The BBC and historian Rutger Bregman have clashed over the removal of a line from his lecture, which he has called ‘censorship’.

In his Reith Lecture, A Time Of Monsters, the author described Donald Trump as ‘the most openly corrupt president in American history’.

This was removed from the Radio 4 broadcast, which aired at 9am on Tuesday, which the BBC said had been done on ‘legal advice’.

It comes after Donald Trump threatened the BBC with a billion-dollar lawsuit over the editing of his speech in a Panorama episode from 2024.

Bregman took to his social media to share the ‘disappointing’ news a month after he delivered his lecture to a live audience in London.

‘Honestly, I wish this wasn’t true, but the BBC has decided to censor the opening lecture of a series they invite

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