Instead of a traditional public address from a world leader, U.S. President Donald Trump tilted back his badly-dyed hair-sprayed coif and howled at the moon for the better part of an hour during his speech to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday morning.
Well, not the better part. Definitely not the better part.
To describe the speech as insane, while accurate, would distract from just how extraordinarily packed with lies it was. How profoundly ignorant it was. How much damage it did to the United States’ standing in the world—it clearly marked a low point in America’s relationship with the United Nations and the international order we helped create in the wake of World War II.
From a purely U.S. political perspective, emphasizing how haggard and low-energy our rapidly declining president was is key. He made a point to note that an apparent mechanical issue with a UN escalator was an insurmountable problem, for example—most of the rest of us who are in fairly reasonable shape might have noted a stalled escalator is actually just a stairway that we could have walked right up.
But it would nonetheless, be a mistake, to ignore just how crazed the speech was. It was apparent from Trump’s opening moments when he railed about the UN’s broken teleprompter to the point later when he brought it up again in his broader condemnation of the UN as also broken, highlighting what he saw as its uselessness in not coming to his assistance in solving the famous seven global conflicts that we all know he did not solve. It was apparent in the fact that he argued that he deserves the Nobel Peace prize while noting he also takes great pride in discussing the attack he authorized on Iran, and those he has ordered against boats he claims without evidence were trafficking in drugs on the high seas.
The speech contained the most extensive condemnation of green energy and what Trump considers the climate change hoax that we have ever heard from a public official since possibly the invention of the steam engine. Science be damned. Oligarchs love fossil fuels or what Trump noted that he demands White House staffers refer to as “beautiful, clean coal.” Windmills, windmills on the other hand, are the pinwheels of Satan. (Someday we will get to the bottom of Trump’s anemomenophobia. Clearly, he had a bad experience with something that blew him the wrong way as a child. Or more recently.)
He defended his irrational, lose-lose global trading system destroying tariffs which in and of itself will soon be listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders as an extreme symptom of economic psychosis. He downplayed civilian casualties in Ukraine and explained this war wouldn’t have happened if there had been good leadership in the country—in front of President Volodymyr Zelensky, no less.
He continued to argue that he could have solved the conflict were it not that Vladimir Putin had, inexplicably, let him down—so now it’s the Europeans who should take the lead in stopping the Russians, or else the US would have to take strong action…sometime…in the near future…or maybe never…who knows.
(It should be noted that, underscoring the degree to which Trump was making up foreign policy on the fly, later on Tuesday he posted on social media a statement seeming to reverse his prior positions: “I think Ukraine, with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form,” it read. He also said NATO countries should shoot down Russian aircraft approaching their airspace. All of which sounds good. And if that is his new position, well done.)
One of his most detailed perorations was devoted to the perils of immigration. Trump told his audience that immigration was destroying their countries. “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now,” he asserted. He exclaimed, in an epic soundbite that will be replayed around the world tonight in its embodiment of the entire speech, Trump’s narcissism, delusions of competence and contempt for his audience, that “I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”
Name an area and Trump lied about it. Name a global issue and he laid out a US position that was at odds with reason and most of the world. (With the exception to his welcome if totally out-of-character call for an end to the development of biological weapons. He also appeared to call for ending work on new nuclear weapons but that riff is almost certain to be walked back soon given Trump’s regular calls for modernizing our nuclear arsenal.) He personally attacked the mayor of London, asserting erroneously that he wanted to impose sharia law in the English capital. He attacked the green movement in Europe even as one of its leaders was presiding over the meeting. He attacked Joe Biden.
Did I mention the aside about how once upon a time when Trump was, in his own words, “a very successful real estate developer in New York,” he offered to remodel the UN? He did not get the gig and, as a result, the UN now has terrazzo floors instead of the marble ones he would have installed. Yuge scandal!
He said, “I am a man more sinned against than sinning” likening the UN to a “great stage of fools.” He warned that people should fear his wrath saying, “And thou, all-shaking thunder, Smite flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!”
Oh, wait. That was King Lear. But face it, listening to Trump today, the one clear message was that Shakespeare got it exactly right when it comes to the lunacy of aging rulers. Of course, “King Lear” was fiction. But sadly, today’s performance by Trump out on the heath of the international community was not.
Instead, it was a low point for American diplomacy, a moment at which the world realized the nation that had been a cornerstone of its stability for eighty years has slipped its moorings. You could see the shock of those in the great plenary hall as they took it in. And we all had to worry when we saw them from time to time nervously applaud Trump remarks. Would any among them be strong enough to offset the reality of an America gone rogue, led by a man like Trump?
As Shakespeare also wrote in Lear, “Tis the times plague, when madmen lead the blind.”
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