Trump Angrily Threatened to Sue BBC. Then Things Took a Darker Turn.

There is something deeply perverse in this outcome. Even if you grant Trump’s criticism of the edit of his January 6 speech—never mind that as the violence raged, Trump essentially sat on his hands for hours and arguably directed the mob to target his vice president—the answer to this can’t be to let Trump bully truth-telling into self-censoring silence.

That’s plainly what happened here. This was one of the BBC’s Reith Lectures—a speech, not produced programming. In it, Bregman addressed the 2024 matchup between Joe Biden and Trump, and he posted a transcript that included the line he delivered, which was omitted from the on-air broadcast. I’ve bolded that bit:

On one side we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other we had a convicted reality star who now rules as the most openly corrupt president in American history. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern day Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a consul. He surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sycophants.

In its email to me, the BBC insisted that “the integrity” of Bregman’s arguments remains “central to the broadcast.” But perhaps due to Britain’s stricter libel laws, Trump’s threat apparently got the BBC to censor something that is obviously correct. Trump is the most corrupt president in U.S. history; it’s not even a close call, and the open flaunting of his corruption and self-dealing are an essential feature of his presidency on a near-daily basis. The MAGA movement plainly thrills on exactly this. Trump and MAGA just don’t want media sources that swing voters might believe to describe his behavior as “corruption”—or worse, “criminality.”