President Donald Trump has spent the last year waging war with ABC News’ biggest stars, whether it was taking George Stephanopoulos to court or complaining about presidential debate moderator David Muir’s hair.
But on Tuesday, Trump granted his first network interview since he took office to ABC’s Terry Moran. The two sat down for an Oval Office interview to commemorate Trump’s first 100 days, releasing the first clip where the two sparred over Trump’s tariffs.
The interview will air at 8 p.m. on Tuesday.
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The conversation closed the loop on Trump’s hatred for ABC News and Moran’s long career covering the White House.
Moran currently serves as ABC’s senior national correspondent, a job he earned after decades at the network in roles such as chief foreign correspondent, co-anchor of Nightline, and the network’s chief White House correspondent.
A Chicago native who graduated from Lawrence University in 1982 (with a singular IMDB credit as an extra in The Heartbreak Kid), Moran started at ABC in 1997 after a decade at CourtTV, where he built a deep expertise in covering legal matters.
He covered a number of high-profile stories, including O.J. Simpson’s murder case and the trials of Erik and Lyle Menendez for murdering their parents. He also extensively covered the Supreme Court.
The veteran newsman broke into political coverage by covering President Bill Clinton’s tenure, and then Vice President Al Gore’s presidential campaign. He scored the first interview with him after the 2000 Democratic National Convention and, months later, it was from Moran’s ABC report on the Supreme Court’s Bush V. Gore ruling, cementing Gore’s loss, that Gore’s team learned he would not be president.
Moran also contributed heavily to coverage of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, eventually traveling to Baghdad, Iraq, in 2003 to report on the U.S.’ war in the nation.
In his role as Nightline co-anchor, Moran reported on Barack Obama extensively through his campaign for president and his eventual tenure in the White House. The two sat down for nine one-on-one interviews, including one in July 2009 to promote the Affordable Care Act.
The White House Correspondents’ Association later awarded Moran with the Merriman Smith Award for excellence in presidential coverage under deadline pressure.
Moran later became the network’s London-based chief foreign correspondent in 2014. Still, he kept a finger on U.S. politics, writing last year that he believed Trump would win in 2016.
“I told colleagues Trump would win. (People thought I was crazy.)” he wrote on X.
Moran eventually moved back to Washington, D.C. in 2018, where he continued to cover Trump alongside the city’s political centers in Congress and the Supreme Court. “It’s like drinking from a fire hose,” Moran told Lawrence University in 2019. “It’s hard to keep your perspective.”
The decision to have Moran interview Trump instead of another one of the network’s legion of stars partly reflects the trepidation networks feel in engaging with the vengeful president prone to attacking—and investigating—his enemies, especially one home to many of his least-favorite anchors.
Trump sued ABC News and Stephanopoulos for defamation last year after Stephanopoulos asked Rep. Nancy Mace (R-SC) how she could support a candidate found liable for “rape,” despite a jury finding him liable for sexual abuse instead. The network eventually settled for $16 million and Stephanopoulos, who has since renewed his contract with the network, apologized.
After taking a yearslong interest in Muir, who anchors the highly rated World News Tonight and landed Trump’s first televised interview after his 2017 inauguration, Trump soured on him in September after Muir fact-checked him on crime statistics during the only presidential debate between him and Kamala Harris.
“They probably watched the debate and heard this foolish man, this foolish fool, make that statement to me that, ‘no no, crime is coming down, the FBI said it was coming down,’” Trump said during a California press conference in September.
Trump also attacked co-moderator and ABC News anchor Linsey Davis after the debate and claimed she had “hatred in her eyes” after she fact-checked comments he made about abortion.
Moran has also proven somewhat confrontational toward Trump’s allies, calling his “personalized power” over the GOP in 2021 akin to a “Fuhrer” and attacking Vice President JD Vance’s characterization of judicial power as weak.
“Judges ‘say what the law is,’” Moran wrote. “Not generals or prosecutors.”
But Moran’s personal indifference and professional fascination toward Trump may have helped him secure the sit-down.
“This year I said it felt like Trump would win again. Why?” he wrote on X shortly after November’s election. “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."
