US President Donald Trump has called for an investigation after claiming he was the victim of “triple sabotage” during his visit to the UN General Assembly on Tuesday.
In a long message posted on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday, Trump insisted that he had experienced “three sinister events”, which included the sudden halting of an escalator he and First Lady Melania Trump were on.
Trump argued that the incident was not a coincidence, citing a report in the Times of London that UN staffers had joked about turning off an escalator during his visit. “The people that did it should be arrested,” he said.
Stéphane Dujarric, spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres, suggested that a videographer from the US delegation had accidentally brought the escalator to a halt by triggering a built-in safety mechanism.
Trump, who has called on Guterres to investigate, saying the US Secret Service is looking into the matter, also complained about a faulty teleprompter, which he reported did not work for 15 minutes.
“I immediately thought to myself, “Wow, first the escalator event, and now a bad teleprompter. What kind of a place is this?” he wrote in his social media post.
The US president also claimed the sound was off in the UN auditorium while he was giving a speech, saying he could only be heard through interpreters.
“No wonder the United Nations hasn’t been able to do the job that they were put in existence to do,” he said on Truth Social, railing against the alleged attacks.
The president’s allies were also quick to hit out against perceived saboteurs, with White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt saying that if someone deliberately stopped the escalator, they should “be fired and investigated immediately”.
“These lapses are unacceptable and symptomatic of a broken institution that pose serious safety and security risks,” Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the UN, wrote on X.
Waltz added that the US “will not tolerate threats to our security or dignity at international forums”, explaining that the Trump administration expected “swift cooperation and decisive action”.
‘You walk on terrazzo’
During his speech at the UN on Tuesday, Trump criticised the institution by saying it was “not living up to its potential” and rebuked other countries over their migration and climate policies.
He also dedicated one part of his address to chide the UN for rejecting his 2001 offer to renovate the organisation’s headquarters in New York “more quickly, much better, and much less expensively” than his competitors.
“I remember it so well. I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding everything. It would be beautiful,” Trump told the world leaders.
“I used to talk about, ‘I’m going to give you marble floors; they’re going to give you terrazzo. I’m going to give you the best of everything. You’re going to have mahogany walls; they’re going to give you plastic.’”
“But they decided to go in another direction,” Trump lamented, “which was much more expensive at the time, and which actually produced a far inferior product.”
Trump said his offer of $500 million (€425.7m) was turned down for what ended up being a much more expensive and inferior deal. “They had massive cost overruns and spent between $2 and $4 billion on the building, and did not even get the marble floors that I promised them.”
“You walk on terrazzo, do you notice that?” he said.