The lawyers working on the adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster Donald Trump’s libel action regarding the BBC’s covering of the January 6 insurrection must have been slapping doughnuts into their foreheads in despair. Trump chose to celebrate St Patrick’s Day by giving a press conference full of outright lies that could prejudice his case. Whatever happened to the old tradition of just putting on a green wig and jumping around to Jump Around until you are sick?
A police officer died during that January 6 attack on the Capitol that many believe Trump encouraged. Four more officers subsequently took their own lives. But even worse than that, a man named Jacob Chansley, who calls himself the QAnon Shaman, arrived at the insurrection in a flamboyant garb that culturally misappropriated both native American dress and the stage costumes of the 1990s acid jazz singer Jamiroquai, insulting the protected characteristics of two minority groups simultaneously.
Chansley, the QAnon shaman, claimed that a cabal of devil-worshipping, flesh-eating child molesters, who met up in a pizzeria basement and were in league with the deep state, was facilitating a worldwide child sex trafficking ring which Donald Trump was secretly trying to thwart, like one of those “occult detectives” popular in 19th-century pulp fiction, but with a massive orange face that made it difficult for him to do undercover investigations, the John Silence of grabbing them by the pussy.
Chansley the Shaman was half right. A secret cabal of non-flesh-eating child molesters was in league with the global far right and subservient tech barons, and they all met up, not in the cellar of a pizza restaurant, but on a deluxe sex island. And, far from trying to thwart them, Donald Trump actually used to party with the main paedophile, whom he had described as “a terrific guy” who liked women “on the younger side”. Surprisingly, the man in the Sioux-Acid Jazz hybrid costume was only a little wide of the mark.
Nonetheless, Dances-With-Jamiroquai’s prison sentence was quashed, and he was pardoned fully when Trump came back into office. Charges relating to Trump’s own involvement in the attack were dropped in November 2024, due to the precedent of not prosecuting sitting presidents, which may explain why he was so desperate to become president. It’s one way of staying out of jail, I suppose.
A BBC documentary on the insurrection had carelessly edited together different parts of the inspirational speech Trump gave to the rioters on the day, in a way that suggested his incitement to violence was deliberately explicit rather than vaguely implicit. The Daily Telegraph, Britain’s worst newspaper, spotted the mistake months after the event and levered Donald Trump into its commercial and ideological war against the BBC, somehow thinking it could get him to do its bidding, like one of those out-of-shape men in tracksuits you see being pulled around the park by a 15-stone weapon dog on a lead made of girders.
Is Trump just making stuff up in a panic, to hide behind, in case the mutilizors come for his presumably orange genitals with big scissors?
Had the Daily Telegraph’s clearly culturally illiterate editor, Chris Evans, not seen Larry Cohen’s 1982 classic Q – The Winged Serpent? Paranoid jazz pianist Michael Moriarty awakens the sleeping Aztec dragon god Quetzalcoatl from the attic of the Chrysler Building to impress a date but its rampage can then only be stopped by the kung fu skills of David Carradine. Trump’s threat of a $10bn lawsuit against the broadcaster surely cast a shadow over news providers everywhere – even, one would imagine, the Daily Telegraph itself, which at some point in the future, surely, may want to risk becoming an actual newspaper again. Though this won’t be happening any time soon, going on its coverage of Trump’s St Patrick’s Day sermon.
Here, for the avoidance of doubt, are Trump’s actual words on the BBC case from his Tuesday weave. I have arranged them as if they were a poem, in order to defeat, and arguably enhance, the adjudicated sex offender and convicted fraudster’s somewhat idiosyncratic syntax.
Terrible Words by Donald J Trump, age 79
In a little while you’ll see
I’ll be suing the BBC
For putting words in my mouth. Literally,
They put words in my mouth.
They had me saying things that I
Never said coming out. I
Guess they used AI
Or something.
And so we’ll be bringing that lawsuit.
A lot of people are asking, “when
Are you bringing that lawsuit?”
Even the media can’t believe that one.
They actually put terrible words in
My mouth to do with January 6
That I didn’t say. And they
Are beautiful words that I said.
Right? Beautiful words. Talking
About patriotism and all of the good things
That I said. They didn’t say that.
But they put terrible words.
The BBC did not use AI to put things Trump did not say into Trump’s mouth. There wouldn’t be enough room anyway, what with all the masticated KFC and decomposing Putin residues. Everyone knows this. It’s possible Trump didn’t understand what AI was, or had misremembered what actually happened. But to me Trump looks like a frightened man; frightened of failure in Iran; frightened of the collapse of domestic support; frightened maybe of those still-unissued Epstein files; perhaps even frightened of being mutilized into being a trans woman against his will by a woketard.
Is Trump just making stuff up in a panic as a smokescreen, to invalidate criticism, and to hide behind in case the trans mutilizors come for his presumably orange genitals with big scissors?
The Daily Telegraph had three reporters covering the speech – Connor Stringer, Robert Mendick and Akhtar Makoii – yet their report doesn’t even mention Trump’s hallucinatory imaginings of the BBC using AI to ventriloquise him, which pretty much every other news source in the free world set centre stage. This was the story. Surely? Instead, the Daily Telegraph merely quotes the sections that consolidate its own anti-BBC position, thus. “Describing its coverage as ‘fake news’ Trump added: ‘It’s corrupt, fraudulent. It really is. It’s fraudulent. It’s not just fake. It’s beyond fake. It’s really criminal what they do.’” Yes. And he also said the BBC used AI to make him say things he never said.
Perhaps the three Telegraph stooges were distracted in the Oval Office by the sort of things that matter to Telegraph writers – a photo of an attractive young woman in a hat at a race meeting, a photo of an attractive young woman in academic dress opening a bottle of champagne in the street after completing her final exams, or tax avoidance advice.
There’s fake news everywhere. Donald Trump is right about that. But you don’t need AI to lie. You can lie by the sin of omission and the trio of Telegraph tools’ report on Trump’s Tuesday speech is as egregious in its own editing of events as the BBC’s concertina-ing of two different sections of Trump’s January 6 speech. Because they failed to identify Trump’s towering untruths in real time at such close quarters, Connor Stringer, Akhtar Makoii and Robert Mendick should be ashamed of themselves. And Robert Mendick, irrefutable proof of the notion of nominative destiny, should be doubly ashamed of himself, for reasons that are obvious.
Stewart Lee vs The Man-Wulf tours everywhere in the UK and Ireland until the end of the year, and Stewart introduces a screening of the film The Memory Blocks, with the artists Andrew and Eden Kötting, at the Watershed in Bristol on Saturday 28 March