Americanswers on 5 Live! Why is Donald Trump threatening to sue the BBC for $1 billion?

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0:06Is the American dream still possible? I'm Asma Khalid, one of the hosts of the Global Story podcast from the BBC. One of the most successful exports the United States has ever sold the world is the American dream, that tantalising promise of a better, freer, richer life. But is it still attainable? I feel like the American dream is alive but not well. For more, listen to The Global Story on BBC.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

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1:10Anthony:Welcome back to another Monday Q &A session. The big stories today, well, the coming end to the US government shutdown is huge in America. But of course, Donald Trump and the BBC, that's pretty huge too. Just after we recorded with Matt Chorley, we had breaking news, the US media reporting that Donald Trump is threatening to sue the BBC for a billion dollars. And we also talk about Elon Musk, which we do often, but it's worth doing this time round in particular because he's launching a rival to Wikipedia. We also discuss whether Barack Obama might return to politics. When we got going, though, Matt wasn't even in the studio.

1:45Anthony:He was on his way back from interviewing the Chancellor down the road at No. 11 Downing Street. The Chancellor, by the way, if you're not living in Britain, is the Treasury Minister in Britain. So we start this edition with me filling in live on the radio until he got into the studio. Here's our episode with me, Marianna and Anthony as well. Welcome to AmeriCansers.

2:16Anthony:This is the most exciting moment in my broadcasting life. It's Justin Webb here from AmeriCast. Matt, as you know, has just been interviewing the Chancellor. There was a very dramatic exit from number 11. He is somewhere currently between number 11 Downing Street and the BBC's offices in Westminster. There's a video feed of the interview that he was conducting here in the studio. I'm just looking up on it now and it says, rather worryingly, no active connection. Oh, Matt, there is an active connection. That was quite an evil capital you did there, Justin, when you realised you had the power. And by the way, Matt, you can't tell me off for not being in Milbank, A, because I've just flown back from America and had half an hour's sleep, but B, because you're not even there yet.

3:02Well, you say that, Mariana, but...

3:04Anthony:I'm here! Oh, goodness. It's AmeriCast. We'll crack on. Anthony's there because I can hear him. Anthony's there, where are you, Anthony? I am in Washington, D.C. Hello, everyone. Very good. So I'm here, Justin's here, Mariana's here, Anthony's here. It's time for the AmeriCast.

3:51Yes, it's time for AmeriCast. We should probably start with a story which is big on both sides of the Atlantic. The BBC chair, Samir Shires, apologised this afternoon for an error of judgement. Yesterday, the BBC's Director General, Tim Davy, and CEO of News, Deborah Tennis, both resigned. Of course, this is all over how a 2024 Panorama documentary edited Donald Trump's speech from January 6th, 2021, without making it that their clip of Trump had been edited. in a statement BBC Chair Samir Shah said we accept that the way the speech was edited did give the impression of a direct call for violent action the BBC would like to apologise for that error on Sunday President Trump posted this on social media lots of it's in capitals but I won't shout those bits the top people in the BBC including Tim David the boss are all quitting slash fired because they were caught doctoring in quotes my very good brackets perfect speech of January the 6th thank you to the Telegraph exposing these corrupt journalists.

4:49These are very dishonest people who try to step on the scales of a presidential election. On top of everything else, they are from a foreign country, one that many consider our number one ally. What a terrible thing for democracy. And then we found out today that Donald Trump has sent a letter to the BBC threatening legal action. So, there's a lot for us to talk about, and obviously it's about more than just this panorama, but right now we'll focus on that because that's sort of the American angle on what happened last night and then again today. Anthony just explain for our listeners who might have come to this story very late uh and not followed it all clear up the truth about January the 6th what did Trump actually say in his speech versus what was shown on Panorama right so on Panorama the the clip was mashed up uh and it was we're going to walk down to the Capitol I'll be with you and we will fight we will fight like hell and if you don't fight like hell you're not going to have a country anymore so it gave the impression that Donald was directly calling for a march on the U.S.

5:44Capitol and for people to fight. What he actually said over a speech that stretched about an hour was, we are going to walk down and I'll be with you. We're going to walk down. We're going to walk down anyone you want. But I think right here, we're going to walk down to the Capitol and we're going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women. And we're probably not going to be cheering so much for some of them because you can never take our country back with weakness. A little later on, he said, I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard.

6:15That's something that Donald Trump supporters point to, saying that he was calling for peaceful marches and peaceful protests. That clip where Donald Trump said, we fight and we fight like hell, that came about later in the speech. Although Trump used the words fight and fighting dozens of times in that speech with assertions that the election was stolen and dire warnings about how if the election results weren't reversed. America wouldn't exist as a country anymore. The fact of the matter is he gave that speech in the morning, and later that day, several hours later, Trump supporters did attack the Capitol.

