First Lady Melania Trump is being heaped with praise for continuing to walk up an escalator after it stopped at the United Nations.
Conspiracy theories and allegations have run rampant after the escalator stopped the moment President Donald Trump and the first lady stepped on it on Tuesday.
But Fox News was quick to gush over the first lady’s immediate action: walking up the short flight of steps.
“Look how great Melania was. She is unfazed. She walks on it. It stops. She turns around to the president, and she just leads the president up and walks,” said Maria Bartiromo on Fox Business, giving a play-by-play.
Bartiromo said while the first lady, a 55-year-old former model, was unfazed, it could have been a “massive, massive issue,” and his brief stop made him “vulnerable.”
The president, 79, has been furious about a series of technical challenges before and during his address before the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
First, the escalator stopped, then the teleprompter was not working at the start of his speech, and then Trump claimed the audience could not hear him speak.
The president took time out of his remarks on the global stage to repeatedly complain about the escalator and teleprompter.
On Wednesday night, Trump complained of “three sinister events” and claimed “sabotage” at the UN.
“It’s amazing that Melania and I didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first. It was only that we were each holding the handrail tightly or, it would have been a disaster,” he wrote about the escalator on Truth Social.
The president demanded an immediate investigation and claimed the Secret Service was involved.
On Tuesday afternoon, a person with knowledge of the events told The Daily Beast it appeared someone in Trump’s own entourage had tripped the emergency button on the escalator.
The UN issued a statement on Tuesday evening indicating that a videographer with the U.S. delegation capturing the president’s entrance may have inadvertently tripped the emergency stop mechanism on the escalator.
A person familiar also told The Daily Beast it was the president’s own team running his teleprompter from the booth, not UN staff, and suggested perhaps they were not in place with enough time to set up.
Trump allies have started calling to defund the UN in response, while critics have blasted his freakout over the stopped escalator as yet another attempt at distraction.
The post Melania Praised by Fox Host for Walking Up Escalator appeared first on The Daily Beast.
