The United Nations headquarters, looming over the East River, is a curious haven, with its towering and unadorned office block dominating its gardens and art pieces that would not look out of place in a monastic retreat.
The other Trump tower, completed in 2001, its windows black tinted, is the UN’s monumental neighbour.
In the midst of an hour-long reverie in which he reproachfully called out the uselessness of the United Nations and rebuked the gathered leaders from around the world for their failures to address myriad issues like immigration and the green energy “con job”, US president Donald Trump allowed himself to reminisce about his days as a property developer.
He had promised to redevelop and rebuild the very building in which he now stood, calling out the chastened and subdued leaders of the world as a schoolmaster might an errant class.
RM Block
He told the United Nations that he had offered them marble floors and mahogany walls for a total cost for $500 million. As he reminisced, he slipped into his lost Queen’s property developer’s argot.
“I’ll give you mahogany walls. They’ll give you plastic.”
[ Trump condemns moves to recognise Palestinian state in UN speechOpens in new window ]
Foolishly and predictably, they had turned him down. Instead, they went with a project that cost, he told the room, somewhere between two and four billion dollars.
Now, on his first return to the building since his original address as president, in the autumn of 2018, a series of farcical mishaps confirmed his worst prejudices against the beleaguered organisation.
Firstly, the escalator abruptly stopped as he ascended the elevator in the company of the first lady, Melania Trump. Then, the teleprompter failed to work. For an opportunist like Trump, these misfortunes were props to his overall point. Trump and his administration had, he told the gathered heads of state, ended seven wars since he assumed office in January.
“No president or prime minister or for that matter no other country has done anything close to that. And I did it in just seven months. It has never happened before. I am very honoured to have done that. It’s too bad I had to do these things instead of the United Nations doing that and sadly in all cases the UN did not even try to help in any of them,” he said.
“I never even received a phone call from the UN offering to help in finalising the deal. All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that stopped right in the middle. If the first lady was not in great shape, she would have fallen. But she’s in great shape – we’re both in good shape. We both stopped ... and then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things I got from the United Nations - a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.
“What is the purpose of the United Nations? The UN has such tremendous potential but it is not even coming close to living up to that potential. All they seem to do is write a strongly-worded letter. It is empty words, and empty words do not solve war.”
The tone was very Trump – laughter and darkness. Although his speech fell short of the worst fears of the United States’ future commitment to the UN, it was a blistering assault on where the organisation finds itself after 80 years.
When Trump first stood at the lectern in 2018, he was a novice president and the world still regarded his victory as an aberration: a quirk of the American personality. When he told the room that his administration had accomplished more than any in US history, the delegates and leaders tittered and openly laughed.
Trump noticed.
“I didn’t expect that reaction but that’s okay,” he said then.
When he returned to that theme on Tuesday, listing out the familiar list of claims and boasts, there was no laughter. This was a different Trump and he was speaking from the bully pulpit when he told them: “This is indeed the golden age of America.”
He took them through it: the silent southern border; “commitments” in $17 trillion of investments and domestic manufacturing resurgent. He had bleaker news for the world at large, dismissing the green-energy commitments of UN nations as naive and pointless, warning about the consequences of immigration, name-checking the London mayor Sadiq Khan as “a terrible, terrible mayor”.
“And it’s been so changed. Now they want to go to sharia Law.”
From London came the swift reply by lunchtime, through a statement from Khan’s office: ‘We are not going to dignify his appalling and bigoted comments with a response. London is the greatest city in the world, safer than major US cities and we’re delighted to welcome the record number of US citizens moving here.”
It was a sharp, concise repudiation and in stark contrast to the kind of placatory comments of appeasement which the world’s leaders have decided to adopt as they weather through the wild first year of the Trump administration.
