When President Trump took to the rostrum at the United Nations in 2018, world leaders in the audience laughed when he boasted of the success of his first administration. On Tuesday, it appeared Trump was getting the last laugh.
Trump made a defiant return to the United Nations for his first General Assembly meeting since winning a second term. The president spent nearly an hour taking world leaders to task on issues such as migration and climate change and questioning the value of the very organization he was addressing.
It was a speech that left world leaders murmuring to each other at times about what they had just heard, applauding Trump at certain moments — such as when he called for the release of hostages in Gaza — and sitting in silence as the president insisted he knew best how they should handle their countries.
“I’m really good at predicting things,” Trump told the audience during a lengthy diatribe against clean energy and the concept of climate change. “During the campaign they had a hat — a best-selling hat — ‘Trump was right about everything.’ And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true. I’ve been right about everything.”
Trump’s remarks reflected the dramatically different tone this administration has had from his prior one.
Trump has rapidly shifted the U.S. away from the Biden administration’s emphasis on strong alliances and consensus-building, instead opting for an approach that forces allies and adversaries alike to play by Trump’s rules.
And he made his domestic priorities central to his address to an international audience, urging other nations to follow his lead.
Trump blamed the United Nations for contributing to what he called “the crisis of uncontrolled migration” and urged its members to replicate his own crackdown on immigration, offering a startling assessment in the process.
“When your prisons are filled with so-called asylum-seekers … it’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders,” Trump said. “You have to end it now. I’m really good at this stuff. Your countries are going to hell.”
Trump spent much of his speech Tuesday dismissing climate change as a “con job,” decrying the concept of a “carbon footprint” as “nonsense” and warning that other nations that shifted their economies toward renewable energy would suffer dearly.
“All of these predictions made by the United Nations and many others, often for bad reasons, were wrong,” Trump continued. “They were made by stupid people that have cost their countries fortunes and given those same counties no chance for success.”
The president — who has repeatedly touted his role in helping to broker peace deals and ceasefire agreements between Armenia and Azerbaijan, Cambodia and Thailand, and India and Pakistan, among others — also struck at the core of the U.N.’s mission in his remarks.
“Later I realized that the United Nations wasn’t there for us. I thought of it really after the fact. …That being the case, what is the purpose of the United Nations?” Trump said.
“I’ve always said the U.N. has such tremendous, tremendous potential. But it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” Trump added.
White House officials and allies trumpeted the speech as an undistilled reflection of Trump’s worldview and an unmistakable rebuke of decades of American foreign policy that had been briefly interrupted by Trump’s first term.
“President Trump in his UN speech just delivered the most direct and unambiguous repudiations of left-wing globalism that ripped off the United States for years,” White House communications director Steven Cheung said after Trump’s speech. “The same things jeopardizing Europe today would have devastated America if President Trump wasn’t elected.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio posted on the social platform X that Trump was “setting the model for the free world.”
Tuesday was the first of four speeches Trump is set to give at the United Nations during his second term. While many Democrats and foreign leaders felt a sense of relief when Trump lost in 2020 and the Biden administration largely returned to business as usual, Tuesday’s remarks were an indication that Trump is as emboldened as ever and intends to impose his will on the international community.
Trump during his speech called out Brazil, a country he has tariffed in response to its prosecution of former President Jair Bolsonaro over his attempts to remain in power after losing an election.
He also met with and endorsed Argentina’s president, Javier Milei, for another term. Milei is a Trump ally, and White House officials have floated the possibility of aiding Argentina’s economy.
There were also clear signs Trump has returned to the type of transactional foreign policy that has come to define his time in office.
Trump mentioned the investments in the U.S. from other countries, which came as part of agreements for the White House to lower tariffs on imports. The president specifically thanked El Salvador for accepting and imprisoning deported migrants in a notorious prison, a partnership that caused backlash after a Maryland man was wrongfully sent there.
Still, there were indications in the aftermath of Trump’s speech he was not walking away from traditional alliances.
During a pull-aside meeting with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump said he supported NATO allies shooting down Russian aircraft that entered their airspace, adding that his administration was “very strong toward NATO.”
Following the Zelensky meeting, Trump posted on social media that Ukraine, “with the support of the European Union, is in a position to fight and WIN all of Ukraine back in its original form.” It marked a departure from Trump’s comments in August calling on Zelensky to accept the idea of ceding territory to Russia as part of a peace deal.
And when he met with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres, Trump made clear he was not abandoning the United Nations as an institution.
“I’m behind it,” Trump said. “I may disagree with it sometimes, but I am so behind it.”