Sometimes, the jokes write themselves. If you were a low-grade comedy writer with a chip on your shoulder and the same liberal opinions as everyone else you know, you might fantasize about a president who came down a golden escalator getting stuck going up an escalator at the United Nations building and then, as a diplomatic crisis escalates in the Middle East, finding that the speakers in the hall are off and that the teleprompter has died. And then you’d dismiss the idea. Too crude, too literal. And too close to the truth.
All of this happened when President Donald Trump went to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23. Was it, as our shy and retiring president suggested afterward, “triple sabotage”? Since November 2024, the Trump administration has cut U.S. contributions to the U.N. by $1 billion and severed ties to UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Human Rights Council. It wants to recover another billion from congressional appropriations, and its fiscal 2026 budget request would cut another $2.2 billion. On Sept. 21, the Times quoted U.N. employees joking that they might “turn off the escalators and elevators” and tell Trump that they “ran out of money, so he has to walk up the stairs.”
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The Center for American Progress calls the funding cuts a “massive blunder.” It also calls itself “non-partisan,” though its long-term CEO, the ex-Obama and Biden staffer Neera Tanden, called it the “central hub for Trump resistance” after 2016. Tanden’s hacks claim that Trump will surrender the U.N. to “China and other rivals” and pass “the literal and metaphorical bill for his incompetence” to the public. I call that literal and metaphorical American progress. The General Assembly has been hostile territory for most of its existence. The Security Council is where France gangs up with Russia and China, while Britain cringes and the Times cheers. Why give money and respect to people who hate you?
This is not just a question for Americans. On Sept. 20, British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recognized the fantasy state of Palestine without conditions. French President Emannuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney followed three days later from the podium of the U.N. They claim, Starmer said, that this gesture will “keep alive the possibility of peace and a two-state solution.” Even if this were true — and it’s not, because peace will never come from a two-state solution that the Palestinians candidly reject — it was, as Trump told the U.N., “a reward” for the “horrible atrocities” of Oct. 7, 2023, given while Hamas, which enjoys massive support among Palestinians everywhere, “refuse to release the hostages or accept a ceasefire.”
The real audience for this theatre was domestic. Britain, France, and Canada rejected recognizing a Palestinian state before Oct. 7. While the slaughter was still going on, Hamas’s Muslim and leftist supporters opened a second front in the capitals of the West under the rallying cry, “globalize the intifada.” The black flag of Islam, flown on campaign by Muhammad, the Abbasid caliphs, al Qaeda, the Taliban, and the Islamic State group, now flutters in the streets of London, Paris, and Ottawa. The soy-drenched dregs of the 20th-century Left march beneath it, along with their boutique slogans. Jews are attacked and insulted with more than usual vigor. Police have lost control of the streets.
John Stuart Mill feared that the weakness of liberal democracy lay in the “tyranny of the majority.” The Western leaders surrendered to the tyranny of a couple of minorities: one sectarian, the other political. In Britain, a poll by JL Partners, which predicted the results of the 2024 elections in Britain and the United States with granular accuracy, found that only 13% backed recognizing a Palestinian state without any conditions. Among Starmer’s Labour Party voters, that number fell to 11%. In France, a poll by the IFOP organization found 75% opposed immediate recognition. Even Canada, a society with terminal brain rot, failed to summon a majority for the throat-cutting, baby-killing, gang-raping, plane-hijacking, suicide-bombing but strangely lovable Palestinians. In a Léger poll, only 41% of Canadians thought statehood a “good idea” for Palestinians. I imagine about the same number think statehood is a good idea for Canada.
This farce will further escalate the Middle Eastern war and the domestic crisis inside the Western states. Hamas responded immediately by claiming “victory.” The Israelis will respond by annexing some of the territories that already belong to them by law and conquest. The Islamists will respond by escalating their international campaign of subversion. And Britain, France, and Canada will escalate downward with new forms of surrender.
“You’re destroying your countries,” Trump informed their leaders at the U.N. “Europe is in serious trouble.” This is no more and no less than the truth. Of course, Trump had to overdo it. The problem is not just that Europe has been “invaded by a force of illegal aliens like nobody’s ever seen before.” The unprecedented “invasion” of illegal immigrants is the final blow after decades of massive and entirely legal immigration, encouraged for now-discredited economic reasons by sensible centrists such as Starmer and Macron. Similarly, London Mayor Sadiq Khan is not imposing Sharia law, as Trump said. Khan is just turning a blind eye to its imposition, just as he pretended not to understand the concept of “grooming gangs” after a report found them to be “rife in the capital.” Sometimes the jokes really do write themselves. But no one is laughing now.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.