Trump was once laughed at on the UN stage. Now, world leaders are courting him
By Kevin Liptak, CNN
(CNN) — When President Donald Trump brought his trademark braggadocio to the United Nations’ rostrum in his first term, he was met with an unfamiliar-for-him response from the delegates: mocking laughter.
Seven years later, few could imagine the scene repeating itself. Once the object of skepticism and open derision by his foreign counterparts, Trump arrives at the UN General Assembly on Tuesday as an avatar of a changing world order that has little use for global institutions like the one he’s speaking at.
Instead of laughing in his face, world leaders are now devising ever-more-lavish displays of flattery to enter Trump’s good graces. And rather than a novice in a shrine to multilateralism, Trump is now the president who has rocked global arrangements on trade and security, all while hollowing out the post-World War II international system that his predecessors built and worked to uphold.
The successes and failures of his strategy are still being written. Two conflicts he once promised to end quickly — in Gaza and Ukraine — continue to rage; his plan of abandoning a collective approach in favor of leveraging close personal relationships with the leaders of Israel and Russia has so far yielded virtually no progress. (After his speech Tuesday, Trump plans to meet a host of foreign counterparts on the margins of the UNGA meetings, including Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump said last week should agree to a peace deal with Russia.)
Trump often touts his efforts to broker peace elsewhere, including a once-intractable conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan for which he’s received widespread credit. His role in other negotiations, including between India and Pakistan, is a matter of dispute. Either way, Trump has made plain he believes his efforts deserve a Nobel Peace Prize — in no small part because he thinks he’s found success where prior attempts, including through the UN, have failed.
In his speech Tuesday morning, Trump plans to underscore where his way works better — including on shared global issues like migration and trade — and call into question the very body he is addressing.
“President Trump will deliver a major speech touting the renewal of American strength around the world, his historic accomplishments in just eight months, including the ending of seven global wars and conflicts,” press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Monday. “The president will also touch upon how globalist institutions have significantly decayed the world order, and he will articulate his straightforward and constructive vision for the world.”
Trump has never seemed a particular fan of the UN. Even before becoming president, he maligned the “cheap” marble on the General Assembly dais and took umbrage when his offers to renovate the 39-story headquarters building were rejected in the early 2000s.
It wasn’t his first dispute. The previous decade, diplomats posted at the institution’s headquarters balked at the real estate developer’s plans to construct Trump World Tower just across First Avenue from their headquarters. Their concern: The tower, with its smoked-glass facade, would cast an unpleasant orange shadow over the iconic modernist UN complex, which had enjoyed its sunny perch on the far east side for decades.
Now in office a second time, Trump’s shadow is well affixed on world affairs, and the UN has not been spared his influence. The US has slashed the money it spends on the institution, no longer making payments toward the UN budget. Trump has cut funding for foreign humanitarian aid and peacekeeping operations, leaving the institution stretched financially.
“I’ve always felt that the UN has tremendous potential,” Trump said this year as he signed a measure withdrawing the United States from the UN Human Rights Council. “It’s not living up to that potential right now.”
Aside from the Human Rights Council, Trump pulled the US from UNESCO, the educational and cultural agency, which the White House claimed “supports woke, divisive cultural and social causes,” and from the UN-run World Health Organization, in part for how it handled the Covid-19 pandemic.
In votes on the UN Security Council, the body’s main mechanism for ensuring international peace and security, the United States has sided at times with adversaries instead of allies. In February, for example, the US joined with Russia and China to score the Security Council’s backing on a Ukraine resolution that didn’t blame Moscow for the war; five European countries abstained.
Trump is also at odds with more than half the member nations, including key allies, over Israel’s war in Gaza and the possibility of establishing a Palestinian state. France and Saudi Arabia are co-hosting a two-state solution conference, supported by nearly 150 of the 193 UN Member States, on the sidelines of this week’s UNGA. The US is not participating in the conference and was one of only 10 countries that voted against the General Assembly resolution backing the high-level gathering.
On Tuesday, Trump — who has come under pressure to apply more pressure on Israel to end the fighting — will host the leaders of multiple Muslim-majority nations, including Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Indonesia, Turkey, Pakistan, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates and Jordan, for multilateral talks centered on the Gaza conflict.
Trump administration officials, along with other Republicans, have long argued the UN is increasingly hostile to Israel. They have also claimed the UN is poorly run and rife with financial mismanagement, and question the efficacy of multilateral diplomacy to solve the world’s problems.
In a sign of the relative importance of the body to Trump, he went without an ambassador to the UN for eight months. His onetime national security adviser Mike Waltz was confirmed by the Senate to the position on Friday.
“Make the UN Great Again,” Waltz posted on X afterward. “#MUNGA.”
Trump’s meetings on the side of UNGA will also include European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, who has been pressing for new sanctions on Russia, and Argentinian President Javier Milei, a top ally of the president who shares some of his political views.
Trump will also meet UN Secretary-General António Guterres, as is standard for American presidents when they attend the annual gathering.
Trump’s first-term speeches to the UN were often dry affairs, read somewhat drudgingly from the teleprompter. Still, there were distinctly Trump-like moments, such as when he labeled Kim Jong Un “rocket man” and threatened to “totally destroy North Korea.”
More common were boasts like the one that drew mockery in 2018, when Trump claimed his “administration has accomplished more than almost any administration in the history of our country.”
When he heard the laughter, Trump tried to shrug it off. “I didn’t expect that reaction,” he said, “but that’s OK.”
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