6:47They broke onto the Senate floor, and they ransacked congressional offices, and they brought election certification to a halt for about 12 hours. Trump's role in all of this was investigated by a congressional committee. He would later be indicted on federal and state charges for attempting to overturn the results of the election. But none of those cases ever reached trial. And the federal charges were ultimately dropped when Trump won re-election. And Marianna, how's this playing out in terms of the sort of relationship between the mainstream media and Donald Trump? The BBC is not the first organisation he's threatened to sue.

7:23No, it definitely isn't. We've chatted quite a lot about all of the different legal cases that have been unfolding where Donald Trump has decided to take action because he wasn't happy with an edit or because there was a disagreement in how he feels the media have been covering certain topics. And I've got a list actually of some of the other, you know, he's had a go before at ABC, at CBS, and we know that there's this case going on with the New York Times at the moment. And, you know, this is this is something that Donald Trump, he's not shy of taking legal action against against media outlets.

8:01And he's certainly not shy of calling them fake news and disinformation. And as he did there in that truth social post, corrupt journalists with capital letters. And it's worth saying, you know, this is about more than from a US point of view. This is about obviously this panorama edit we've been talking about. But the memo itself, the leaked memo, which has triggered this whole conversation is also about lots of other things like Gaza, for example. and how the BBC covered last year's election in the US more generally, including our own Sarah Smith, who presents America, in her role as North America editor.

8:33And when you look at how this is playing out on social media, so my undercover voters with their accounts across all the main social media sites, I use them to interrogate what different people are pushed and recommended. You can see how some of these narratives, particularly taking aim at the mainstream media, saying that they are fake news, they distort stuff, that they get stuff wrong all the time, have got loads and loads and loads of traction, sometimes going beyond legitimate concerns and questions, sometimes not. And then you've also got other narratives suggesting that this is an attack on the press and then going beyond that with some kind of slightly more conspiratorial takes that are taking off on the other side.

9:10So a lot of this is playing out through a very polarised social media world, as it always does. And a lot of Donald Trump's key phrases and words are popping up all over the place.

9:21Anthony:I mean, I think it's worth pointing out, Don't laugh at me, Matt, when I do this, OK? Promise not to laugh. I won't laugh. Yes, promise not to laugh. Because you've got your number 11 Downing Street shirt on and all the rest of it. Very serious trousers. It's a serious day in the history of the nation. I do think that on AmeriCast, we have always really bent over backwards. And it hasn't always been easy, actually, because the audience, generally speaking, doesn't think much of Donald Trump. It is as simple and as blunt as that. But generally, we've bent over backwards to be fair to him. And during the whole course of his effort to be reelected, we have pointed out again and again the efforts of his supporters to be heard and to be heard in terms that they would understand matter to them.

10:09Anthony:We've pointed out the things that his opponents did wrong, including obviously Joe Biden and that effort to keep him in the White House when he was pretty obvious to everyone, including most Americans, that he was unfit, if not to serve, then certainly to be reelected. elected. And even recently on this program, we did an entire episode on how Donald Trump's efforts to reorganize American universities might be considered by some and is considered possibly by a majority of Americans to be an effort to rebalance a kind of academic monoculture that has completely forced out any proper questioning of important issues inside those universities.

10:47Anthony:And that is something, frankly, you don't hear, not just elsewhere in the BBC, but elsewhere in the media. So it is a really difficult job. And I'm certainly not suggesting we've always got it right. But I think it is really important that we try to carry on. And this is a warning to us all not to get kind of swept up in these efforts to say, oh, well, you know, Donald Trump, obviously, he had violent intent, or obviously he did this, or obviously did that. Stick to factual reporting of what he's doing and when necessary, report what his supporters think is important and that's what we do. You didn't laugh at all, Jim.

11:25No, I didn't laugh at all because I was under strict instructions. It's very important. Let's move on then and talk about some of the other things which are happening in America right now. We've got a question from Rose in Lincolnshire. Listening to you all talk about the government shutdown and people not being paid for large indeterminate amounts of time leads me to this question. How do ordinary people manage? Are there mechanisms in place for people to carry on paying their mortgage bills, etc. Well, the reality is that there was no set governmental policy for how to help federal employees who lost their paychecks, who weren't being paid for about a month during this shutdown.

