IS THE BBC BEASTLY ENOUGH TO FASCISTS (6): 2021-2024
Across the Biden presidency Trump never really left BBC news. He changed role, from sitting president to defeated incumbent, then to twice impeached former president under investigation, then to clear front runner for 2024. For the BBC that meant shifting him from the top of the running order to a persistent presence threaded through coverage of American democracy, conspiracy culture and the rule of law. The question is whether that treatment was neutral, in the sense the BBC uses the word, or whether the tone and structure of its output placed Trump in a fixed moral frame long before his second run.The immediate transition moment matters. The Trump Show, the BBC One documentary series about his first term, ended on 19 January 2021, the night before Biden’s inauguration. Its final episode had explicitly framed the last weeks of the Trump presidency as an attempt to overturn the election, culminating in scenes of violent insurrection against the US Congress.
That is, already, a strong interpretive stance. The programme used interviews with insiders such as Steve Bannon, John Bolton and Stormy Daniels to paint a picture of four years of chaos. It was not, strictly speaking, Biden era coverage, but it set the starting point. For BBC audiences, Trump left office as the protagonist of a political horror story, not as a normal conservative president who had simply lost an election. Once Biden was sworn in, the rolling news output switched focus, but Trump stayed at the centre of two big storylines: accountability for 6 January and the future of Trumpism in American politics.
Straight news first. In the early months of 2021 BBC bulletins and BBC World News programmes covered the second impeachment trial, in which Democrats charged Trump with incitement of insurrection. They ran clips of his 6 January rally speech, footage of the Capitol attack and reaction from both parties. The BBC had already co produced an HBO documentary, Four Hours at the Capitol, released in October 2021, which reconstructed the riot between one and five in the afternoon using body camera footage, rioters’ videos and testimonies from police officers, congressional staff and members of Congress. The film was grim and immersive, designed to show the violence of the day rather than argue a point in voice over. By partnering on it the BBC aligned itself with a documentary account that clearly treated 6 January as an attack on democracy by Trump supporters, prompted by his false claims of a stolen election. That phrase 'false claims' is important. In its daily output, BBC News followed the now standard practice among large outlets of labelling Trump’s assertions that the 2020 election was rigged as false or baseless, and of referring to them as fabricated claims. The Trump Show itself described them as fabricated, and later BBC online explainers did the same.
This is not neutral language in the everyday sense, it is a factual judgement based on court decisions and state level audits, but it commits the BBC to treating one side of a polarised domestic argument as factually wrong. Where straight bulletins stuck to that formula, the deeper interpretive work about Trump in the Biden years was done by two BBC audio projects and by continuing analytical coverage of the investigations into him. Americast, which had started as a 2020 election podcast co hosted by Emily Maitlis and Jon Sopel, evolved into what the BBC itself describes as its authoritative US news and politics podcast. In its current incarnation it is fronted by Sarah Smith, the BBC North America editor, Radio 4 presenter Justin Webb, social media correspondent Marianna Spring and Washington based reporter Anthony Zurcher. Through the Biden presidency Americast episodes repeatedly returned to Trump, both as a political actor and as a symbol of something larger.
When Biden took office Americast spent time on questions such as whether Trumpism would fade without Trump in the White House, how Republican voters saw the Capitol riot, and what the Biden administration might do to de Trumpify institutions. Later episodes examined his control over the Republican Party during the 2022 midterms and then his decision to run again in 2024. A more recent programme, from June 2025, gives a flavour of the style. Its title, Elon Musk says Donald Trump is “in the Epstein files”, refers to a public row in which Musk claimed without evidence that Trump appeared in sealed documents linked to Jeffrey Epstein. The BBC’s own synopsis explains that the Americast team unpack how the row intensified, with Trump threatening to revoke Musk’s government contracts and Musk suggesting Trump should be impeached again, and asks why that matters for the midterms.
Americast sells itself as analysis, not as raw news. The hosts are billed as trusted BBC journalists and the show is deliberately conversational. Trump is almost always treated there as an agent of disruption and as the central figure in a story about polarisation and democracy under strain. The team go out of their way to hear from his supporters, often through vox pops and listener messages, and they invite Republicans and former Trump officials such as Marc Short onto the podcast. But the frame is clear. Trump is the problem to be explained. His narratives about fraud are false, his style is unprecedentedly norm breaking, and the question is how institutions will respond. The Coming Storm, launched on BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds in January 2022, goes further. Gabriel Gatehouse’s series is billed as America through the looking glass, an exploration of the QAnon conspiracy movement and the wider rabbit warren of American conspiracy culture. From the first run, reviewers in outlets like the New Statesman and the Guardian picked up the way it treats QAnon, Stop the Steal and the Capitol attack as connected elements of a deeper plot to break reality.
