President Donald Trump returned to the podium at the United Nations General Assembly with an update on how the U.S. has been since he started his second term as president. Trump, as heard in other public statements, jumped from topic to topic, congratulating his administration for their work and ranting about inoperable escalators in New York City.
Trump stood before world leaders at the 80th General Assembly and updated them and the U.N. about his nation’s progress and pressing issues. He told the body he left the Oval Office in 2021 with peace across the nation and world, and said since his return, the “guns of war” shattered his progress.
“An era of calm and stability gave way to one of the great crises of our time,” Trump said. “Here in the United States, four years of weakness, lawlessness and radicalism under the last administration, delivered our nation into a repeated set of disasters.”
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He painted a picture of the U.S. in a golden age, with a flourishing economy and shrinking inflation rates. However, utility bills are increasing at a rate that has demanded renewed debate on costs. Slowed job growth, coupled with rising unemployment rates, forced the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates.
The president cut the seriousness of his speech by criticizing the escalators at the U.N.’s New York building, which stopped as he, First Lady Melania Trump and others stepped aboard. Footage of the incident showed the group stopping on the mechanical stairs before walking up shortly thereafter.
“If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would have fallen, but she’s in great shape,” he said. “We’re both in good shape. We both stood, and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations — a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”
Trump updates on his second term
Part of Trump’s second address to the General Assembly included a roundup of what he’s done in his second term. Many of the tasks he mentioned focused on unauthorized immigrants and his goal of ramping up deportations.
He told the body that former President Joe Biden allowed migrants to “pour into our country with the ridiculous open border policy,” which he had to clean up. He followed up with a claim that the people who entered the U.S. without papers were drug dealers, formerly imprisoned or held in mental institutions from all over the world.
“Our message is very simple: If you come illegally into the United States, you’re going to jail, or you’re going back to where you came from, or perhaps even further than that,” Trump said. “You know what that means.”
He thanked Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele for jailing several unauthorized immigrants. The jail at focus is the country’s notorious prison CECOT, where Kilmar Abrego Garcia said in July he faced torture. In the court filing, Abrego Garcia said that he endured beatings, sleep deprivation and psychological abuse from guards.
In one of his strongest statements, he told world leaders that their “countries are going to hell” because of immigration. American lawmakers wrote on X that Trump’s speech was an embarrassment for the country.
“What a disgrace,” wrote California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat, on X.
America’s hand in foreign affairs
Trump also claimed that, since moving back into the Oval Office, he’s ended seven wars without the U.N.’s help. The wars were Cambodia and Thailand; Kosovo and Serbia; Congo and Rwanda; Pakistan and India; Israel and Iran; Egypt and Ethiopia; and Armenia and Azerbaijan.
“It’s a shame I’ve had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them,” he said.
Fox News cohost Jessica Tarlov shared a portion of that speech on X and said Trump is “gaslighting the entire world.”
As far as ending these “unendable” wars goes, the president’s success is rocky. Groups tied to Rwanda have reignited violence in the Democratic Republic of the Congo after the June 27 ceasefire deal, according to the U.N. Serbia and Kosovo ended their war in 1999, and Kosovo was declared independent from Serbia in 2008, according to CBS News. According to the BBC in July, India has repeatedly rejected Trump’s claims that he ended the country’s conflict with Pakistan. Also in July, the BBC reported that an Ethiopian official rejected Trump’s claim that the U.S. paid for a controversial dam.
Trump shifted his focus to the ongoing wars between Russia and Ukraine, as well as Israel and Hamas, pressing all four bodies to reach a ceasefire deal.
“We have to stop the war in Gaza immediately,” Trump said.
In the case of Israel and Hamas, he pleaded for Hamas to release all remaining Israeli hostages, which resulted in applause from some world leaders. He also reiterated his administration’s opposition to a Palestinian state, despite allies like France, Canada, the United Kingdom and others recognizing the territory.
On the conflict in Ukraine, Trump admitted that he thought ending the war would be easy since he and Russian President Vladimir Putin were friendly, but that’s proven to be tough. He said people predicted Russia to “win this war in three days.”
“It was supposed to be just a quick little skirmish,” he said. “It’s not making Russia look good. It’s making them look bad, no matter what happens from here on out, this was something that should have taken a matter of days, certainly less than a week, and they’ve been fighting for three and a half years.”
He blamed Biden’s leadership for allowing the Russia-Ukraine War to escalate. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 to forcibly annex the country. Trump threatened tariffs on Russia if the war didn’t end and requested that other countries get on board.
“Let us all work together to build a bright, beautiful planet,” Trump said. “A planet that we all share, a planet of peace and a world that is richer, better and more beautiful than ever before.”
