If I’m honest, it was hard to watch proceedings at yesterday’s UN General Assembly. I can remember several times when the world of international relations was in similar turmoil, but I can’t remember ever being as pessimistic as I am now about the prospects that our international institutions will be able to fix things. The contrast between the speech of Secretary General Guterres and that of President Trump could not have been starker.
UN Secretary-General António Guterres opened the General Assembly’s 80th session with grave warnings about various challenges to our civilisation and basic humanity around the world –
“We have entered an age of reckless disruption and relentless human suffering.”
Just hours later, Trump took the same podium and opened with a sneer about a broken escalator and a faulty teleprompter.
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations,” Trump wise-cracked to the assembled world leaders, “a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”
The awkward line drew some muted, diplomatic laughter, but for a global audience grappling with wars in Ukraine and Gaza, climate catastrophe, and collapsing international norms, it signalled something much more troubling: that America’s leader had fundamentally misunderstood the moment, the institution, and his role in both.
When Seriousness Was Required
Guterres had used his opening address to confront leaders with an uncomfortable truth: the pillars of international order are “buckling under the weight of impunity, inequality, and indifference.” His diagnosis was clinical and urgent: “Impunity is the mother of chaos – and it has spawned some of the most atrocious conflicts of our times.”
The Secretary-General then laid out five critical choices facing humanity: peace rooted in international law, human dignity and rights, climate justice, technology governance, and strengthening the UN itself. Each the subject of years of careful multilateral UN work. Each demanding a serious response from America, still ostensibly the pre-eminent player in the UN’s global diplomatic efforts.
Trump’s response was an embarrassing re-litigation of his failed bid to renovate the UN building from 2005.
“Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex,” he told the assembly during his nearly hour-long address. “I said at the time that I would do it for US $500 million… I used to talk about, ‘I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo.'”
The gathered heads of state wanted to see a global leader bringing his great power and influence to bear on existential crises. What they got was a property developer bitching about a failed business deal from 20 years ago.
Denial as Policy
Where Guterres had called climate action a matter of survival – “Science says limiting global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees by the end of this century is still possible… but the window is closing” – Trump dismissed the entire scientific consensus as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.” A contemptuous wholesale rejection of empirical reality, delivered to leaders whose nations are already experiencing climate-driven displacement, drought, and economic disruption.
Trump followed this with apocalyptic warnings about migration, telling European allies their “countries are going to hell” due to what he characterised as invasion-level immigration. He accused the UN itself of funding “an assault on Western countries,” turning an institution designed to coordinate refugee protection into a conspiracy against Western civilisation. I wondered how many in the room found themselves torn between anger and laughter as he told them he was really good at analysing these things (best ever, in the history of the world, no doubt).
The Performance of Contempt
Throughout, Trump treated the General Assembly like a campaign rally. He distributed MAGA hats reading “Trump was right about everything.” He boasted about ending “seven wars” (no, I can’t work it out either) while offering no roadmap for resolving current conflicts. You’d have thought a man capable of stopping a war a month would be keen to say more.
Even the technical problems he used to mock the institution were not as he presented them. The escalator malfunction that Trump blamed on UN incompetence was actually caused, according to UN officials, by someone in Trump’s own entourage hitting the stop button. And the teleprompter issues were the responsibility of Trump’s team, not UN staff.
Regardless of those inconvenient truths, Trump used his privileged platform to cast the institution as broken and incompetent…and to suggest they should turn to him for advice on how to fix the world’s problems.
The Moment That Was Lost
What makes Trump’s performance particularly depressing is its timing. The UN is marking 80 years since world leaders, emerging from the ashes of global war, chose “cooperation over chaos, law over lawlessness, peace over conflict,” as Guterres reminded the assembly.
That choice created the system that has, however imperfectly, helped prevent World War III and established the international legal framework that governs everything from trade to human rights. Trump’s speech wasn’t just dismissive of that achievement – it was explicitly contemptuous of it.
At a moment demanding American leadership on Ukraine, Gaza, climate change, and emerging technology governance, Trump offered cheap, smart-arse-schoolboy spectacle. Where Guterres called for choosing “peace rooted in international law,” all Trump could come up with was campaign slogans and self-promotion.
The Price of Performance Politics
His misreading of the room wasn’t just poor diplomacy – it was a sign that America seems happy to abdicate its historical responsibility to drive the defence of civilised values around the world. The United States remains the UN’s largest financial contributor and most influential member. When America’s president treats the institution as a comedy club, it weakens every multilateral effort to address the very real global challenges we all currently face.
Guterres ended his address with a personal reflection on growing up under Portugal’s dictatorship, where “fear silenced voices and hope was nearly crushed.” His lesson was that “real power rises from people – from our shared resolve to uphold dignity.” His call to those assembled before him was: “We must never give up.”
Trump’s call was different: more tariffs, more walls, more America First unilateralism. Where the moment called for global leadership, he offered nationalist performance art. When history demanded statesmanship, America sent a property developer with a grievance and a notebook full of cheap campaign lines. How utterly depressing.
This evening, September 24, I will be at the O2 in London to hear Barak Obama speak. I’m willing to bet there will be more gravitas and substance on display there. I hope so…my spirits could do with a lift after all that nonsense yesterday.