Bombs, Boasts, and Bad Teleprompters

Trump’s UNGA spectacle had it all: marble floors he never laid, wars he never ended, and peace conjured through 30,000-pound bombs, proof that the con man has become his own most gullible mark.

Trump’s return to the marble halls of the United Nations was less a state leader’s address than a late-night infomercial for Trumpism itself, equal parts grievance, self-promotion, and snake oil. He opened, naturally, by blaming a broken teleprompter, “whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble,” he joked, before assuring the world that speaking without notes meant he was now speaking “from the heart.” One might forgive the assembled diplomats for wishing he’d kept his heart to himself. The broken escalator and the bad teleprompter quickly became metaphors for the U.N. in his telling: all malfunction, no purpose, and certainly no marble floors like the ones he once tried to sell them decades ago. “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped in the middle … and then a teleprompter that didn’t work,” he groused, before declaring, “these are two things I think I got from the United Nations. A bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.” He even rewound history to remind delegates that years earlier he had bid to rebuild the U.N. complex for just $500 million, promising “mahogany walls” and “marble floors,” only to be passed over for what he called a corrupt project that ended up costing billions. “They decided to go in another direction … and you walk on terrazzo, did you notice that?” he sniffed, still nursing the grudge like a failed contractor decades later.

From there, Trump spun a tale of America resurrected by his mere presence.