The basic thesis of The Coming Storm is that Trump did not create the conspiracy culture that led to 6 January, but that his rhetoric, his tolerance of QAnon influencers and his refusal to concede defeat drew that culture into the mainstream and gave it explosive force. Gatehouse travels across the US, interviewing QAnon believers, cultural entrepreneurs and ex insiders, and repeatedly returns to imagery of storms and judgement borrowed from Q lore. The 2024 second series, aired in the run up to the Biden Trump rematch, makes this link explicit. Its website description notes that whilst liberals across the world worry about a possible return of Donald Trump, millions of Americans are convinced their democracy has already been hijacked by a Deep State cabal, and that Gatehouse is investigating who is behind this story.
The Coming Storm clearly is not neutral in an everyday sense but that's because the truth here is nuts. It correctly labels QAnon a crazy conspiracy theory in Radio 4 continuity scripts and reviews, and it speaks of a plot to break reality. Yet it was produced within the BBC’s current affairs department and presented as journalism, shortlisted for the Orwell Prize and praised for its chilling investigation. It also scrupulously lets believers speak, often at length, rather than simply mocking them. The editorial judgement is that there is a reality based side and a conspiratorial side, and that impartiality in this context means listening in order to understand, then making clear that some claims simply are untrue. Trump himself is a constantly recurring figure in the series rather than a continuous presence. January 6 is treated as a turning point, a moment when the storm arrives, but Gatehouse’s attention is more on the underlying culture than on day to day Biden era politics. Nevertheless, for BBC audiences The Coming Storm is one of the most significant ways in which Trump’s Trumpism took shape as an object of narrative, a phenomenon to be studied rather than just a stream of news.
In parallel, the main BBC news operation spent much of the Biden presidency covering a series of investigations and indictments of Trump, each of which presented new tests for due impartiality. On 31 March 2023 a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict him on charges related to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels. A Financial Times timeline of that day, which cites BBC tweets, shows that BBC News pushed alerts and ran live coverage as soon as the story broke. Archive.org captures BBC News at One on that date trailing the indictment with a line from a guest who said I do not want to see anyone, including Donald Trump, indicted but the rule of law applies to everyone. The bulletin format is familiar. BBC presenters state that Trump denies wrongdoing, that he calls the case a witch hunt, that prosecutors say it involves a conspiracy to undermine the integrity of the 2016 election, and that he will appear in court in New York.
When the federal classified documents indictment landed in June 2023 BBC online and television coverage again followed the pattern seen with previous high profile stories. The BBC piece listed and explained the 37 original counts against Trump and the later superseding indictment, and ran a photo gallery by BBC journalist Chelsea Bailey showing boxes of documents stacked in a bathroom and ballroom at Mar a Lago. That gallery, echoed on PBS, was powerful for viewers because the images carried an implicit judgement. You did not have to call Trump reckless. The boxes in the bathroom did the work. But in text the BBC stuck to neutral phrasing, describing allegations, quoting the indictment and including Trump’s denial. Later in 2023, when special counsel Jack Smith brought a separate federal case charging Trump with election obstruction over his efforts to overturn Biden’s victory, BBC News produced a profile titled Jack Smith, the special counsel investigating Donald Trump, setting out his career and the scope of his inquiries. The article explained that Smith was examining attempts to interfere with the transfer of power and that the case overlapped with the House 6 January committee’s findings. Again, the value judgement is largely in the choice of frame. Smith is described as methodical and determined. The case is treated as a serious effort to hold a former president to account for an attempt to subvert the election.The Georgia racketeering indictment in August 2023 was covered in the same structural way, with BBC social media and online news pushing the Trump charged in Georgia 2020 election probe line. The later British documentary Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case, released in 2024 and broadcast by the BBC, took that indictment as its central story, reconstructing Trump’s phone call asking Georgia officials to find 11,780 votes and examining the RICO theory behind the charges.
Reviews in the Guardian, Telegraph and Times called it blood chilling, a documentary maker’s dream and a film that would make you even more worried about Trump winning. Those reviews were outside the BBC, but they captured how the film was received as a warning piece, emphasising the gravity of the alleged plot. During the Biden years, then, Trump appeared in three main forms in BBC output: as the central character in a narrative about conspiracy and the breakdown of shared reality, through The Coming Storm and related discussions; as the subject of legal accountability in rolling news and dedicated documentaries; and as a looming political return, analysed weekly on Americast and other political programmes.
