In the end, Mr Trump didn’t have to embark on flights of fancy over "fake news" from the "fake news media".
Instead, the BBC handed itself over on a silver platter and is now fully embroiled in a debacle it could easily have avoided.
An appalling piece of editing in a Panorama documentary in the United Kingdom in October last year, before the US election, has effectively done all credible media organisations around the world a huge disservice when it comes to maintaining trust.
The BBC maintains it wasn’t done on purpose, but it was a dreadful bit of work. If it was meant to make it appear Mr Trump was inciting violence, it did a good job.
The documentary used parts of Mr Trump’s January 6, 2021, speech more than 50 minutes apart to make it appear he said: "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol ... and I’ll be there with you. And we fight. We fight like hell."
What he actually said was: "We’re going to walk down to the Capitol, and we’re going to cheer on our brave senators and congressmen and women."
Deleting what was effectively almost an hour of his rambling address to make up a more compelling and condemning quote showed extremely poor judgement.
It is common practice for print and online journalists to shorten lengthy remarks in speeches in an effort to remove irrelevancies and present the reader with a more concise quote. This is indicated by an ellipsis, three dots showing where words have been omitted.
This might be used within a sentence or a paragraph of similar ideas, but to use an ellipsis to mark the deletion of many hundreds of words from a speech over such a long time period would be bad form.
Instead, a journalist should indicate the passage of time by inserting paragraphs of reported speech which sum up the intervening words.
The BBC has apologised to Mr Trump for the awful editing and says it will not broadcast the item again. The fallout from the fiasco has led to the resignations of director-general Tim Davie and also the corporation’s head of news, Deborah Turness.
Always looking to boost his bank balance, Mr Trump is now threatening to sue the BBC for somewhere between $US1 billion and $US5b, depending which way the wind is blowing on the day he decides.
The BBC has already said it will not pay him any compensation and denies there is a case for a defamation claim.
While there are also fears the British public’s money could become entangled in any legal action, there are good reasons to believe his attempts to sue are unlikely to succeed.
The primary reasons are the documentary was only screened in the UK and Mr Trump was elected regardless of it. The BBC also says the edit was done without malice and was only 12 seconds in an hour-long programme.
We all know how litigious Mr Trump is. He currently has four active lawsuits against media companies, including The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times.
He has also won money from ABC News and notably from CBS News/Paramount, over its editing of a 60 Minutes interview with Democrat presidential hopeful Kamala Harris.
Mr Trump always threatens in the hope of an early and quick settlement, and the BBC will be well aware of his tactics.
In some ways what the BBC did couldn’t have happened to a nicer man. Trump has provoked. He has done terrible things to the truth, twisting it this way and that, and lying at every turn.
Journalists are humans too. Absolute objectivity is impossible to achieve because of that. And they make mistakes.
But the BBC’s actions have given Mr Trump a victory, and made it harder for all media companies to retain their valued trustworthy reputations.
