When Nathan Ames patented the first moving staircase in 1859, little did he know that 166 years later the escalator would become the latest fixation of Trump and his MAGA base.
At the United Nations general assembly this week, Donald Trump delivered a sprawling speech that often felt like experimental free form jazz. Except the avant-garde approach to the music genre requires a great deal of improvisational talent.
When he wasn’t describing climate change as the “greatest con job ever”, he was singling out how European nations are “going to hell” over their migration policies or waxing lyrical about his red hat merch.
But the moment that caught people’s attention was when he broke from his prepared remarks to bemoan a defective teleprompter and the now-viral moment when he and first lady Melania Trump were on a malfunctioning escalator.
“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” said Trump.
Indeed, the escalator did suddenly stop as Donald and Melania Trump stepped onto it, leading to them having to walk up the stairs.
Trump posted about the harrowing experience on Truth Social, writing that it was “amazing that Melania and I didn’t fall forward on to the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first.”
In his legnthy chronicle of the “REAL DISGRACE”, Trump made reference to a report in the Times of London newspaper on Sunday saying that UN staff members had joked that they would turn off the escalators and “tell him they ran out of money.” This would have been a jab at the sweeping US funding cuts.
Trump has demanded an “immediate investigation” into whether UN staff sabotaged his attendance, with the Leader of the Free World calling the teleprompter failure and the escalator SNAFU “very sinister events”. He added that the “people that did it should be arrested!”.
As overblown as the presidential reaction was to a malfunctioning piece of equipment, the Trump administration and the MAGA base doubled down.
Karoline Leavitt, the White House spokeswoman, told Fox News that the Secret Service was investigating allegations that Trump had been deliberately sabotaged by UN staff.
“It doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she told Fox News. “And I know that we have people, including the United States Secret Service, who are looking into this to try to get to the bottom of it.”
Good luck, as that particular escalator was supposed to go up, and not to the bottom.
Leavitt then suggested on X that this was an intentional act of protest and that someone could have intentionally halted the escalator.
Where’s Hercule Poirot when you need him?
Then again, even the famous fictional detective would probably come to the conclusion that the UN have better things to do with their time than investigate a malfunctioning escalator under the guise of sabotage suspicions.
Still, UN officials took it seriously and have said the escalator’s built-in safety mechanism had been “inadvertently triggered” by a videographer working for the Trump administration and that the teleprompter was operated by the White House rather than the UN.
So, the call was coming from inside the (American) house after all.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric confirmed that a videographer from the US delegation who ran ahead of him may have triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator.
He said: “In an effort to document their arrival, a videographer from the US delegation stepped on to the escalator ahead of the president and first lady. As the videographer, who was travelling backwards up the escalator reached the top, the first lady, followed by President Trump, each mounted the steps at the bottom. At that moment, the escalator came to a stop.”
His statement continued: “Our technician, who was at the location, reset the escalator as soon as the delegation had climbed up to the second floor. A subsequent investigation, including a readout of the machine’s central processing unit, indicated that the escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator.”
“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing. The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function described above.”
Still, MAGA are convinced there’s a wider conspiracy here – leading to the trending hashtag #EscalatorGate.
Still, some found a silver lining…
Late-night talk show hosts had a field day with the moment, pointing out the lunacy of overblown conspiracy theories.
“My favourite part of that clip (of Trump stuck on the escalator) is trump looking around like he doesn’t know what to do next,” said Seth Meyers. “We all know that when an escalator breaks, we just use it as stairs. But when Trump see a broken escalator, he turns to Melania and says, ‘We live here now’.”
Referring to Leavitt’s comments on Fox News, in which she blamed “UN globalist staffers” plotting to set up Trump, Meyers quipped: “I’ve heard a lot about these globalists over the years, but I didn’t realise their M.O. was to just burn you with soft pranks.”
Jimmy Kimmel, who is now back on the air despite Trump’s wishes, showed clips of Fox News host Jesse Watters saying: “They could have hurt the most beautiful first lady in American history.”
Kimmel said: “Just to recap: Trump will not release the Epstein files, but we will be doing a thorough and complete investigation into who stopped his escalator…”
As for The Daily Show’s Jordan Klepper, he referred to the extensive Fox News coverage of escalatorgate and their repeated accusations of sabotage by asking: “Can you people please decide if Trump is the strongest man who has ever walked the Earth or a sickly child with hollow bird bones who will crumble if he walks up three stairs?”
No news on which one they’re picking, but suspicions of a shadowy UN cabal continue.
We really do live in the most unserious timeline, don’t we?