Trumplethinskin Goes After the BBC - Because Facts Keep Hurting His Feelings
The man who demanded people "fight like hell" now insists the real injury was a slightly compressed quote on Panorama.
There has been so much written about the BBC this week, that it’s become, to be honest, a bit overwhelming. There has been analysis from so many sides that are both hagiographic about the broadcaster, critical and everywhere in between. The weirdness of seeing headlines about the BBC pop-up on my phone screen from the BBC has been jarring.
Sadly, we are nowhere nearly done with this, since overnight we’ve found out that the Orange Geriatric Felonious Game Show Host has, in an interview with GB News no less, confirmed that he would indeed be suing the BBC for between £1bn and £5bn.
The utter absurdity of this whole situation is making my head spin, and my first response on seeing the news this morning was literally “well, he can fuck right off.1” And he honestly can.
Because all of this is nonsense. Every single bit of it. The legal foundations, the political implications, what it all means for the BBC, and that’s not even to mention the fact that British media in the US now seems to be represented by GB News presenters who count WhatsApp forwards and Facebook memes as peer reviewed evidence2.
The sort of most boring bit of this all, to a large extent, is the legal bits and pieces of defamation - and the case that Trumplethinskin is making against the BBC for their Panorama edit is not something that is likely to survive any sort of contact with reality.
The first thing to acknowledge is that the Panorama edit was a mistake - it was a dodgy edit, there was no good reason for it, but, it also remains true that the words that were in the programme were Trumps words. Those words were in his actual speech. It’s not like the BBC AI’d new syllables into his mouth.
Now, in the UK, defamation law has a couple of massive big steel gates in front of it, and Trump currently finds himself on the completely wrong side of these. The biggest barrier, and the most obvious one, is that there is a one-year limit from publication of a claim to the point where you can actually claim damages, largely because Parliament eventually got bored of oligarchs and chancers shaking people down for things printed in the Bronze age.
The programme in question was aired in October of 2024, and anyone with a working calendar would realise that we are now in… checks the date… late November 2025. He is, in what I would consider to be legal jargon, late to the party, drunk on his own fumes and hammering on the door after the host has already gone to bed - ultimately meaning that before you even get to the questions of truth, public interest or logic, a UK court is more than likely to say “No, no - clock ran out, please go away.”
The bigger problem though is that you can’t actually defame someone when you accurately describe their already very well documented wrong-doing. The attempted overturning of an election result on 6 January 2021 by Trump acolytes is not, despite what Trump and his acolytes would like you to believe, up for question like it’s village gossip that has gone too far - it was the subject of congressional investigations, criminal indictments, plea deals, an impeachment and his own televised speeches.
Trump summoned his followers to Washington. He told them, repeatedly, that the election had been stolen from them. He told them to “fight like hell.” He watched the attack for several hours and refused repeatedly to call it off. Whatever else we can disagree on, it is beyond proven that Trump did these things. We are not yet at the point where reality can be bent that far.
When it comes to defamation law, the central question is whether a statement caused someone serious harm - and this is where things truly tip over into the surreal, because what courtroom, on what planet is going to sit there with a straight face while Donald J. Trump, the man who has now for years been telling everyone with a microphone that the election was stolen from him3, tells them that the BBC very slightly compressing his riot-inciting speech is the thing that truly did the damage to him.
That this documentary, put out by a broadcaster in another country, to what was primarily a non-US audience, rather than the riot itself, the deaths, the criminal charges, the rambling speeches and years of coverage is the reputational straw that broke the bright orange camel’s back?
In the US, things don’t look much rosier for this lawsuit either, because unfortunately for Orangina, he would have to clear something called the “actual malice” bar - which in short means he would have to prove not only that something was factually wrong, but that it was published or broadcast knowing it was false, or with reckless regard for whether it was true or not. That’s a deliberately high standard which was designed to stop exactly this sort of situation in which a public figure sues journalists every time their feefees get a bit hurt. A dodgy edit in a not-even-that-hostile and broadly accurate documentary is absolutely nowhere near that.
Trump should know this - because he’s walked down this road multiple times now in his apparent crusade against any media organisation that’s not actively taken the knee to kiss his bright orange ring, and that becomes abundantly clear in his actual successes in suing broadcasters. Which just isn’t great.
His case against CNN for calling his election lie “the Big Lie” got punted out of court. His swing at Christopher Steele in London not only failed, but cost hundreds of thousands of pounds in fees. He currently has sprawling cases against the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, which, so far, are mostly achieving two things - making some lawyers very wealthy and producing judicial orders that have gently suggested that legal filings should come with fewer adjectives and adverbs and more actual legal arguments4.
To people pointing at ABC and CBS - yes, he managed to shake a bit of money loose to fund the Epstein Memorial White House Ballroom, but even there, as soon as you scrape off some of the MAGA glitter, you’re not really left with vindication of any sorts. In the ABC case, their anchor screwed up a very specific legal term about the Carroll verdict, and in the CBS case there is every indication that the network settled with the sole purpose of making sure a vindictive old man with impossibly thin skin and his pet regulator stay away from a merger they have ongoing at the time.
Neither of these cases is the same as a court declaring to Trump that “Yes, you were right all along, sir”, and reads far, far more like corporate risk management in an increasingly authoritarian climate.
The long and short of it is that the legal threats against the BBC are not really about the law - but that being the case, what is it about?
In short, it’s about power. Trophies. Sending a very clear message.
Trumplethinskin lives in a media ecosystem in which public service broadcasting is treated as anathema to the idea that news should be shaped in its entirety by owners, advertisers and political patrons5. NPR and PBS in the United States and the BBC in the United Kingdom - all three are permanently on his ever-growing mental list of enemies for the sole reason that nobody in a golden tower can ring up the newsroom and say, “Be nice to me or you will be fired.”