12:00Now, private companies, banks and mortgage companies and utility companies did offer special dispensation to government employees, a chance to put off payments in some instances, but this was done on a kind of an ad hoc basis. It was a challenging time for government employees. I mean, imagine yourself sitting at home and not being able to get a paycheck, several paychecks over the course of a month. A lot of people, a lot of our listeners, I imagine, a lot of Americans live paycheck to paycheck, and it would be incredibly stressful. So they managed, I guess, as best they could. And now that it looks like the government is going to reopen, these people will receive back pay and they will start getting their paychecks.

12:42So hopefully they've been able to hang on and make ends meet during what has been, I'm sure, a very trying time for them. Matt, can I add my shutdown firsthand experience? Oh, yes, of course. Only because I have just come back from, I was in New York and Chicago for this documentary I'm doing for BBC Two about social media algorithms. And we were stuck on the tarmac for what felt like hours and hours and hours. I think it was about two hours when we were flying from New York to Chicago and I couldn't understand what was going on and I thought, why is everyone just so relaxed about the fact that everything is so incredibly delayed?

13:14And then I realised it was the shutdown, which is a very small example of how it was really annoying. Another big topic in the AmeriCast inbox this week is about whether this former US president is about to make a comeback.

13:34Thank you! All right, all right, all right. Man, I'm fired up too.

13:46So that's Barack Obama there, fired up, campaigning with Democrats, and they won big in key US elections last week. Jim has sent us this question. If Barack Obama's recent multi-city tour in support of Democrat candidates were they meant as a warning shot to Republicans that he will return to the presidential trail if Trump manages to overturn the 22nd Amendment. So there's some hurdles to get through there, but if Trump finds a way to run again, that would obviously free the field for Barack Obama to run again, so it could be a rerun, Trump versus Obama. Justin?

14:19Anthony:No, I don't think he'd do it. I think he lives in enormous, pleasant, and doubtless many would say deserved luxury in Martha's Vineyard, and I don't think he's absolutely got it in him. I think he can do the odd campaign intervention, but the idea of being president again. And there is a certain person to whom he is married who would have very strong views on that. And she would definitely express them and probably express them publicly. There is absolutely no way at all, realistically, that he comes back. Is he still a campaigning force? I think you can say at the last set of elections we just had, yeah, he made a bit of a difference.

14:57Anthony:Although you can also say at the set before that, the actual Trump presidential election, he was pretty useless, actually. came out and was a bit tetchy, particularly with young black men who in the end voted in record numbers for Donald Trump and Obama didn't actually seem to make much of a difference with them other than perhaps put them off voting Democrats. So the jury's out about how much of a force he is in the modern United States but the idea of his coming back I think is completely for the birds. What about Michelle Obama herself though, Anthony? Could she run? She could run. She has not expressed any interest in running.

15:34In fact, she has actively dismissed calls for her to run. If you remember when she gave a, yeah, they all do that. But, and, you know, she obviously has very, very real political talents. If you remember her speech at the Democratic Convention last year, it was very well received. Her speech five years before that virtual Democratic Convention speech also got a lot of Democrats jazzed. But I think she never really liked the spotlight, the political spotlight. She doesn't really want to return to the spotlight. She's very careful about her public appearances only really coming out during presidential election year.

16:12So while she is eligible, I would find it unlikely that she would step into the spotlight again. But I'm glad that we've taken a break from talking about whether Donald Trump will run for a third presidential term, to talk about whether Barack Obama would run for a third presidential term. This is a change of pace. Yeah, just shake things up a bit. Marianna, last week, obviously there is a sort of slight sense of a generational shift in Democrats. You had Nancy Pelosi announcing that she's standing down. You've got Mamdani winning in New York. Is that a sense that you see that actually, to a lot of young voters in America now, Barack Obama is the old guy.

16:52Is there a generational shift going on, do you think? Yeah, I think it's really interesting. I mean, we chatted about it quite a lot. we did this episode which was very well felt very late New York time because I just I just got there and I could hear like loads of people cheering in in Brooklyn and Williamsburg where I was staying and when Mandami had won won the election for mayor there and I think you know we chatted about it quite extensively but that that Mandami feels like he has a new strategy one that is perhaps capturing an energy in a way that Obama succeeded in doing when he became president but obviously on a different kind of in a different forum which is uh new york which is not as anthony's pointed out quite a lot um necessarily um one that would work everywhere and um would apply everywhere but there is that real sense of like right he actually has got good at what i'd say is kind of gaming the social media algorithm making sure his content is authentic and genuine and and actually on point and not sort of a bit passé which kind of kamala harris made the mistake of of sort of trying to be to social media and then that a bit she was being a bit bossing the internet matt as we would say whereas mandami was actually bossing the internet and so i think i think that there's a new blueprint that is emerging for how to be a democrat in the way mandami is that really excites people but whether he well and we know that he in the current climate he couldn't run to be president anyway because of where he was born but that could be a blueprint in which to build yeah a new generation of Democrats who perhaps evolve on from Nancy Pelosi and Obama and are native to the social media age.

