As regular readers know, to celebrate his (second) first one hundred days in office, Trump sat down for an interview with ABC News reporter Terry Moran. Honestly, we question why he goes so often to these hostile outlets but we suppose it is because he wants to defeat them on their own field of battle. In fact, Trump owned Terry Moran so hard that Shri Thanedar has filed new Articles of Impeachment against Trump for violating the Thirteenth Amendment.
Okay, that last part was a joke.
But we think the most damning part came when Trump talked about how allegedly DOGE found a great deal of waste, fraud and abuse, which led Moran to try to ‘well ackshully’ the claim of fraud:
ABC: “Fraud is a crime. There have been no referrals to the Justice Department.”@POTUS: “Well you don’t know that do you? How do you know that?”
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 30, 2025
ABC: “I’m asking you, sir.”@POTUS: “You’re not asking me. You made a statement… Yes there have.” pic.twitter.com/Gxu5bWKBdG
So, let’s break that down. First, Moran asserted that there had been no referrals to the justice department—presumably meaning for fraud. Then Trump called him on that, saying ‘Well, you don’t know that, do you?’ Moran tries to ask him if there had been, but Trump refuses to get distracted, interrogating how he could make that claim, and Moran adds to it, saying ‘there’s been no investigation from the Justice Department.’ Then Moran pretends that this is him asking a question, but Trump correctly says ‘You’re not asking me, you made a statement.’ So, Moran made a factual claim, that there were no referrals. When he was challenged on it, he basically admitted he didn’t know but then made a different factual claim—no investigations. He was called on it again and he pretended, falsely, to be asking a question. And then Trump verified that in fact there were investigations, which is newsworthy apart from how he made Moran look like he was terrible at his job.
And to be blunt, there is no practical way Moran could possibly know his statements were true when he made them. How can any civilian claim to know what 100% of the FBI is not doing? Even if they had one agent, or even ten of them, with loose lips saying they had never heard of such an investigation, that investigation might still be going on behind that person’s or persons’ back. Moran was attempting to claim that he had proof of the negative, and anyone versed in basic logic knows that it is very difficult to prove the negative. And when you are dealing with with an agency that regularly practices secrecy it becomes impossible.
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We are also reminded of this banger from when Mike Cernovich went on 60 Minutes and owned them while they were trying to do a hit piece on him. In context, Scott Pelley was challenging him on his coverage discussing whether or not Hillary Clinton was hiding a serious illness during the 2016 campaign, particularly after she had to leave a September 11 memorial and seemed to lose control of her body just before she was loaded into a vehicle. Here’s that video:
Flashback to the time @Cernovich was interviewed by 60 minutes for a hit piece on him and flipped the script, showing that they were engaged in terrible journalism pic.twitter.com/3JwfyzDijG
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) April 30, 2025
There’s an old saying in journalism: ‘If your mother says she loves you, check it out.’ Obviously, it’s a facetious phrase—if your mother says she loves you, just take her at her word. But underneath it is the notion that even if someone says something you already think is true, maybe even want to be true, you should still be skeptical and make sure it actually is true.
But apparently Scott Pelley felt that if the Clinton campaign said something, their word is gospel: No further investigation was necessary. Cernovich brilliantly exposed that flawed viewpoint. We don’t know to this day whether Clinton just had pneumonia or something more serious, but it is always a mistake to take any politician’s word as gospel.
But arguably Trump’s flipping the tables on Moran was even worse, because Moran apparently had no idea whether the things he was saying was true or not and he kept saying them anyway.
Still, the rest of the interview was kind of a garbage fire for ABC News. We already shared earlier how Trump also roasted Moran for the media’s cover up of Joe Biden’s cognitive decline, but we will post the video again:
.@POTUS: “We are a respected country again… We had a President that couldn’t walk up a flight of stairs… We had a President that was grossly incompetent. You knew it, I knew it… But you guys didn’t want to write it because you’re FAKE NEWS. And by the way, ABC is one of the… pic.twitter.com/n7dK4xd4xi
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) April 30, 2025
The cut off text:
And, by the way, ABC is one of the worst.
And we listened to the entire interview, folks. It was torture, but this is what we do for you. And the whole time, Moran just kept trying to berate Trump into following his policy preferences and agree to his talking points, and Trump refused to go along.
That last clip was an example of this. Lawyers know how to ask a question that is open ended and how to ask one that implies the answer we believe is correct and guess what? Journalists know how to do that, too. And that was what Moran was doing, but Trump wasn’t having it.
