Adekeye Adebajo | The King’s speech: Trump at the UN

American president, Donald Trump’s recent extraordinary speech at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York, once again demonstrated his monarchical delusions, as he haughtily proclaimed to gathered guests: “I’ve been right about everything.”

Fresh from a state banquet at England’s Windsor Castle where Trump had outrageously suggested to King Charles that the United States (US) and Britain had ended slavery, this rambling one-hour rant was his most frontal assault on multilateralism and international cooperation.

A paranoid, petty, and petulant Trump started by questioning the UN’s purpose without mentioning Washington’s $3 billion debt to the organisation. He accused the UN secretariat of having sabotaged him through a broken escalator and malfunctioning teleprompter (operated by the White House), before complaining about not having won a UN renovation contract as a real estate developer decades earlier.

CLIMATE CHANGE

Having withdrawn from the 2015 UN Paris Climate Agreement, the US president then launched an unhinged attack on global efforts to tackle climate change which he dismissed as the “greatest con job ever perpetrated on the world” and a “green scam” that had brought countries to “the brink of destruction.” He complained that policies on climate change were “made by stupid people,” incoherently noting: “Then they said global warming will kill the world, but then it started getting cooler. So now, they just call it climate change because that way, they can’t miss.

Climate change – because if it goes higher or lower, whatever the hell happens, there’s climate change.” Repeating his “drill baby, drill” mantra to oil corporations, the US president then preposterously berated environmentalists for wanting to “kill all the cows,” before falsely accusing China – which accounts for half of the world’s wind power – of exporting its wind energy, while continuing to burn coal and gas at home.

Evidence from Trump’s own government agencies shows that global warming has resulted in rising temperatures, extreme weather, wildfires, and shifting oceans, while 90% of scientists agree that the negative actions of humans is the main cause of climate change.

PEACEMAKING AND PALESTINE

Trump then perversely sought to portray himself as a peacemaker, while simultaneously justifying his murderous gunboat piracy which continues to kill suspected drug smugglers in international waters, and his illegal strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Chiding the UN for not having supported his mediation efforts (though he had refused to meet its Secretary-General, António Guterres, for eight months), he derided the world body’s “strongly worded letters”, noting that “empty words don’t solve war.”

Trump then falsely claimed to have resolved seven conflicts in Africa, Asia, the Balkans, and the Middle East, several of which, like the three-decade war in Africa’s Great Lakes continue unabated. India has insisted that its conflict with Pakistan was resolved bilaterally, and not through Trump’s intervention.

The US president’s peacemaking claims have also been contradicted by his enabling of what the UN’s Independent International Commission of Inquiry on the Occupied Palestinian Territory – chaired by South Africa’s Navi Pillay – has described as Israel’s genocide in Gaza, where over 66,000 people have been killed since October 2023 and over 1.1 million displaced. Rather than playing the role of an “honest broker” in this dispute, Trump instead denied Palestinian Authority president, Mahmoud Abbas, a visa to address the UN in New York.

He castigated his 10 Western allies for joining 147 UN members to recognise a Palestinian state, leaving Washington and Tel Aviv diplomatically isolated. Trump’s speech continued to repeat Israeli talking points: that recognising a Palestinian state was tantamount to rewarding Hamas terrorists, conveniently ignoring the fact that Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, had unilaterally broken the ceasefire in Gaza.

WHITE CHRISTIAN ISLAMOPHOBIA

A scaremongering Trump then accused the UN of leading a “globalist migration agenda” and “funding an assault on western countries,” before launching a prejudiced attack on migration which he described as “that double-tailed monster that destroys everything in its wake.” Trump cautioned European allies that: “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders. You have to end it now. Your countries are going to hell.” However, anyone with a basic understanding of “Fortress Europe’s” harsh treatment of African and Middle Eastern migrants, would clearly understand that Europe’s external borders are far from open. Trump continued his speech by warning Europeans that they were being “invaded by a force of illegal aliens”: othering language deliberately designed to dehumanize migrants as extraterrestrial monsters.

The US president then falsely claimed that millions of global citizens “from prisons, from mental institutions” had crossed America’s southern border. However, 90 per cent of the 238 Venezuelans deported to El Salvador last March, had no criminal record in America. His assertion that “zero” migrants had entered the US between June and September 2025 was also inaccurate: 8,200 asylum-seekers and migrants had, in fact, entered America in July 2025 alone.

Reinforcing his white Christian supremacist Islamophobic ideology at the UN, Trump described as “terrible” Pakistani-British London mayor, Sadiq Khan, before falsely accusing him of seeking to impose Shariah law on the English capital. The American president then implausibly complained that Christianity was the “most persecuted religion on the planet.” His bigoted speech – and warning to Europeans that they were “destroying [their] heritage” – thus unwittingly exposed the paradox at the heart of the UN: an organisation founded largely by western nations in 1945 to champion Christian principles of universal human rights and “just wars” that they themselves had spectacularly failed to live up to during five centuries of brutal slavery and imperial violence across the globe.

Professor Adekeye Adebajo is a senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship in South Africa. Send feedback to columns@gleanerjm.com