A decade of watching Donald Trump speak has cured me of any expectation that this extraordinary man will ever deliver a speech that meets pre-Trump norms. The incessant boasting, grousing, misstatements, rambling, and shocking cruelty toward perceived enemies are all now so standard that they hardly bear mentioning — until Trump deploys them in a new and jarring context. You don’t have to be a globalist to regard addresses to the General Assembly of the United Nations as a relatively solemn occasion during which invited dignitaries have the opportunity to address the world, at least symbolically. At a minimum, it requires a broader perspective, and, indeed, we were told Trump would present his “vision for the world.”
If so, Trump’s “vision for the world” is mostly directed into a mirror. After some preliminary complaints about a malfunctioning teleprompter, the president treated the world’s representatives to a narcissist’s view of a planet that could reach the incredible heights achieved by America under his leadership, if only everyone would acknowledge his greatness and emulate his example.
To be sure, Trump has devoted portions of his past speeches at the U.N. to recitations of his many claimed accomplishments. But he surpassed himself this time in length (57 minutes) and in self-regard. He gave puzzled delegates a version of a vintage Trump-rally address, detailing the riches-to-rags-to-riches tale of an America that rose to giddy heights in his first term, plunged to near destruction under the regime of “Sleepy Joe Biden,” and is now rising again to previously unimagined triumphs now that its greatest president ever is back in charge. The “invasion” of the U.S. by “25 million” migrants has ended! Inflation has been “defeated”! The hellhole of Washington, D.C., is a crime-free paradise! All that was missing was Lee Greenwood singing “God Bless the U.S.A.”
Trump made equally wild claims about world conditions with and without his leadership. Wars didn’t exist until he left office (under rather conspicuous protest) in 2021, then flared up everywhere, and now are being rapidly resolved via his personal intervention and his powerful deterrent effect on evildoers. If he can get a little help from Europe, he will personally end the wars between Russia and Ukraine and between Israel and its desolated Palestinian subjects. But the main obstacle to global peace and progress, he unsubtly suggested, is the “politically correct” resistance by other countries to his war against immigration and his war on behalf of the absolute maximum exploitation of fossil fuels. He shared with the U.N. his strangely personal rage against renewable-energy sources (“The wind doesn’t blow; those windmills are so pathetic”) and his fury at the countries (nearly all of them) that haven’t abandoned the climate-change “scam.” If only, Trump suggested, the world’s nations would close their borders and drill, baby, drill (or perhaps buy oil and gas from the USA), all would be well. Instead, he asserted, “Your countries are going to hell!”
There was one passage that stood out precisely because it did seem like something a normal American president would say at the U.N.: an offer to foster international cooperation in controlling bioweapons research, though his call for AI monitoring of such research was a reminder of his efforts to give the U.S. hegemony over that promising yet threatening technology.
But Trump’s altar call clearly returned his focus to his MAGA movement as a global model for success. Playing off his planned self-celebration during the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, which he called “the light to all nations,” the president rolled through a near-poetic (and very J.D. Vance–like) paean to the universal value of blood-and-soil nationalism, telling the assembled delegates that each represented “ancestors who gave everything to the homelands they defended with pride, with sweat, with blood, with life, and with death.” He closed with the words “God bless the nations of the world.” It’s certainly ironic that the president of the country that helped create the United Nations as an organization dedicated to the defeat of militant nationalism and to the defense of world peace against its recurrence is now asking U.N. delegates to look exclusively to their own traditions and passions, making themselves great again as America has. All these nations can’t have their own Donald Trump, but that’s why America is First.