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.

“One year ago our country was in deep trouble, but today just eight months into my administration, we are the hottest country anywhere in the world, and there is no other country even close.” In Trump’s telling, it is a second Golden Age. “America is blessed with the strongest economy, the strongest borders, the strongest military, strongest friendships and the strongest spirit of any nation on the face of the Earth. This is indeed the Golden Age of America.”

If you blinked, you missed the part where he single-handedly defeated inflation. “Energy costs are down, gasoline prices are down, grocery prices are down, mortgage rates are down, and inflation has been defeated,” he bragged, before clarifying that “the only thing that is up is the stock market, which just hit a record high. In fact, hit a record high 48 times in the last short period of time.” Then came the pièce de résistance: “In just eight months since I took office, we have secured commitments and money already paid worth $17 trillion. Think of it, four years, less than a trillion. Eight months, much more than $17 trillion.”

In the same alternate dimension where windmills kill whales, climate change is a hoax, and Tylenol turns babies into vegetables, only someone could hatch numbers this absurd. Like his rambling Oval Office performance the day before, where he solemnly warned against “pump so much stuff into those beautiful little babies” and suggested Tylenol was frying the brains of “perfect blond-haired” children, Trump once again revealed himself as a con man so gullible he swallows his own grift.

The centerpiece of his global sermon was war, or rather, the seven wars he swears he ended in just seven months. “They said they were unendable, you will never get them solved. Some were going 31 years, two of them, 31 years. One 36 years. One was 28 years. I ended seven wars,” he proclaimed, rattling off a geography bee of conflicts as though they were Yelp reviews: “This includes Cambodia and Finland, Kosova, Serbia, Congo and Rawanda … Pakistan and India, Israel and Iran, Egypt and Ethio­pa, and Armenia and Azerbaijan.”

“No president or prime minister and for that matter, no other country has done anything close to that,” he puffed, “and I did it in just seven months, never happened before.” For emphasis, he added: “All I got from the United Nations was an escalator … and a teleprompter that didn’t work.” Wars, peace, nuclear bombardments, all interchangeable with faulty office equipment in Trump’s cosmology.

The absurdity practically wrote itself. These weren’t “ended” wars so much as names Trump strung together until he reached the magic number seven. It was the same instinct that drove him, a day earlier, to spin a campfire tale about Tylenol frying children’s brains: latch onto a half-baked rumor, repeat it until it hardens into gospel, and crown himself the savior who solved what no one else could. The master of the deal, indeed, except the deal here was with reality, and reality never signed off.

As if “ending” seven wars weren’t enough, Trump unveiled his blockbuster sequel: Operation Midnight Hammer. “Seven American B-2 bombers dropped 14, 30,000-pound bombs on Iran’s key nuclear facility, totally obliterating everything,” he boasted, pausing just long enough to let the image of 420,000 pounds of American steel rain down from the heavens sink in. “No other country on Earth could have done what we did … we have the greatest weapons on Earth. We hate to use them. But we did something that for 22 years people wanted to do.”

In Trump’s retelling, this wasn’t escalation but diplomacy by detonation. Immediately after the strike, he claimed to have “brokered end to the 12-day war, as it is called, between Israel and Iran, with both sides agreeing to fight, fight no longer.” In his mind, vaporizing Iran’s nuclear program was the peace plan. “Millions of people are no longer being killed in endless and unglorious wars,” he insisted, as though cause and effect were that simple. One imagines the diplomats staring into their translation earpieces, wondering if they’d misheard or if the American president had just declared peace through strategic carpet-bombing.

From there, he turned on the General Assembly itself, warning against any move to recognize Palestinian statehood. “Now as if to encourage continued conflict, some of this body [are] seeking to unilaterally recognize a Palestinian state,” he sneered. “The rewards would be too great for Hamas terrorists … this would be a reward for horrible atrocities, including October 7.” In Trump’s telling, diplomacy was indistinguishable from surrender.

He hammered the hostage issue with his trademark repetition. “Instead of giving in to Hamas’s ransom demand, those who want peace should be united with one message: release the hostages now. Just release the hostages now.” The applause that followed was less a thunderous endorsement than a polite attempt to move him along.

And in classic Trump fashion, he couldn’t resist pivoting from geopolitics to personal heroics. “I always said last 20 will be the hardest and that is exactly what happened,” he bragged. “We want them all back and we want the 38 dead bodies back, too.” As though even the dead could be negotiated into his ledger of wins.

