Trump’s fury at the BBC is real. I could see the anger in his eyes

Story by Rob Crilly  

Telegraph, November 14, 2025

Donald Trump had won a retraction and an apology just a day earlier from the BBC for the way it had edited his January 6 speech.

But as he glowered over me on Friday night at the back of Air Force One, it was clear he wasn’t ready to celebrate just yet.

“We’ll sue them,” he told me. “We’ll sue them for anywhere between $1bn and $5bn, probably some time next week.”

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I was sitting in the front row of the press cabin. Mr Trump was close enough to touch.

Next to him stood Karoline Leavitt, his press secretary. It was her interview with me a week before, when she called the corporation a “leftist propaganda machine”, that had given fresh legs to The Telegraph investigation.

It ultimately triggered the resignation of Tim Davie as the corporation’s director-general when he must have realised he was at the heart of an international incident.

Behind her was Sergio Gor. Until recently, he was one of the most powerful figures in the White House, but he is now due to take up a posting as ambassador to India.

He winked at me as the president arrived in the press cabin. He must have known what was about to come.

“Mr President,” I began… “My newspaper, The Telegraph, has led the way in exposing…”

He cut me off. “Are you The Telegraph? Oh, what a job you did,” he said. “What a job you did.”

Like most reporters, I have been on the receiving end of his glares.

He once stormed out of a press conference because of a question I asked about Covid and, during his trip to Scotland this year, I ended up as “this guy”, dismissed as a wise-cracking troublemaker.

This was a new experience. I was on the receiving end of a beam, the sort of all-embracing glow the president deploys to woo Middle Eastern princes bearing big money deals or glamorous talk show hosts with soft ball questions.

It was one of those moments that his close staff talk about. He wasn’t exactly cooing, but it was the next best thing.

“Are you proud of yourselves? How did you catch the BBC like that? Honestly, congratulations,” he continued.

It must have been a blessed relief to rail against “fake news”.

He was flying home on Air Force One to Mar-a-Lago for a weekend of golf chased by headlines about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, following the latest email dump, and what he knew about the late paedophile’s activities.

A moment earlier, he had berated the reporter sitting next to me, calling her “piggy” after she pushed hard on the latest Epstein releases.

But he was in the mood to praise The Telegraph.

It was only when he moved on to his plans to take the BBC to court that his face darkened again.

“I mean they even admitted that they cheated,” he said in disbelief.

He was in the press cabin for 26 minutes for his “gaggle” – what the White House press corps calls a quick question and answer session. But in that time, his mood ran from fury to elation and back again.

Trump’s fury at the BBC is real. I could see the anger in his eyes