Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. On Sept. 23, President Donald Trump gave an address to the United Nations. It was a rare address. Believe me. No one has ever been that blunt, that explicit, and that critical of the U.N.
It was scheduled to be 15 minutes—but on the other hand, if the U.N. membership was shocked at the candor of Donald Trump, Donald Trump had ample reasons to be candid because before he even gave the speech, he and first lady Melania Trump and their entourage were just, the minute they got on the escalator, it mysteriously shut down. And by the way, the London Times had run a story saying that some members wanted to shut it down in protest of Trump’s cutting back on U.N. support.
That was an odd thing to happen.
No. 2 was the teleprompter suddenly went out. But the escalator, by this time, was mysteriously back in service and the teleprompter would be too.
And then, three, unbeknownst to Donald Trump, people, reporters, and even first lady Melania Trump said you couldn’t hear Trump. All of a sudden, mysteriously, his sound was—what do you want to call it Deamplified?
And then fourth, for a minute, the translation did not come into English to the membership, but to Portuguese.
All four of those circumstances were almost impossible to occur in one session. So, what am I getting at? This is very serious. It means that the United Nations has employees, or perhaps administrators, who deliberately tried to sabotage an American president while on American soil.
So, Donald Trump, as he was experiencing the breakdown in the teleprompter, and had just gone through the escalator shock, decided to lengthen his speech from 15 minutes to about 55, and he had some blockbuster things to say.
First of all, the U.N. did not like it. They sat in stony silence. Why? First of all, he said the U.N. had been of no real importance when he was trying to negotiate peace, or at least a ceasefire, with the Congo and Rwanda, with Serbia and Bosnia, with Russia, of course, and Ukraine, Pakistan and India. I could go on, but he had seven separate conflicts that he at least got a temporary ceasefire. There was no U.N. praise, there was no U.N. input.
The subtext, what he was saying, is that most of their declarations of condemnation are against tiny Israel. In fact, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would follow his appearance at the U.N. and half—at least a lot of the contingents—just simply walked out.
Now, they didn’t do that for the Palestinians, of course. And notice another thing. Israel is a democratic country, and they walk out when the prime minister speaks. But they don’t walk out when Chinese leader Xi Jinping speaks. He’s got over a million people in a Uyghur labor camp. They don’t walk out when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan speaks. Turkey has occupied for a half-century, illegally, Northern Cyprus. And they don’t, of course, walk out when a Russian diplomat speaks, when they’ve killed over 150,000 Ukrainians in this war.
It’s only selective because Israel is tiny, it’s Western, and—let’s speak frank—it’s Jewish. But Donald Trump—so, he knows all that in advance and he has no respect for the U.N.
The other subtext that got the U.N. people very angry was that he talked about Europe—not Africa, not Asia, not Latin America. And they felt excluded. But he—it was very passive-aggressive. He said to Europe: I love Europe. I want you to fulfill, essentially, your shared Western heritage with us, but you’re not doing it, and you’re not doing it for three or four things.
No. 1, you’ve embarked on a suicidal energy policy that subsidizes inefficient and unsustainable green energy—solar and wind, specifically—and you’ve given up oil and natural gas and clean coal and nuclear, and you’ve lost your competitive edge and your consumers are hurting.
No. 2, you let in millions of illegal immigrants—and not just any illegal immigrants, mostly from the war-torn Middle East, who were Islamic and had no desire to adapt to, integrate with, or assimilate with Western civilization’s customs, cultural norms.
And therefore, you’ve got a terrible problem with immigration, you’ve got inefficient energy, and you’re disarmed. And I’m lecturing you, Trump said, because I love Europe and I want you to be a full partner.
And that offended the rest of the world that wasn’t—didn’t get that privilege of having a U.S. president talk directly to them, but it also got the Europeans angry because he was telling them the truth.
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