and order at borders” would disturb “decent, middle-class people, who value stability and steady progress” and were not in favor of “top-down socio-economic innovation and a radical redefinition of national character imposed by corporate interests aligned with an academic elite.”

“[T]elling voters they must consent to the economic policies and moral attitudes of the educated and professional classes when it comes to immigration,” he wrote, “no matter the negative impacts on lives and communities — that is a recipe for a populist revolt.”

Here, Moran criticized the Federalist Society and other conservative legal scholars for not predicting that Trump would “trash” them “as soon as they got in his way.”

In this tweet, Moran wrote that the Framers of our Constitution favored Congress driving the national agenda instead of the president, because they “had just got done fighting a war against overweening executive power” and Congress was the branch “closest to the People.” That is a criticism of the Trump administration, but not a radically liberal one. Libertarian commentators like the contributors at Reason and other conservative legal scholars have criticized the White House’s overreach.

Moran also added that he thought “Obama doing DACA without Congress, and Biden doing student debt relief with executive orders were both unconstitutional.”

Moran has frequently posted tweets honoring American veterans and other patriotic content.

He has also posted tweets voicing support for Ukraine’s fight against the Russian invasion.

Moran traveled to Vatican City to cover Pope Leo XIV, the first American pope. He posted numerous tweets about the new pope, not just reporting the news but sharing his own personal reflections, calling it a “genuinely thrilling moment” to meet him.

 

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.