In addition to that, Trump clashed with Moran over Kilmar Ábrego García, the El Salvadoran who was mistakenly deported to the wrong country. This author has talked about this case here, here and here, with the bottom line being that the Trump administration has been ordered to ‘facilitate’ the return of Garcia so we can give him a hearing and throw him out of the country again, but as of today, the Trump administration is not being ordered to ‘effectuate’ the release. That may seem like a small detail, but to quote Jack Reacher…
— (((Aaron Walker))) (@AaronWorthing) April 30, 2025
The term ‘facilitate’ means essentially to help someone else to do something that they have chosen to do on their own. This term is extremely well understood in the law because facilitation of a crime can often be a crime in and of itself. But, importantly, the term ‘facilitate’ does not require Trump to lift a single finger to make the government of El Salvador actually release him—only to help them if they choose to.
So a lot of people think it is big news that Trump admitted that he could get Garcia released tonight, but Trump is never going to deny that he can get world leaders to do what he wants. That's just baked into his personality. Still, Trump and his subordinates have not been ordered to even ask El Salvador to get the guy back so saying Trump can release him is legally irrelevant.
But we want to focus on him cornering Moran on another factual issue:
President Trump: "He had MS13 tattooed on his knuckles."
— TheBlaze (@theblaze) April 30, 2025
ABC: "He had some tattoos that are interpreted that way."
Trump: "It says MS13."
ABC: "That was photoshopped."
Trump: "Do you want me to show you the picture?"
ABC: "I'm not an expert."
UNREAL! pic.twitter.com/9WsNzziOCT
It’s not quite as heinous as the question of fraud referrals and investigations, but it is another poor showing for Moran. As for the claim there is a photoshopped picture of that, here’s where that silliness came from. Trump posted this on his TruthSocial account (as mirrored on this Twitter/X account):
This is the hand of the man that the Democrats feel should be brought back to the United States, because he is such “a fine and innocent person.” They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found… pic.twitter.com/4bcCJ1q3p3
— Donald J. Trump Posts From His Truth Social (@TrumpDailyPosts) April 18, 2025
The cut off text:
They said he is not a member of MS-13, even though he’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles, and two Highly Respected Courts found that he was a member of MS-13, beat up his wife, etc. I was elected to take bad people out of the United States, among other things. I must be allowed to do my job. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!
As you can see in the picture, Garcia’s hand has a marijuana leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull. The Trump administration asserts that these four images are code for MS-13. We are probably about as far from being a gang expert as one can get but it certainly makes sense that Marijuana would be used to stand for M, and a smiley face stands for S. We admit we are less sure that the last two symbols represent 1 and a 3, but when this author looked at the same photo with some blurring, it suddenly looked like the last two tattoos are a 1 and 3. Take that how you want.
In order to illustrate this point, with the photo Trump is holding up, someone put on that photo the letters ‘M S 1 3’ onto Garcia's knuckle. This was an obvious and open alteration. No one looking at this image would think that this is actually the tattoo he had. So, the accusations of photoshopping are just an intentional misinterpretation designed to distract from the tattoos that are actually there. Indeed, if you zoom in, you can see them in this photograph of him from the prison:
Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the “death camps” & “torture”, now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!🍹 pic.twitter.com/r6VWc6Fjtn
— Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele) April 18, 2025
If you enlarge the first picture and look closely at his left hand (the one closest to the camera), you can see the tattoos.
Again, we are no expert on gang tattoos, but if Garcia’s tattoos are innocent, why did his wife hide them?
Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s wife, Jennifer Vasquez Sura, has strategically censored her partner’s left hand in the photo she uploaded on her TikTok to promote her GoFundMe. @nayibbukele, can you release the full resolution photos from the photoshoot meeting he had with… pic.twitter.com/6KP3GsjMIV
— Andy Ngo (@MrAndyNgo) April 18, 2025
The cut off text reads:
@nayibbukele, can you release the full resolution photos from the photoshoot meeting he had with @ChrisVanHollen? The tattoos appears to be a marijuana leaf, a smile and the number 13.
For the record, we had no problem enlarging Mr. Bukele’s photo enough that you could see he has the same tattoos: Marijuana leaf, smiley face, cross and skull.
(We found it much easier to enlarge the image on our phone than on our home computer.)
But back to our point ... the fact she strategically placed hearts over his knuckles suggests she was trying to cover up these tattoos. Sometimes the act of covering up evidence is the most powerful evidence.
Or as one of our favorite follows on Twitter/X, @TheAmishDude said, replying to a post of the Trump interview:
Summarizing these replies:
‘He doesn't have MS13 on his fingers. He just has marijuana, a smiley face, a cross, and a skull on his fingers for no discernible reason and with no particular meaning.
He went into the tattoo parlor and told the artist, `Give me random s**t.'‘
We would have just embedded the @TheAmishDude's post, but in the original he said a naughty, naughty word and we had to censor it.
There was naturally more to the interview than we are covering in this post, but we wanted to focus on the parts where Trump was exposing the terrible journalism of ABC News in general and Terry Moran in particular. Hopefully the people watching it at home realized that they can’t trust ABC News to get their facts straight.
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Editor’s Note: The mainstream media continues to deflect, gaslight, spin, and lie.
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