On September 23, 2025, President Donald Trump strode into the United Nations headquarters in New York, ready to deliver his address to the General Assembly. What should have been a routine entrance quickly became the spark for an international controversy, as a series of mishaps unfolded—each more dramatic than the last. Within days, the events had ballooned into a political firestorm, with accusations of sabotage, conspiracy theories, and official investigations swirling around what some saw as a comedy of errors, and others, a sinister plot.
The first incident occurred as President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump approached the escalator leading to the assembly hall. According to BBC and multiple other outlets, the escalator came to an abrupt halt just as the couple stepped on. Melania Trump jolted forward, and the pair ended up climbing the motionless stairs, an undignified moment that was quickly captured and shared across social media. The United Nations’ official response was prompt: a spokesperson stated that a built-in safety mechanism at the top of the escalator—the comb plate—had been triggered. The culprit, they said, was likely a videographer from the U.S. delegation who, by stepping ahead of the Trumps, inadvertently set off the sensor designed to halt the motor if an obstruction was detected.
President Trump, however, was having none of it. He took to his social media platform, Truth Social, to declare, “This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN.” Trump went further, demanding arrests and warning of the potential for catastrophic injury, claiming the escalator “stopped on a dime” just as the First Lady boarded. He insisted the Secret Service would open an investigation and called on the UN to preserve all security tapes related to the incident. “The people that did it should be arrested,” Trump wrote, as reported by TVNZ.
As the dust settled from the escalator incident, two more technical failures marred Trump’s address. First, the teleprompter he relied on to deliver his speech reportedly went “stone cold dark.” Trump accused the UN of orchestrating this failure as part of a broader scheme to undermine his appearance. Yet, as a UN official clarified to CNN and BBC, the teleprompter was operated by the White House, not by UN staff. “We have no comment since the teleprompter for the U.S. president is operated by the White House,” said UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric. The confusion didn’t end there; a White House official countered that the UN team was responsible for the teleprompter, adding a layer of bureaucratic finger-pointing to the already tangled affair.
The third and final issue involved the sound system in the General Assembly hall. Trump claimed that attendees could not hear his speech unless they were using the UN’s interpreter earpieces. He cited his wife Melania as saying she couldn’t hear him speak. The UN, for its part, explained that the sound system was designed this way: “The sound system was designed to allow people at their seats to hear speeches being translated into six different languages through earpieces,” a UN official told the BBC. This system, they said, was standard procedure for all addresses, not a targeted slight against Trump.
While the UN insisted that all three incidents were the result of human error or standard operating procedures, the narrative quickly took on a life of its own in the U.S. political sphere. Social media activist Laura Loomer, known for her embrace of conspiracy theories, posted an “Exclusive” claim that the escalator stoppage was a remote-controlled assassination attempt, timed to cause a fall that could have inflicted serious harm on the Trumps. Loomer disputed the official explanation, arguing that the videographer was too far from the comb plate to have triggered the safety mechanism and cited manufacturer diagrams to support her theory. Trump and his allies echoed these claims, framing the episode as a deliberate act of humiliation or even attempted harm.
In the days that followed, the White House and the U.S. Ambassador to the UN backed Trump’s call for an investigation. The Secret Service became involved, and the UN was asked to cooperate fully and preserve all relevant security footage. Meanwhile, the UN stuck to its guns, reiterating that the escalator’s safety mechanism was triggered by accident and that technical hiccups with escalators and elevators were not uncommon in the building. In fact, as TVNZ and CNN noted, the UN had experienced intermittent outages of elevators and escalators in both its New York and Geneva offices as part of cost-saving measures due to a liquidity crisis. The United States, ironically, is the top donor to the UN, and delays in U.S. funding had contributed to these very cutbacks.
As the controversy raged, late-night television jumped into the fray. On September 25, 2025, Stephen Colbert devoted a segment of The Late Show to the unfolding drama, donning three Sherlock Holmes hats and three pipes as he parodied the investigation into what he called “the one foe who refuses to take him up”—the United Nations escalator. Colbert’s comedic take underscored the absurdity that many saw in the situation, yet for Trump’s supporters, the allegations were no laughing matter.
For Trump, the events at the UN were just the latest in a long history of grievances against the international body. “No wonder the United Nations hasn’t been able to do the job that they were put in existence to do,” he wrote on Truth Social, tying the technical mishaps to his broader criticisms of the UN’s efficacy and mission. His speech at the Assembly itself was a blistering critique of the institution, accusing it of having “squandered its potential,” and lambasting U.S. allies for their approach to the war in Ukraine and immigration policies.
As of this writing, the UN Secretary General’s Office has not issued a further comment, and the investigations—both by the Secret Service and UN security—are reportedly ongoing. The saga has served as a microcosm of the broader tensions between Trump and the United Nations, with each side digging in and supporters on both ends amplifying their narratives. Whether the truth behind the “triple sabotage” is ever fully accepted by all parties remains to be seen, but the episode has certainly left its mark on the already fraught relationship between the former president and the world’s foremost international institution.
For now, the only certainty is that a routine day at the United Nations can, in the right hands—or perhaps, the wrong ones—become the stuff of global headlines and late-night satire alike.
