U.S. President Donald Trump addressed the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Tuesday in a rambling speech that lasted nearly an hour.
Trump repeatedly criticized the institution and other world leaders. He described the U.N. as ineffective, criticized migration policies, dismissed climate change as a “hoax” and “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world,” and told the assembled leaders that their countries were “going to hell.”
If the speech was intended to project strength, the reaction from foreign diplomats and U.S. politicians suggested something closer to alarm. One foreign diplomat texted The Washington Post’s Ishaan Tharoor: “This man is stark, raving mad. Do Americans not see how embarrassing this is?”
Former State Department spokesperson and deputy U.S. ambassador to the UN, Ned Price, dismissed the address entirely: “Let’s not pretend this is a foreign policy speech or dignify it by calling it one. This is basically MAGA madlibs,” he wrote on X. “Trump is speaking to his political base, hitting each of his campaign trail hits, while addressing a room of leaders who’d rather by just about anywhere else.”
Sen. Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., said that the president “just embarrassed our country in front of the entire world at the U.N. We heard America in Retreat. For all our partners who still believe in the rule of law, human rights, and democracy, we need you to step up and lead. It will demand all our collective action.”
Trump framed himself as the lone problem-solver on the global stage. “It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them — and sadly, in all cases, the United Nations did not even try to help,” he said, repeating his false claim that he has unilaterally solved seven “unendable wars,” and, as a result, that the deserved to win the Nobel Peace Prize.
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Other Trump declarations were met with sharp criticism from his targets. The London mayor’s office, for example, condemned Trump’s bogus claim that the city was succumbing to Sharia law, describing the assertion as “appalling and bigoted.”
Following the address, Trump posted on Truth Social, praising his own speech as “very well received.”
“It focused very much on energy and migration/immigration,” he wrote. “I have been talking about this for a long period of time and this Forum, was the absolute best from the standpoint of making these two important statements. I hope everybody gets to watch it! The teleprompter was broken and the escalator came to a sudden hault as we were ridding up to the podium, but both of those events probably made the speech more interesting than it would have been otherwise.”
