To confront Donald Trump is to have interaction in uneven conflict. It’s to go into a battlefield that’s not stage, the place he enjoys a right away and inbuilt benefit over those that would oppose him or simply hang him to account. That reality has price Democrats dearly over the last decade – exacting a toll once more this very week – but it surely has now upended an establishment central to Britain’s nationwide existence: particularly, the BBC.
The important thing asymmetry will also be spelled out merely. Trump will pay very little regard to the normal bounds of fact or honesty. His documented tally of false or deceptive statements runs into the tens of 1000’s: the Washington Put up registered 30,573 such statements throughout Trump’s first time period within the White Space, a mean of 21 an afternoon. In one interview with CBS’s 60 Mins previous this month, Trump spoke falsely 18 occasions, in step with CNN.
To carry him to account for this dishonesty is to forged your self as an arbiter of fact, which creates the moment and glaring expectation that you simply your self will have to be honest. Right here, then, is the asymmetry: he can lie, however his critics can’t.
So he can proceed to inform the massive lie, claiming towards all proof that he gained the 2020 election, and myriad smaller lies – he advised 60 Mins that grocery costs “are down” when they’re up and that Joe Biden gave Ukraine $350bn in help when the actual determine is easily underneath part that – and, save for a couple of tireless factcheckers, nobody cares. The reaction is a collective shrug, as it’s Donald Trump. Nobody expects any higher.
The other is correct of his scrutineers. They need to be fastidious, their proof impeccable. So when the BBC’s Landscape programme tested Trump’s report forward of the 2024 election, it needed to be proper on each and every element. As we now know, and for which the BBC has apologised, it used to be now not: it stitched in combination two statements, made 54 mins aside, from Trump’s speech forward of the Capitol Hill rise up of 6 January 2021 to create a unmarried, seamless name for violence.
There’s no defence to be product of that. No journalist would argue for the best to be as cheating as Trump is permitted to be, even if misquoting and manipulating the phrases of others is a Trump specialism. That trail is closed to people who need to criticise Trump for his untruthfulness.
Nor will it do to make the transfer some have tried in defence of Landscape, arguing that the programme’s vast thrust used to be proper, even supposing that individual edit used to be now not. It’s slightly true that quite a lot of 6 January rioters testified that they believed they have been doing Trump’s bidding. It’s additionally true that Trump used to be impeached, even supposing in the end acquitted, for his function in inciting the ones occasions. However the ones information can’t justify a misleading edit. To mention in a different way is to have interaction in what america comic Stephen Colbert famously referred to as “truthiness”, substituting what feels to be true, or what we would possibly need to be true, for what’s in fact true.
What’s at stake right here is not just highbrow and journalistic integrity. It’s additionally that any slip is a present to Trump and a setback to what, portentously, we would possibly name the reason for fact – now not in some high-blown, summary sense, however very nearly. Word the White Space press secretary’s denunciation of the BBC as “100% pretend information” and a “propaganda device”. Mark the ones phrases, as a result of they are going to be used once more. Subsequent time the BBC appropriately exposes a Trump misdeed, and even asks a difficult query, he and his allies will recall the Landscape edit and demand that regardless of the BBC says will also be safely left out.
It’s because of this that it’s not the BBC’s many enemies, however reasonably its staunchest buddies who must be taking the occasions of the closing week maximum significantly. (Complete disclosure: I’ve introduced BBC Radio 4’s fresh historical past collection The Lengthy View for a few years.) A democratic society can’t serve as with no widely authorized frame of information. The United States not has that: there are red-state information and blue-state information; Fox Information information and MSNBC information. The Watergate scandal that drove Richard Nixon from place of work would slightly make a dent in these days’s US: the best would merely deny the proof, cheered on through its media allies.
What stands between Britain and that sorry state, during which wisdom is an issue of tribal association, is the BBC. And but for it to accomplish that essential serve as, the BBC can’t simply be excellent; it must be bulletproof. Which without a doubt explains why it’s that a few of the ones maximum dedicated to the BBC and its challenge – individuals who have faithful a long time in their operating existence to it – have sought to combat with, reasonably than disregard, Michael Prescott’s inside document and its extra alarming findings of bias on a chain of problems past the Landscape edit, from gender to Gaza. They keep in mind that, as the prestigious former Newsnight journalist Mark City places it, “failing to deal internally with problems like the ones raised through Prescott is a present to the destroyers”.
None of that is truthful. Trump’s loss of disgrace method he can say what he likes. However those that search to give protection to the foundations that undergird a liberal democracy – of which a fundamental, if essentially imperfect, dedication to fact is one of the maximum basic – hang themselves to the next same old.
That addiction continuously palms an enormous benefit to Trump. A model of it used to be at paintings this week, when 8 Senate Democrats broke from their birthday celebration to carry an finish to the standoff that had ended in a 42-day shutdown of america federal govt. Politically, the Democrats have been within the more potent place: polls confirmed citizens blamed Trump and the Republicans for the stalemate. However, as one of the crucial 8 put it, the “mounting financial ache [and] dangers to American citizens’ protection” become an excessive amount of to endure – they usually caved. Of their footwear, Trump would have pressed his political benefit, the general public’s ache be damned.
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That put out of your mind, for the general public excellent up to for fact, offers Trump super energy. So incessantly he fights an opponent who’s hamstrung through values he freely ignores. There would possibly, if truth be told, be just one space the place he’s constrained through the similar requirements, topic to the similar limits, as everybody else. And we were given a glimpse of that, too, this week.
The world in query is Jeffrey Epstein. Democrats this week launched new paperwork that recommend Trump can have identified extra about Epstein’s development of abuse than the president has admitted, or no less than that Epstein sought after to offer that affect. True to shape, the president’s allies in Congress and on cable information performed down the revelations. That typically works: if the objective is the media or the Democrats, the Maga base will reflexively give Trump the advantage of the doubt. However the Epstein scandal is other.
A lot of the Maga hardcore have been first attracted to Trump through their conviction, bolstered through the QAnon conspiracy, that there used to be a secret, elite cabal of kid abusers safe through the deep state – a cabal that Trump would disclose and spoil. Any e mail or scribbled be aware that confirms he and Epstein have been, if truth be told, friends shakes that self belief. It’s the something the Trump devoted would possibly by no means forgive him for. He may just shoot other folks on 5th Road – however he couldn’t do this.
Which is why the White Home is recently straining each and every sinew to forestall the Space of Representatives balloting subsequent week for a complete unlock of the justice division’s Epstein information, a movement more likely to be sponsored through a number of riot Republicans who understand how a lot this issues to the bottom. Trump calls the entire thing a “hoax”, as regardless that all the ones tens of 1000’s of pages are solid. In the event that they’d been produced through the BBC, he would escape with that. However Epstein is other. It’s the only battlefield that’s stage – and the possibility terrifies him.
Jonathan Freedland is a Mum or dad columnist
Mum or dad newsroom: Yr One in every of Trumpism: Is Britain Emulating america?
On Wednesday 21 January 2026, sign up for Jonathan Freedland, Tania Branigan and Nick Lowles as they replicate at the first yr of Donald Trump’s 2nd presidency – and to invite if Britain may well be set at the similar trail.
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