Long before it had ended, US president Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations in its 80th year had entered the ranks of most famous or infamous. It was a Make America Great Again (Maga) rebuke to the world.
The faces of some of the most prominent figures in European and global politics were set in stone as they listened to Trump’s cascading message of folly and ruination. If he had restored the golden age to the United States, he could promise only a darker fortune-telling to its allies across the Atlantic.
“Immigration and suicidal energy ideas will be the death of western Europe immediately,” he warned.
“What makes the world so beautiful is that each country is unique. Your countries are going to hell.”
RM Block
He castigated European countries for continuing to buy oil from Russia even as they offered unflagging support for Ukraine. “Think of it. They’re funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one?”
He flatly rejected the recent recognition of the state of Palestine as a “reward for Hamas”. He warned them that green energy is “a scam”.
He told the gathered force of global powers that in mere months he had ended seven wars, and he lightly mocked the United Nations for two farcically unfortunate mishaps which he played for dark comedy.
“No president or prime minister or, for that matter, no other country has done anything close to that,” he said of his peace-brokering efforts, again dropping a clanger of a hint about his Nobel Peace Prize credentials.
“It’s too bad I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing that and sadly in all cases the UN did not even try to help in any of them. I never even received a phone call from the UN offering to help in finalising the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that stopped right in the middle. These are the two things I got from the United Nations – a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”
He spoke for an hour, at times acerbic, at times meandering. Contrarily and characteristically, he ended the bruising rhetoric with flattery, promising that he is fully behind the UN and warmly praising Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskiy as “a brave man – and he’s putting up one hell of a fight”.
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There was no foreign policy in Trump’s speech: no vision for how to end the years of death on the Russia-Ukraine front, or the starvation and death and genocide in Gaza. It was a familiar litany of boasts and chastisements.
Afterwards, as bright sun flitted across the East River, Taoiseach Micheál Martin gamely countered that there was “nothing surprising in the speech and nothing new. We have heard that commentary before. Europe, in my view, is a bastion of good-quality living. Good opportunities for people. Liberty, freedom of speech and a high standard of living.”
That Trump has delivered these sentiments before is true. But it was the setting: his native city, in the United Nations building, in the institution’s 80th year, in front of a silent classroom of world leaders who believe that appeasement, rather than confrontation, is the only way to deal with the US president’s caprices.
“The platform doesn’t matter,” suggested the Taoiseach. But Mr Martin is a natural diplomat. The platform mattered to Trump, and it was clear that he enjoyed his hour on the stage, even if nobody else did.
In fact, he reminisced about the time, some 20 years ago, when he offered to redevelop the ailing UN skyscraper on First Avenue.
“It would be beautiful,” he said, in art-of-the-deal mode.
“I said: I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo. I’ll give you mahogany walls. They’ll give you plastic.”
The moral of the story was that the United Nations opted for the plastic-and-terrazzo chumps, at a cost Trump estimated to be two to four billion dollars.
“You are walking on terrazzo,” Trump told other world leaders. “Did you notice that?”
More accurately, they are walking on eggshells. But they did not complain.
