President Trump’s visit to the United Nations yesterday was greeted with the institutional equivalent of a wardrobe malfunction. First the up escalator stopped at the precise moment Mrs. Trump, President Trump, and an accompanying Secret Service agent stepped on to it. Then the teleprompter stopped rolling for his speech to the United Nations General Assembly.
The escalator incident is not funny. Susan Crabtree suggests the security risks it posed to President and Mrs. Trump in linked X posts that can be accessed here.
Whoever engineered it must have had a pretty good idea what was coming. What was that — let’s call it “sabotage” pending whatever investigation ensues — all about? I should like to think that President Trump had the last laugh.
The White House has compiled a set of highlights with links to video excerpts under the heading “At UN, President Trump Champions Sovereignty, Rejects Globalism.” Rev has posted full text of the speech here. I have posted full video below.
Trump touted his own achievements in office and derided the UN as a useless institution. On the latter point, I have to part company with the president. Would that the UN were only useless. It has become a hateful and destructive cesspool of anti-Americanism and anti-Semitism.
President Trump himself sketched out one side of this angle. This is right on the mark: “Not only is the UN not solving the problems it should. Too often, it is actually creating new problems for us to solve…The United Nations is funding an assault on Western countries and their borders…The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and not finance them.”
The speech had a comic highlight that I haven’t seen noted anywhere else. It harks back to the story I recalled this past January in “Citizen Trump.” This is how Trump told it to the United Nations General Assembly yesterday:
Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex. I remember it so well.
I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful. I used to talk about, “I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo.” The best of everything. “You’re going to have mahogany walls, they’re going to give you plastic.” But they decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product.
And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction and that their building concepts were so wrong, and the product that they were proposing to build was so bad and so costly, it was going to cost them a fortune. And I said, “And wait until you see the overruns.” Well, I turned out to be right. They had massive cost overruns and spent between two and $4 billion on the building and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them.
You walk on terrazzo. Do you notice that? As far as I’m concerned, frankly, looking at the building and getting stuck on the escalator, they still haven’t finished the job. They still haven’t finished. That was years ago. The project was so corrupt that Congress actually asked me to testify before them on the tremendous waste of money because it turned out that they had no idea what it was, but they knew it was anywhere between two and $4 billion as opposed to 500 million with a guarantee, but they had no idea. And I said, “It costs much more than $5 billion.” Unfortunately, many things in the United Nations are happening just like that, but on an even much bigger scale, much, much bigger.
Will somebody say amen?
The president’s speech reminded me of Charles Lichenstein’s words of wisdom at the UN in 1983. Lichenstein was serving as our alternate delegate at the UN as Jeane Kirkpatrick’s deputy. After the Soviet Union shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007 on September 1, 1983, New York and New Jersey both denied Soviet aircraft permission to land at airports in either state in violation of the United Nations Charter, which requires the United Nations’ host nation to allow all member countries access to the U.N. Lichenstein responded:
When the United Nations committee met to review the situation, the Soviet delegate, Igor I. Yakovlev, said the ban on landing “raises the question of whether the United Nations should be in the United States.” The American delegate Charles Lichenstein replied that if member states felt “they are not being treated with the hostly consideration that is their due,” they should consider “removing themselves and this organization from the soil of the United States. We will put no impediment in your way,” he continued. “The members of the U.S. mission to the United Nations will be down at the dockside waving you a fond farewell as you sail off into the sunset.”
Seth Barron argues the case for farewell, fond or otherwise, in the Tablet article “The End of the U.N.” (“The international body—mired in corruptions scandals, morally questionable escapades, and budgetary shortfalls—now functions primarily as a check on American power.”) It is long past time for the United States to adopt the Lichenstein solution to the problem that the UN has become.