Palestine, in Trump’s framing, was never about sovereignty or statehood, it was shorthand for terrorism, ransom, and weakness. Recognition, he insisted, meant rewarding murderers. The U.N., meanwhile, was guilty once more of writing “a really strongly-worded letter” instead of taking action, proof, in his words, that it was “not even coming close to living up to its potential.”

Migration, of course, was cast as the apocalypse. The U.N., he declared, was not only failing to stop migration but actively financing it, handing out “debit cards” and “transportation” to “illegal aliens” en route to the U.S. border. “Your countries are going to hell,” he sneered at his fellow leaders, before zeroing in on London’s mayor and warning Europe that “immigration and suicidal energy idea will be the death of Western Europe.” It was the familiar cocktail of fearmongering and projection: the man who just promoted a conspiracy about Tylenol on live television now scolding the world for falling for scams of their own.

On Russia and Ukraine, he insisted the war would never have happened if only he’d been in office. “This war would never have started if I were president. This war never should have happened,” he declared, holding up his friendship with Putin as proof of his would-be deterrence. What was supposed to be, in his words, “a quick squirmish” had dragged on for “3-1/2 years … killing anywhere from five to seven thousand young soldiers mostly, mostly soldiers, on both sides every single week.” The repetition, like the math, was as sloppy as it was grotesque.

But the punchline came with his solution: tariffs. “In the event Russia is not ready to make a deal, to end the war then the United States is fully prepared to impose a very strong round of powerful tariffs which would stop the bloodshed, I believe very quickly.” That alone might have raised eyebrows, but he pressed further, scolding Europe for hypocrisy: “Think of it, they are funding the war against themselves. Who the hell ever heard of that one? … They are buying oil and gas from Russia while they are fighting Russia. It is embarrassing to them and it was very embarrassing to them when I found out about it.”

It was classic Trump alchemy: reduce a grinding European land war to an overdue invoice and threaten to balance the books with tariffs, the one policy tool he never tires of misusing. This from a president who still believes tariffs are “hundreds of billions flowing into our country”, free money conjured out of thin air, a gullibility so profound it borders on performance art.

And then, inevitably, came climate change. Trump rolled into his well-worn routine, branding the entire concept a scam cooked up by “stupid people.” “In 1982 … they predicted by year 2000, climate change would cause a global catastrophe,” he said, before cackling at the non-arrival of the apocalypse. “Then they said global cooling will kill the world … then they said global warming will kill the world. Now they call it climate change. They can’t miss. Climate change. Higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, climate change. It is the greatest con-job perpetrated on the world, in my opinion.”

Windmills, of course, took their lumps. “They are a joke. They don’t work. The wind doesn’t blow, the windmills are pathetic and bad, expensive to operate and have to be rebuilt all the time and start to rust and rot.” Meanwhile, coal was rebranded like a boutique spa treatment: “Never use the word coal, only use the words, clean, beautiful coal. Sounds much better doesn’t it?”

And if the audience still hadn’t gotten the point, he drove it home with his trademark flourish: “The carbon footprint is a hoax made up by people with evil intentions and they are heading down a path of total destruction.” To Trump, Europe’s energy crisis wasn’t about a heating planet or market volatility but about air conditioners too expensive to run. “While the U.S. has approximately 1300 heat-related deaths annually, Europe loses 175,000 people to heat death each year because cost is so expensive you can’t turn on an air conditioner. That is not Europe, that is not the Europe I love and know.”

It was the Tylenol routine all over again, just scaled up for world leaders: the gullible salesman who can’t tell science from scam, earnestly peddling the idea that turbines are frauds, coal is beautiful, and global warming is a plot. The man who warns that acetaminophen “fries” babies’ brains now informs the planet that the real killer isn’t climate change but an overzealous electric bill.

The speech lurched from anecdote to accusation, always circling back to the same refrain: only Trump delivers results, and everyone else is a fool. Yet beneath the bravado was the same gullibility that drove his Tylenol tirade. He is a man who mocks world leaders for being duped by “climate hoaxes” even as he swallows conspiracy theories whole; a man who ridicules the U.N. for “empty words” while filling 90 minutes with little else. The master con artist has become his own most loyal mark, spinning and spinning until the line between scam and belief collapses.

And so the world watched as the American president stood before them, bragging about marble floors he never installed, wars he never ended, and science he never understood, convinced he was pulling one over on everyone in the room. The tragic joke is that the only one being fooled anymore is Donald Trump himself.