On Tuesday, Donald Trump boarded a plane to New York City, mounted the rostrum of the United Nations General Assembly and gave a speech that lasted nearly an hour. Even friendly witnesses thought his speech disconnected and incoherent. His vision, policy and political execution were woefully inadequate by the measure of past global leadership. He often diverted from his pace chart and zeroed-in on deepening personal grievances rather than addressing pressing global priorities.
For nearly a fifth of his speech, Trump railed against UN-led initiatives to combat climate change. Not surprisingly, he mocked renewable energy policies. His words exposed a 25-year-old vendetta against the UN. That resentment would have started in the early 2000s when he attempted to put an expansion on the organization’s headquarters building in New York. Trump’s original alternative — to take his half-a-billion-dollar offer to rebuild the UN complex — had already been rebuffed.
Trump unapologetically touted his administration’s choice to withdraw the United States from the Paris Climate Agreement. His defiance was clearly present and elicited passionate responses. He has repeatedly downplayed dire predictions of climate fueled catastrophes calling them “alarmist” and saying that was the work of “dumb people” doing “dumb things.” Trump’s remarks echoed a longstanding skepticism toward climate science, which he characterized as “the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world.”
Climate wasn’t the only thing Trump railed against during his time in London, he attacked local hero, Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. He called Khan “terrible” and inaccurately suggested that he wanted to implement Sharia law in London. Their hostility can be traced back to late 2015. At the time, Khan deemed Trump’s campaign promise to ban Muslims from entering the U.S. as “divisive and outrageous.”
In fact, under the former president’s administration he took credit for the same harmful immigration policies, calling them common sense policies for America’s national security. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now … I’m really good at this stuff,” he asserted, reflecting his populist approach to governance.
One big logistical issue Trump complained about himself in his State of the Union address. He whined about his teleprompter going down and he got stuck on a non-functioning escalator when he arrived at the UN.
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” – Donald Trump
In an extended rant, Trump aired personal grievances while attacking the UN, European leaders, migration policies, and clean energy initiatives. He guaranteed UN bureaucrats marble floors and mahogany walls as part of his winning renovation proposal. Yet, in pursuit of this goal, other contractors supplied inferior materials, resulting in a $2 billion dollar project that went way over budget.
His comments about Khan were particularly incendiary. But as Spicer then admitted, Trump did indeed go on to call the London mayor “one of the world’s worst” mayors. He asked British officials not to bother inviting him to state dinners, like the one King Charles threw in his honor.
“I look at London, where you have a terrible mayor, terrible, terrible mayor, and it’s been changed, it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia law.” – Donald Trump
Indeed, a lot of career diplomats and international leaders who walked into Trump’s assembly left astounded. All of them expressed alarm that his bellicose rhetoric would deepen international divides and hamper joint action on urgent, shared crises such as climate change.