Donald Trump speaks during the first day of High-Level Week at Unga in New York, on Tuesday. Photograph: Bianca Otero/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
Donald Trump speaks during the first day of High-Level Week at Unga in New York, on Tuesday. Photograph: Bianca Otero/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock Show key events only Please turn on JavaScript to use this feature
Live feed Trump claims he was the victim of ‘triple sabotage at the UN’, demands investigation Donald Trump demanded a formal investigation on Wednesday of three technical mishaps that marred his speech to the United Nations general assembly on Tuesday: a malfunctioning escalator, a faulty teleprompter and an apparent sound problem in the hall.
Although Trump, in an enraged social media post, called the technical failures “triple sabotage”, UN officials told reporters that at least two of the problems were likely caused by Trump’s own delegation.
The chief UN spokesman, Stephane Dujarric, said in a statement that a read-out of the escalator’s central processing unit indicated that it had stopped because a built-in safety mechanism at the top had been triggered by accident, most likely by a White House videographer who was moving up the escalator backwards to record Trump’s ascent.
A UN official told Colum Lynch, a veteran UN correspondent, that the US delegation was operating the teleprompter from their own laptop, and Trump had simply arrived at the podium before it was ready.
According to Mike Waltz, who was demoted from national security adviser to US ambassador to the UN after accidentally adding a journalist to a confidential Signal group chat to discuss US strikes on Yemen in March, the third technical flub was interruptions of Trump’s speech in the hall with Portuguese interpretation.
Trump himself, on social media, claimed that the audio problem was much more substantial. “I was told that the sound was completely off in the Auditorium where the Speech was made, that World Leaders, unless they used the interpreters’ earpieces, couldn’t hear a thing,” Trump wrote.
That, however, appears unlikely to be true, since video evidence shows that there were numerous occasions throughout his speech when the audience reacted immediately to hat he was saying.
At the start of his remarks, for instance, when Trump said, “I can only say that whoever’s operating this teleprompter’s in big trouble,” his remark was met with immediate laughter from the delegates in the hall.
Donald Trump got a laugh at the start of his UN speech on Tuesday when he joked about his teleprompter not working. Similarly, when Trump criticized other nations for deciding to recognize the state of Palestine, calling the diplomatic move “a reward” for “horrible atrocities” carried out by Hamas militants on October 7,” the pool camera in the room cut to Israel’s ambassador to the UN, Danny Danon, who nodded in agreement.
Danon clearly had no trouble hearing Trump’s speech, since he posted video of that moment on social media later, and told reporters outside the hall that it was “a great speech; we are grateful to president Trump for a powerful speech.”
Similarly, other members of the US delegation who listened in the hall, including the energy secretary, Chris Wright, and the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, who were photographed smiling as Trump described his escalator mishap, gave no indication after it that they had any difficulty hearing Trump’s speech. “Incredible speech at the UN”, Rubio wrote on social media on Tuesday, before Trump claimed that there was no audio in the hall he had been sitting in.
Donald Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles; treasury secretary Scott Bessent; special envoy, Steve Witkoff; secretary of state, Marco Rubio; energy secretary, Chris Wright; and UN ambassador, Mike Waltz, react to the president’s joke about nearly falling on a stalled escalator, his address to the UN general assembly on Tuesday. Photograph: Bianca Otero/ZUMA Press Wire/Shutterstock
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