18:28Let's move on and talk about your other mates, Marianne. Elon. It's time for this. Klaxon. Elon. Oh my gosh, you are so uncannily sound the same. Now, don't worry, I'm not going to try and explain how big a trillion dollars is again, which I tried to do on Newsnight on Friday night and I think made matters more complicated. It was after somebody wrote in the script that if one grain of rice is one dollar a million grains of rice is the same weight as a four year old so a trillion would be a million four year olds made of rice and I just wasn't sure that that was helping. You really picture how big that pay packet would be.

19:11That is so bizarre. Anyway, that's news now for you. Elon Musk instead we want to talk about because he's launched Grokipedia which is a rival to Wikipedia which he calls Wokipedia it's all AI generated and he says his goal is to provide the truth and purge the propaganda from the online encyclopedias Ray has been in touch says I wondered what you think of the concern of myself and others of maybe entering a new era of what might be labelled tech fascism we have Elon Musk using X as a propaganda machine for far right movements he has also just launched an alternative to Wikipedia and we have got Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires building surveillance of military machinery for the authoritarian regime of Donald Trump.

19:48What do you think? Very good question. I mean, we should obviously point out they would, Musk, Teal and the rest, would refute allegations of being fascists. And that's Ray's view. And not the BBC's. And not the BBC's. And it's worth saying as well, when I say a very good question, it's not because I agree with Ray, it's because I think it's an interesting thing for us to talk about. Everyone's being so cautious today, aren't they?

20:08Anthony:I wonder why. I played after all those caveats, we've run out of time. But what I would say, and I think this is why this is so interesting to talk about is, first of all, I think that Wikipedia in general has often been seen as quite a neutral place, actually. Like, it essentially is run by volunteers. It relies on donations. And a lot of people who contribute to the pages are basically just kind of compiling together open source links that they can find on the internet. So these kind of accusations of Wikipedia being Wokipedia feel like versus some other social media platforms where there are arguments to be made that there's been, say, biased moderation or other things like that.

20:46I mean, Wikipedia generally has escaped a lot of that heat, but not now because of Elon Musk. What I think is at the heart of this, actually, and this question, is that when we talk about, for example, something like Grok, which is AI, or when we talk about algorithms, the recommendation systems, which are also AI, can AI ever be sort of impartial? And actually, the issue is that a lot of this technology will, either it's drawing from a when it comes to generative AI it's drawing from a kind of base of content and it depends on what content is kind of being fed into the model and how it and how it then interprets that and spits it back out again and then when it comes to the kind of algorithmic systems they thrive off outrage and reaction and that can be on either side of the political spectrum but ultimately on extremes and so impartial nuance tends to get a bit lost and so So I think when Ray uses that term tech fascism, I'd say it's more so the way that it's not necessarily fascism.

21:46It's just the way that technology favors outrage and extremes and the models off which it operates. And actually often Grok, which is this AI tool on X, disagrees quite strongly with some of the MAGA influencers and Elon Musk as well, because it's ultimately drawing off a kind of wider database and you can't necessarily control what it does or says. But I think that we're entering this world where, you know, it's like everything is set up in opposition to each other. So it's Wikipedia versus Grokipedia. And that is, I think, for me, a product of this algorithmic system which favours kind of in-and-out groups and extremes on either side and there's just not any room for anything in the middle.

22:28I was just having a look at Grokipedia. I've just looked up myself. It's incredible. Even I can't be bothered waiting through all that. I mean, it's just like an extended version of Wikipedia. Yeah, and there's also, I mean, and this also raises another question, which is like, how does it compile? Like, what data is it working off? Yeah, exactly. And, you know, Peter Thiel, there's been various criticisms of Palantir, the technology firm that he is in charge of because of what data it uses and concerns about privacy and things like that. So all of that is at play here as well. which is the same with the algorithms, because they figure out loads about how we behave and what we do.

23:06There's a brilliant sentence here. External influences from television, including the two Ronnies during his youth, and later, if I got news for you, introduced him to satirical humour and political commentary, fostering interests that contrasted with his rural trade-orientated upbringing. Yeah. I think I've said once that I grew up... Absolutely right. Trade-oriented upbringing. Yeah. Well, my father wasn't a toolmaker. I can't make that clear. It's interesting this Grokopedia thing, though, Justin. I had interviewed Jimmy Wales a couple of weeks ago and asked him about exactly this and how worried was he?

23:35And he said, not really. Elon Musk is about to find out how difficult it is to run an enormous online encyclopedia. Or control AI as well.