Donald Trump just can’t shut up about himself. Anyone who has followed the past decade in American public life knows this all too well. And yet he still manages to astonish. When he spoke at the U.N. General Assembly, on Tuesday, it took less than ten minutes for Trump to get to his personal grievances with the international body, which stretch back at least a quarter century, beginning with its supposed refusal, in 2001, to grant him a contract to redevelop its headquarters. “They decided to go in another direction, which was much more expensive at the time, which actually produced a far inferior product,” Trump said. He claimed that he had promised the U.N. mahogany walls and marble floors and that what it got instead was cheap terrazzo flooring and enormous cost overruns. “And I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction.”
The reason Trump was ranting about the U.N.’s floors was that he was mad about the reception he had received while entering the building to make his speech—the escalator conveying him and Melania Trump to the main speaking floor had come to a halt, forcing them to walk one floor up, only to find that the teleprompter also was not working and the President would have to read out his address the old-fashioned way. “These are the two things I got from the United Nations—a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” he said. By the next day, he was calling his experience in New York “triple sabotage,” adding to his list of complaints that the sound for his speech had been turned off in the Assembly Hall itself. “The people that did it should be arrested!” he demanded in a social-media post, on Wednesday. Never mind that an official statement from the U.N. suggested that it was likely Trump’s own White House videographer who might have accidentally triggered the escalator shutdown. Both Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, and Mike Waltz, Trump’s newly confirmed Ambassador to the U.N., demanded full investigations into the conspiracy theories that the President was so quick to float—confirmation, as if any were needed, that the personal complaints of Donald Trump are now the official foreign policy of the United States.
Somehow, the state of the world seemed a lot more assured when it was the rambling, unscripted speech of the late Libyan dictator Muammar Qaddafi that shocked the General Assembly, rather than the rambling, unscripted speech of America’s President, who also expounded on his sky-high approval ratings, his brilliant move to call in the National Guard to eliminate crime in the District of Columbia, and his personal genius for predicting the future. “They had a hat, the best-selling hat: ‘Trump was right about everything,’ ” he explained. “And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.” Imagine if he had said that in a braggadocious way.
The substance of the speech was, in many ways, just as jarring as its narcissistic surround sound: Trump denouncing much of the rest of the world for buying into the idea of climate change—“the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion”—and for failing to adopt his close-the-borders, shut-it-down approach to illegal immigration. “Your countries are going to hell,” he told the other Presidents and potentates in the room; indeed, it was this statement that led to his meditation on how he was always right about everything.
In his first term, Trump provoked incredulous laughs when he took the lectern at the U.N. to brag that, “in less than two years, my Administration has accomplished more than almost any Administration in the history of our country.” This time, after only a few months back in office, Trump has made clear that he plans to operationalize his bluster far more than he was able or willing to back in 2018. Perhaps that explains why it was not laughter but stunned silence that greeted much of Trump’s nearly hour-long lecture, which was not only far more boorish and self-serving than his address seven years ago but also far more menacing and explicit about the path down which he is now leading the United States.
Take what he said about Venezuela. Everyone has heard his rhetoric about going after the country’s violent drug gangs. But now that Trump has ordered the U.S. military to attack three different alleged drug-trafficking boats from Venezuela, an escalation of dubious legality, his threat to “blow you out of existence” using “the supreme power of the U.S. military” sounds markedly different. Trump is not constrained by his own party, or political advisers, or even America’s supposedly co-equal branches of government; international law that he does not recognize hardly stands a chance.
And yet there is still so much wishful thinking about how to interpret Trump’s words. Despite his clear indication, for years, that he would refuse to embroil the United States too deeply in defending Ukraine, for example, every hint of support he gives to the embattled country is greeted as a major turn away from Russia. In his speech on Tuesday, he threatened Russia with “a very strong round of powerful tariffs” on its energy industry if it did not agree to end the war. But he also reiterated his previous, threat-neutering position that he would go forward with such a measure only if all of the European Union, which has sharply curtailed its energy dependence on Russia but which continues to buy billions of dollars’ worth of oil and gas from it, would join in the tariffs, too. A total non-starter, in other words. A few hours later, it was treated as major news when Trump, emerging from an unexpectedly positive meeting with Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, published a long social-media post in which he seemed to endorse Ukraine’s view that it could win the war militarily and warned that “Putin and Russia are in BIG Economic trouble.” The backstory, according to various reports, is that Trump’s surprising rhetorical shift was, as always, strictly personal in nature, driven by his pique at the Russian leader’s rebuff of his many overtures for a peace deal.