The neutrality question has to be asked separately for each layer. At the straight news level, BBC television bulletins, the website and World Service radio were broadly neutral in the procedural sense the corporation uses. They reported what prosecutors alleged, what Trump said in response, what courts decided and how voters reacted. They labelled some claims false when those claims had been repeatedly disproved, such as assertions of a stolen election, but this was in line with explicit guidelines on truthfulness. They did not tell audiences whom to vote for. The presence of phrases such as Trump, who denies all wrongdoing, calls the case a witch hunt, appeared in almost every story.
At the interpretive audio and documentary level, the stance is more clearly sceptical. Americast’s descriptions of Trump’s behaviour are often wry. The Coming Storm places him at the centre of a conspiratorial politics that it calls chilling and reality breaking. The Trump Show and The Criminal Conspiracy Case construct him as an egotistical disruptor whose actions endanger democratic norms. This is not party political bias in the sense of cheerleading for Democrats, but it is a settled editorial judgement that Trumpism represents a threat to liberal democracy and that it should be scrutinised from that angle.
There is also the question of what was not said. In the Biden presidency BBC coverage tended to take Biden’s legitimacy and normality for granted and to frame political conflict as something happening within the Republican Party around Trump and his allies. Biden came under criticism for issues such as Afghanistan, inflation and age, but the BBC rarely constructed him as an existential danger to the system. Trump, by contrast, was consistently embedded in storylines about democratic crisis, conspiracy culture and legal jeopardy. For many observers that reflects the empirical reality of his behaviour and rhetoric. For some of his supporters it reads as institutional bias.
Internally the BBC’s impartiality culture was still in flux, shaped by earlier rows. The Naga Munchetty case in 2019, where the corporation initially ruled that she had breached neutrality by calling Trump’s go back where you came from tweets racist and then reversed that decision under pressure, set the template. By the Biden era there was a clearer acceptance that labelling racism or outright falsehood as such does not violate due impartiality. That acceptance made it easier for journalists to use language such as baseless claims or racist rhetoric in relation to Trump, but it also gave his defenders a target. They could argue that BBC staff felt freer to make moral judgements when Trump was involved than when other politicians were.
One more detail from the Biden years feeds into this. Although the Panorama Trump, A Second Chance documentary and the Trump lawsuit exploded only later, they were made and first broadcast in October 2024, at the end of the Biden presidency. The BBC now acknowledges that the edit of the 6 January speech in that programme, in which two separate lines were cut together and his peaceful and patriotic sentence was omitted, was an error of judgement. At the time of transmission it was framed as a sympathetic exploration of why Trump remained popular with voters, but the editing choice foreshadowed the current crisis about impartiality. It illustrates how, even in a film that tried to explain Trump’s continued appeal, there was a readiness to compress his words into a more damning shape.
If we list some of the concrete BBC reporters and programmes that defined Trump coverage under Biden, we can see how these strands come together. Gabriel Gatehouse and The Coming Storm, which took the Capitol attack and QAnon as starting points and traced the ways conspiracy culture, Trump and the idea of a coming storm intertwine. The series turned Trump era politics into a case study in how reality can be broken and rebuilt for millions of people. The Americast team, Justin Webb, Sarah Smith, Marianna Spring and Anthony Zurcher, who week after week during the Biden presidency analysed both Biden’s decisions and Trump’s hold on the Republican Party and base. Their own programme description makes clear that they specialise in social media and political analysis, tracking how Trump aligned narratives move online. BBC news correspondents like Chelsea Bailey, whose visual coverage of the classified documents indictment used photographs of boxes stored in bathrooms and ballrooms to communicate the strangeness of the situation. Documentary makers Marian Mohamed and Jecca Powell, whose Trump: The Criminal Conspiracy Case dissected the Georgia racketeering prosecution and was widely reviewed as outstanding and blood chilling, reinforcing a narrative of Trump as a serious danger rather than a spent force. The Panorama team behind Trump: A Second Chance, whose misjudged edit of the 6 January speech was made and first shown while Biden was still president, and which has since been treated as emblematic by those who see systemic anti Trump bias inside the BBC.
On balance it is fair to say that BBC reporting of Trump in the Biden presidency was neutral in form but not in effect. Bulletins, profiles and online explainers met the corporation’s internal tests for due impartiality. They quoted Trump and his allies, presented his legal arguments, and avoided overt endorsements of the Democrats. At the same time, the most prominent narrative projects drove home a consistent message. Trump was portrayed as the figure around whom conspiracy theories, assaults on the electoral process and authoritarian impulses crystallised. That is a substantive judgement about the nature of Trumpism rather than a party preference, but it is a judgement all the same, and one based on the facts. Whatever it was, it was less than beastly treatment for the fascist.