US President Donald Trump delivers remarks to the United Nations Common Meeting on the UN headquarters in New York Metropolis on September 23, 2025.
Timothy A. Clary | Afp | Getty Pictures
President Donald Trump mocked the United Nations’ headquarters in a speech to the Common Meeting, recalling his failed bid to renovate the constructing in New York.
“A few years in the past, a really profitable actual property developer in New York, referred to as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complicated,” Trump informed the GA throughout wide-ranging remarks that questioned the aim of the UN.
“I stated on the time that I might do it for $500 million, rebuilding and every thing, it will be stunning,” Trump stated.
“I used to speak about, ‘I’ll offer you marble flooring, they’ll offer you terrazzo,'” he recalled. “‘I’ll provide the better of every thing, you are going to have mahogany partitions. They are going to offer you plastic.'”
“I spotted that they didn’t know what they have been doing when it got here to development,” Trump stated.
He stated that the UN in the end determined to go in “one other path,” which was “way more costly on the time” and “produced a far inferior product.”
Trump started his speech studying from paper notes as a result of the teleprompter was not working.
The escalator on the UN additionally stopped working when he and First Girl Melania Trump stepped on it, fueling his assaults on the headquarters.
“These are the 2 issues I obtained from the United Nations: a foul escalator and a foul teleprompter,” Trump cracked.
A United Nations official official stated later Tuesday that an individual touring with Trump inadvertently hit the cease lever on the escalator, inflicting it to come back to an abrupt halt, in response to the Related Press.
The official additionally famous that the president’s staff was answerable for working the teleprompter, the AP reported.
In 2005, Trump requested a U.S. Senate committee to permit him to handle renovations of the UN, a request that was in the end denied.
In his speech to world leaders on Tuesday, Trump criticized their world group, accusing the UN of working with “empty phrases, and empty phrases do not remedy wars.”
“The UN has such large potential, I’ve at all times stated it,” Trump stated.
“It has such large, large potential, however it’s not even coming near dwelling as much as that potential,” he stated in his tackle, which lasted practically an hour.
“All they appear to do is write a extremely strongly worded letter, after which by no means comply with that letter up; it is empty phrases,” he continued.
Trump’s speech got here as he has withdrawn the US from plenty of completely different UN our bodies and slashed funding for the group.
Trump, who has lengthy been crucial of the UN, stated its member international locations “are being ruined” by immigration.
He additionally known as local weather change “a con job.”
Trump urged the UN to belief his imaginative and prescient for coverage, saying that he is “actually good at predicting issues.”
“Through the marketing campaign, they’d a hat. The perfect-selling hat, ‘Trump Was Proper About All the pieces,'” he recalled.
“And I do not say that in a braggadocious approach, however it’s true,” Trump stated.
