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 United Nations 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,