From Jen Psaki's 9-24-25 MSNBC article entitled "Embarrassing U.N. Escalator Debacle Sets Off Another Trump Rage Cycle":
During an address to the U.N. General Assembly in 2018, Donald Trump said that his administration had “accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.” In response, the crowd, full of world leaders and foreign dignitaries, broke out into laughter.It was definitely not the reaction that a world leader hopes for when addressing the United Nations. But it was especially concerning for Trump, a man so thin-skinned and so obsessed with his self-image that he rarely lets any slight go unanswered.
And so on Tuesday, you could only imagine what was going through the president’s head when, in front of a gaggle of cameras at the United Nations, an escalator abruptly halted, leaving Trump and first lady Melania Trump flummoxed for a few seconds, before they ultimately decided to just walk up the immobile staircase.
Now, basically everyone who has ever used an escalator has had some version of this exact same experience. Sometimes, escalators malfunction and you are left to just treat them like a regular staircase. It happens.
But for Trump, the brief inconvenience of having to walk up a nonworking escalator while on camera was enough to provoke outrage. Moments later, the president took to the stage to address the assembly, and it was clear the incident was still on his mind.
“All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle,” the president said. “And then a teleprompter that didn’t work. These are the two things that I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”
Yes, the president of the United States really did lash out at an assembled gathering of world leaders because the escalator didn’t show him enough respect. It was, to say the least, a ridiculous thing to bring up over and over again in a speech to the United Nations.
But the escalator crisis did not end there. Just a few hours after that speech, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt posted on X: “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.” The White House press secretary called for an investigation into the world’s largest intergovernmental organization because an escalator stopped working.
To read the entire article, click HERE.
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