🇺🇳 From UNGA in NYC: Trump's quest to Make the West Great Again
Trump torched the globalist UN, in rallying cry to populists worldwide
Donald Trump, as expected, stole the show with his fiery speech to the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) this week.
Most leaders, like Australia’s Anthony Albanese speak to a near-empty Hall, when they address the UNGA.
Not so for the US President. It was a full house. And he delivered a vintage performance, that as always, amid the outright lies and exaggerations, contained undeniable statements of truth, especially when he laid into the UN itself.
He had the hall laughing when he ad-libbed his introduction after the teleprompter failed and complained about the UN escalator breaking.
‘All I got from the United Nations was an escalator on the way up that stopped in the middle,’ he bemoaned.
'If the first lady wasn’t in great shape, she would’ve fallen but she’s in great shape.
When Trump added: ‘We’re both in good shape,’ that drew more laughts.
‘These are the two things I got from the United Nations — a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter, thank you very much.’
The self-indulgent, yet humorous critique served as a metaphor for his more valid criticisms of the multilateral organisation that, celebrating its 80th year, has never felt more remote and irrelevant in resolving global challenges.
‘What is the purpose of the United Nations?’ the President said.
‘The UN has such tremendous potential. I’ve always said it.
‘It has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential.’
He claimed that the UN had not tried to help in his attempts to fix wars.
‘It’s too bad that I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing them and sadly in all cases the United Nations did not even try to help, in any of them,’ he said.
‘I never even received a phone call from the United Nations, offering to help.’
In a bilateral meeting with the UN’s Secretary-General Antonio Gutteres, Mr Trump said his country remained ‘100 per cent’ behind the UN.
But this can hardly be taken as truth. Earlier, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio went further in an interview on Fox, saying it was the US alone that leaders turned to seeking help.
‘They all come to the White House, they all want to speak to President Trump, they all want President Trump to fix it,’ he said.
‘So they can say whatever they want to say.
‘The truth of the matter is that we have leaders – we have meetings going on today that we have leaders begging to be a part of it.
‘They are calling and saying: Can we be included? Can you bring us in? Can you get me five minutes to shake the President’s hand?
‘He is the indispensable leader in the world right now.
‘He is the only one who has any chance of not just brokering a deal to end the war with Russia and Ukraine, but also bringing about the war that’s going – and getting all the hostages released in Gaza.
‘And I think he has put more time and energy into peace proposals and peace initiatives than anybody else in the world, and he’s had the most success of anybody else in the world.’
Rubio and Trump are right, for now. The UN under Gutteres is feckless, and the United States remains the undisputed leader of the world. China, the only possible rival for global leadership, has shown no interest in resolving conflicts in the Middle East and actively fuels Russia’s murder of tens of thousands of Ukrainians.
Thus, having both Russia and China sit on the United Nations Security Council as permanent members with veto votes has rendered the UN organ impotent.
It is admirable that Trump wants to end wars, even if his motives are mercantile and not moral. But this is why it is so difficult to tell if his latest shift on Ukraine, declaring that the country can regain all its territory, will last and lead to a meaningful policy change, or if its simply another bout of the President regurgitating the views of the last person who spoke to him, in this case, the European Union’s Ursula von der Leyen and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky.
But torching the UN is also by extension trashing many allies who still believe, whether rightly or wrongly, that global cooperation is central to solving common challenges. This, along with his position on climate change, which is existential for many countries in the non-aligned global south, including the contested Pacific, is akin to administering arsenic to the United States’ treasured bilateral relationships.
But Trump’s crass and brash attacks carried a deeper message than a simple assertion of American dominance.
It was a rallying call to the populist far-right movements that are on the rise across Europe and a naked quest to take his Make America Great Again global.
Insulting, funny, incoherent and rambling all at the same time, the President spared no prisoners as he spoke for three times longer than the allotted amount per leader, as he ventilated his core messages, laying into Europe and the UK and savaging their policies on migration and what he said was the ‘green scam.’
‘You’re destroying your countries. They’re being destroyed,’ he said.
‘Europe is in serious trouble. They’ve been invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before. Illegal aliens are pouring into Europe.
‘It’s not sustainable. And because they choose to be politically correct, they’re doing just absolutely nothing about it.
‘It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. Your countries are going to hell.’
Mr Trump married uncontrolled migration with climate mitigation efforts being made in the West while Russia and China were allowed to pollute for longer.
‘Both the immigration and their suicidal energy ideas will be the death of Western Europe,’ he said.
‘It’s the greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world, in my opinion. Climate change.
‘If you don’t get away from this green scam, your country is going to fail.
‘You must take control strongly and immediately of the unmitigated immigration disaster and the fake energy catastrophe before it’s too late.
Underlining his point was China’s President Xi Jinping who later in the week told the UN Climate Summit via a video message that China would cut it’s 2035 carbon emissions output by just 7 per cent.
‘These targets represent China’s best efforts based on the requirements of the Paris Agreement,’ Xi said.
‘Meeting these targets requires both painstaking efforts by China itself and a supportive and open international environment.’
‘Congratulations, Europe, great job, you’ve cost yourself a lot of jobs, a lot of factories,’ said Trump.
The US President revealed that he had told UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer to ditch wind and solar power during his State visit last week.
‘I want to see them do well, I want to stop them ruining their beautiful Scottish and English countryside with windmills and massive solar panels,’ he said.
He notably did not say this during his press conference at Chequers, even though he was given ample opportunities to do so by willing media.
Mr Trump used the global stage afforded to him at the United Nations General Assembly to attack London’s Muslim Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is not shy in return about criticising Mr Trump.
But Trump falsely claimed that Mr Khan was intent on imposing Sharia law across London.
Even for Trump, this was unedifying. Khan is hardly a popular figure in London and the more devastating attack would have been to cast him as irrelevant and pretend to not know who he was.
‘I appear to be living rent-free inside Donald Trump’s head,’ Khan told Britain’s Sky News from a London bus.
But Trump’s attack on Khan was relevant to his objectives. MAGA, and the European populist movements are fusing evangelicalism and Christian nationalism with MAGAism.
Last week, a US-based GB News presenter asked Trump to say whether he regarded Britain as a Christian country. Trump declined to insult Mr Starmer, an atheist, during their press conference, but regularly attacks Khan, a prominent Muslim.
As Trump’s UN outing went on, he didn’t even bother trying to hide his naked political interference when he gave his backing to right-wing Argentinian President Javier Milei.
‘I’m doing something I don’t often do, I’m giving my full endorsement to him,’ he said.
‘The people of Argentina - we’re backing him 100 per cent.
‘He, like us, inherited a mess, and what he’s done to fix it is good … we need to make Argentina great again, so it’s an honour for me to endorse.’
Europe can expect to see this next. Trump set impossible metrics for European leaders to meet in order to satiate their irritable publics on migration and climate measures.
When they inevitably fail to meet them, the conditions will be ripe for him to urge Europeans and Britons to vote for his trans-Atlantic look-a-likes, such as the AfD in Germany and Reform in the UK.
Whether through inspiration or outright meddling, Make America Great Again is a movement Trump wants to expand into Making the West Great Again.
This is updated version of an article originally published by The Nightly.