The BBC as an organisation has many, many problems and challenges - far too many to go into any sort of detail in this post - but being in Trump’s good books is not one of them, which is exactly why he is so keen on hurting it.
Beyond all of this, the stage that he has chosen for this threat had me, literally, laughing out loud this morning when I first read the reporting, because of all the media organisations, he has chosen GB News fronted by Bev Turner to lay out his grievance.
Bev. Turner.
A journalist who holds views on vaccine that feel like they’re completely shaped by memes and a dodgy Telegram channel and who happily amplified anti-semitic claims and then got terribly confused about why Jewish people would be unhappy about it. A journalist who leapt to Russell Brand’s defence before even engaging with any of the actual journalism that detailed the allegations against him, because in her world, the “establishment media” are always the villain and the man with the YouTube channel is always the hero.
If you were going to design the perfect interviewer from the ground up to facilitate Trump’s derangement, you’d probably end up with a near exact copy of Bev - someone who already believes the BBC is some decadent citadel of the woke, resents “mainstream outlets” of having had more reach than her and who is only too thrilled to sit there nodding along while an increasingly dictatorial US president uses her show as a battering ram against a domestic rival.
GB news in all of this also comes out a winner, because it gets exactly what it most craves - a starring, central role in the imported US culture war. They’ve already spent years building themselves up as the Anti-BBC channel - tons of flags, lots of “we’re obviously just saying what you’re all thinking”, multiple politicians playing pretend newsreader in between constituency surgeries, and now they get to be the platform where Trump threatens their long-time enemy with financial oblivion. They have hit the absolute motherlode of grievance and spectacle that they so desperately rely on to remain relevant.
And while this is all happening, there are spectres hovering around in the background - entities who have always loathed the licence fee purely on principle and have been waiting for this exact moment to pounce. The Telegraph and The Mail get to plaster daily headlines bashing the BBC, ring-wing politicians get to feign the most melodramatic of outrage while enjoying the opportunity to kick an institution they’ve wanted to cut down to size for years.
Everytime the BBC has a stumble, these particular spectres don’t see something that can be fixed - but an opportunity to privatise and grab the narrative by the short and curlies, and the looming Trump lawsuit is Christmas come early for them.
In the end, even if the lawsuit materialises - and I have serious reservations about whether it will or not, and that if it does somehow materialise, it’ll crawl around the courts for a bit before quietly dying in a corner - the threat of the lawsuit is doing the work for Trump and his UK based following. It deepens the ever-growing sense of crisis at the BBC and tells every editor working on a Trump piece in future that, “if you get this wrong, even a little bit, you could cause the whole building to come down.”
It whispers to governments and regulators, “look how much trouble this one documentary caused, maybe you should tighten the leash a bit more.”
It tells other media organisations, all over the world, “think very, very carefully before you run anything that might be just a bit too critical about the US president, because it may just end badly for you too.”
Sitting in the UK, I am viscerally irritated by the sheer brass-neckedness of this whole situation. We have plenty of our own homegrown wannabe authoritarians, thank you very much, without importing one that we have to be careful about from Mar-a-Lago to stomp around threatening to bankrupt a British institution because it hurt his feelings about a riot that he actually caused.
We have spent years and years being lectured to by men in bright trousers with mismatched blazers about sovereignty and taking back control and now suddenly we’re also supposed to just nod along while an American president demands tribute from our public broadcaster like some sort of petty Roman governor?
No. Abso-fucking-lutely not.
We can - and without a doubt should - get the BBC to explain exactly how the Panorama edit happened, who signed it off, which editorial safeguards failed and how they’re going to stop it happening again. That’s a proportional and fair response. We have to have a conversation with the BBC and openly criticise it for its timidity in calling lies lies, its indulgence of cranks in the name of balance and its willingness to give Reform UK a permanent dressing room in White City. We must expect better from the BBC when it comes to transparency around internal crises and scandals.
We can do all of these things precisely because the BBC is ours. Because it belongs, notionally at least, to us, the public that funds it.
What we simply cannot afford to do is cheer while Trump, Bev Turner, GB News and a constellation of right-wing interest groups try to turn a genuine failure into an excuse to beat the BBC into obedient submission or strip it down and sell it off for parts to the highest bidders.
By all means, investigate, reform, improve and occasionally shout at the BBC - but when a twice-impeached, insurrection-adjacent, legally radioactive game show alumnus who now thinks he’s a king shows up and demands several billion pounds while expecting us to politely nod along as though this is a normal, sensible use of courts, there is only one response that is appropriate.
The Orange Geriatric Felonious Gameshow Host can fuck right off.
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A phrase I seriously suspect now appears almost verbatim in half the UK’s collective inner monologue at any given time.
I would say citation needed, but they’d probably just send me a Minions GIF.
Which I must repeat, emphatically, it wasn’t.
I.e. Legal filings shouldn’t read like an unhinged Reddit manifesto.
A sort of a terrarium of grievance if you will - humid, enclosed and full of creatures that are standing ready to inflate your ego at the snap of very small fingers.
It's time to call Trump's bluff with measured, reasonable argument. As you say, he clearly said these things although the Panorama edit is clumsy, sloppy work.
Jeffrey Epstein wrote (email) about Trump as having "not one decent cell in his body" a thunderous statement for so many reasons.
My sentiments exactly.
My words when I first heard the Manbaby saying he was going to sue the BBC for a billion dollars was well
“he can fuck right off” A few other obscenities may have past my lips too but am I bothered?