Trump Forced to Walk Up the Stairs, Alleges UN Sabotage

Well, that escalated quickly.

By Danielle Han  |  September 26, 2025 | 3:36pm
PoliticsTrump Administration
Trump Forced to Walk Up the Stairs, Alleges UN Sabotage

On Wednesday, Donald and Melania Trump sauntered past reporters at the United Nations headquarters and stepped onto the escalators when, suddenly, the mechanics stopped. The two looked around, confused, before moseying up the steps. 

Since escalatorgate, the president has become convinced the move was a humiliation ritual and has taken to Truth Social to call sabotage: “the escalator came to a sudden halt as we were riding up to the podium,” he wrote in one post. “A REAL DISGRACE,” he said in another—citing two other mishaps during his visit, including one with a faulty teleprompter and one with the sound system. 

Responding to a Times piece which referenced UN staff members joking around that they might “turn off the escalators and elevators” and “simply tell [Trump] that [the UN] ran out of money,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt tweeted that whoever was responsible should be “fired and investigated immediately.” Speaking to Fox News later that day, she alleged: “It doesn’t look like a coincidence to me.”

 

Considering if there’s foul play at hand, we’re talking about a president who has been a longtime critic of the organization, and removed the US from the UN Human Rights Council in 2018. Speaking to the international body on Tuesday, he also claimed the UN is pushing a “globalist migration agenda” and accused it of “funding an assault” on the West. “The UN is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and finance them.” In the past nine months, Trump has further shirked his UN responsibilities, causing diabolical turmoil to the international body’s funding, and singlehandedly reversing progress on many humanitarian initiatives. And thanks to sweeping cuts and gross funding reductions, the UN is preparing to cut $500 million from next year’s budget and drop 20% of its staff. 

But as it turns out, the saboteur was….. Trump’s own team. On Tuesday, a spokesperson for the UN Secretary-General released a statement detailing the summary of the events, saying that a videographer who stepped ahead of the President and First Lady may have inadvertently triggered a safety mechanism, a possibility that was corroborated by some escalator experts who spoke to NPR. But a more updated detail of events came Thursday, when a person “with knowledge of the events” told the Daily Beast that it seemed someone in Trump’s own team had tripped the escalator’s emergency button. And speaking to AP News, a UN worker said the White House was also the ones managing the teleprompter. 

Now, Trump is saying the Secret Service is investigating the incursions, and the same UN spokesperson has announced the Secretary-General has ordered a thorough investigation into what happened. I hope they send him a $500 million bill for it.

 
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