NEW YORK — President Donald Trump on Thursday castigated the United Nations over a string of technical mishaps he said disrupted his appearance at the General Assembly, claiming an escalator malfunction nearly caused an accident for First Lady Melania Trump and that a faulty teleprompter and sound system forced him to ad-lib before world leaders.
“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that, on the way up, stopped right in the middle,” Trump told reporters after his address. “If the First Lady wasn’t in great shape, she would have fallen, but she’s in great shape. We’re both in good shape. We both stood.”
The president said the teleprompter failure compounded the disruption. “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,” he said, adding, “I can only say that whoever is operating this teleprompter is in big trouble.”
UN officials did not immediately comment on the president’s account. Administrative sources said no evidence of sabotage has been found so far and noted that equipment glitches are typically handled by venue technicians and vendor contractors. There were no reports of injury from the escalator stoppage.
The episode comes as Trump has used his General Assembly platform to reiterate U.S. grievances with multilateral institutions, pressing for reforms on funding, bureaucracy, and accountability. Allies of the president said the mishaps underscored long-standing complaints about UN logistics; critics argued the focus on technical issues risked overshadowing substantive policy messages.
White House aides said the president completed his remarks as planned, crediting his willingness to speak without notes when the prompter failed. Security and facilities staff at the UN were seen inspecting escalators in the delegates’ corridors later in the day, and technicians conducted checks on audiovisual systems ahead of subsequent sessions.
Whether the dust-up has any lasting impact beyond a fraught news cycle remains unclear. For now, the president’s visit—already framed by tensions over U.S. relations with international bodies—has been marked as much by stalled steps and scrambled lines as by diplomacy.
