Donald Trump is taking your money — what are you going to do about it?

Donald Trump has just forced the BBC’s Director General to resign, nudged its Head of News to follow, and is now suing the corporation for a billion dollars. Don’t scratch your eyes; that sentence is real.

It began with a Panorama documentary called Trump’s Second Chance. Broadcast last year, it followed a group of loyal supporters to ask why, despite the convictions and the chaos of January 6th, they still stood by him. It wasn’t a hit piece. If anything, it tried to understand belief. But somewhere in the edit, a clip of Trump’s speech that day was misquoted, implying he’d said words he hadn’t.

His lawyers sent a letter demanding a “full apology, full contrition, full surrender” or a billion dollars. Within days, Director-General Tim Davie quit. The Head of News had already gone. And now the broadcaster that’s survived wars, recessions, and fourteen Culture Secretaries is being told to hand over licence-fee money to a man who tried to overturn an election.

Inside the BBC, lawyers are probably debating the impossible question: fight or fold. To fight means months of transatlantic litigation and soaring legal costs. To fold means explaining to the public why their licence fees are being wired to Mar-a-Lago. There’s a deeper danger too. American networks like NBC and CBS have quietly paid out before, usually to avoid embarrassment or discovery. But the BBC isn’t them. Every possible outcome looks humiliating, which is precisely the point. Trump’s lawsuits are not about justice. They are about spectacle. The performance is the punishment. Every hour of legal wrangling, every headline of doubt, feeds his argument that truth itself can be negotiated. Settling wouldn’t just be expensive; it would turn a small editorial mistake into confirmation of a global lie.

Let’s be clear, Trump’s actual case is hopeless. He’s suing in the United States, where he’d need to prove not only that the BBC published a false statement, but that it did so with “actual malice” — a deliberate intent to deceive. There’s even a question over whether the statute of limitations has expired. It isn’t really a lawsuit at all, it’s theatre.

The BBC, on the other hand, has a solid defence. The edit may have been sloppy, but Trump’s record isn’t. This is a man impeached twice, investigated repeatedly, and found by his own officials to have spread falsehoods about a “stolen” election before a single ballot was cast. If the BBC stands its ground, it will probably win.

Because that’s the real purpose of the suit. Trump doesn’t expect to win; he expects to frighten. To remind journalists that calling him what he is will always come at a higher cost than they can bear. He has turned the bureaucracy of truth against itself: the lawyers, the disclaimers, the endless risk assessments.

And his admirers in Britain are cheering him on. The same men who shout about British sovereignty and “taking back control” are now applauding an American president who wants to take control of our media. Nigel Farage, populism’s franchise owner, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who treats pronunciation as ideology, have both defended Trump’s right to sue. Both, conveniently, are paid by GB News, a channel built to attack the BBC while mimicking its authority. Their patriotism has always been conditional: Britain first, unless there’s money to be made. Even the Russian Embassy has joined in, accusing the BBC of “manipulating facts” and “pushing ideology.” When your allies are Farage, Moscow, and Mar-a-Lago, the line between patriotism and parody has disappeared.

But this isn’t just about Trump. It’s a mirror held up to a Britain that has forgotten what the BBC is for. The right calls it a den of left-wing elitists. The left calls it a government mouthpiece. Politicians on both sides secretly dream of a version that asks fewer questions. Meanwhile, the BBC itself stumbles from scandal to scandal, so desperate to prove its impartiality that it’s forgotten how to be brave.

There’s a strange sickness that sets in when a national institution starts apologising for existing. Executives spend more time pre-empting outrage than producing journalism. They lean into criticism instead of resisting it, desperate to prove they can still be “balanced.” The result is a newsroom that mistakes timidity with fairness.

And yet, despite all that, the BBC still matters. It is the last shared stage we have. Millions of people, from the furious to the indifferent, still turn to it to find out what’s real. It’s the only British institution that can be accused of both leftist capture and Tory servitude in the same week and have both sides believe it. That isn’t hypocrisy. It’s reach.

Which is exactly why it makes such a convenient enemy. The populist right doesn’t hate the BBC because it lies. They hate it because it still believes in truth as a public good — something we fund collectively, not something we stream privately. They want to replace it with rage-based infotainment, because rage is cheaper and doesn’t require fact-checking.

Trump’s lawsuit fits neatly into that project. It’s part of a global war on trust, an attempt to make every fact debatable and every institution corruptible. You don’t have to destroy the BBC outright, only make it doubt itself.

This story is bigger than a single libel claim. It’s a test of moral confidence. Will the BBC fight back and defend its journalism — flawed, imperfect, but grounded in evidence — or will it apologise and pay off a man who built his career on lying? If it caves, it will be remembered not as Trump’s victim but as his accomplice.

And who would pay the price? You, me, and everyone else who still fills out a licence renewal form would be, in effect, funding Donald Trump’s golf membership. It’s the kind of irony Britain specialises in: morally revolting but procedurally correct.

So yes, your licence fee might one day help pay Donald Trump’s legal bills. But before you rage at the BBC for that, remember what the alternative looks like. It’s a media landscape where truth is whatever the loudest man in the room says it is. Where “patriotism” means siding with foreign autocrats if it gets better ratings. Where news becomes content, and content becomes propaganda.

The BBC’s problem isn’t bias. It’s that it still believes facts can survive in a world that rewards fiction. And that’s exactly why it deserves defending — not as a museum piece, but as an endangered species. Because once the bullies finish with it, they’ll come for whoever tells the next uncomfortable truth.