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It is easy to forget that Brexit provided an electrifying boost to Donald Trump; Britain’s 2016 referendum came five months before he defeated Hillary Clinton. The success of one anti-establishment insurgency was a demonstration effect for another. “They will soon be calling me MR. BREXIT,” Trump tweeted. “Mr Brexit” did not catch on. But the ties between Trump and the British right were umbilical even before the UK’s vote to leave Europe. A decade later, they are intertwined.
Nobody should be surprised that Trump has the BBC in his sights. That Britain’s broadcaster gave Trump a gift-wrapped pretext — its dishonestly spliced piece of editing about his role in the January 6 Capitol Hill storming — is clear. Yet he has ample motive to go after the British right’s most relished target. Trump has three reasons to sue the BBC, the first of which is money.
He is asking for between $1bn and $5bn in compensation, although the BBC has apologised and lost its top two executives over it. Moreover, he wants the case adjudicated in Florida. It would be a shock but no surprise were a Florida court to accept jurisdiction over a foreign broadcaster’s programme that few Americans saw. Though English law is generous to libel suits, this one’s 12-month statute of limitations period has elapsed. Which means that Trump would be lucky to get any money out of the British taxpayer.
Yet he has squeezed millions of dollars apiece out of Meta, Paramount and ABC in out-of-court damages for claims that would have been dismissed by any self-respecting judge. A few million in BBC “please leave us alone” money cannot be discounted. Trump recently asked his Department of Justice for $230mn to compensate for the legal bills he incurred over the federal government’s probe into his 2016 campaign’s Russia ties and over the 2022 seizure of classified documents that he took to Mar-a-Lago. There is no precedent for a president asking the US taxpayer to make him whole. That does not mean he will fail.
His second motive is political. It has become standard to describe that BBC edit as “misleading”. The edit was dishonest but the documentary’s main point was right. Nobody who observed the events of January 6 could doubt that Trump’s aim was to reverse the 2020 election. More than 200 of the defendants in the January 6 criminal cases cited Trump’s speech as the reason they stormed Congress, according to the watchdog Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.
Trump’s aim is to raise the cost of telling the truth about his attempt to overturn an election. He has already tamed two of America’s great media institutions, CBS and the Washington Post. CBS’s Edward Murrow famously called out Joe McCarthy’s “red scare” in a 1954 broadcast. The Washington Post brought Richard Nixon’s crimes to light in the early 1970s. Both outlets are now acting cowed. The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post’s editorial pages are increasingly pro-Trump. CBS’s 60 Minutes recently conducted a soft ball interview with the president in which a torrent of falsehoods went mostly unchecked.
No display of journalistic meekness, however, could rival last week’s GB News interview with Trump. The UK outlet recently held a launch party in Washington that several of his cabinet members attended. The guest of honour was Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s Maga-style Reform party. Speaker after speaker referred to Farage as Britain’s next prime minister. Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s spokesperson, recently called the BBC “total 100 per cent fake news”.
In Trump’s interview with GB News, its correspondent, Bev Turner, gave North Korea’s broadcasters a run for their money. “It feels much safer here,” Turner said, contrasting Washington to London, though the chances of being murdered in DC are around 26 times higher than in London (you read that correctly). She described Trump’s recent state visit to the UK as “beautiful. Incredible. I’ve never seen anything like it.”
Turner posed variations on the same question throughout — the gist of which was asking Trump to explain the secret to his success. Her closing one still came as a shock. Having praised Trump on being a great parent, she asked: “Does it ever occur to you how much the role is like being a father? Being president?” He loved that one. Which brings us to the final reason Trump is suing the BBC. Why can’t all media be like GB News?