US President Donald Trump’s recent speech at the UN in New York once again demonstrated his monarchical delusions, as he haughtily proclaimed to gathered guests: “I’ve been right about everything.” This rambling one-hour rant was his most frontal assault on multilateralism.
A paranoid, petty and petulant Trump started by questioning the UN’s purpose, without mentioning Washington’s $3bn debt to the organisation. He accused the UN secretariat of having sabotaged him through a broken escalator and malfunctioning teleprompter, before complaining about not having won a UN renovation contract as a real estate developer decades earlier.
Having withdrawn from the 2015 UN Paris Climate Agreement, the US president then launched an unhinged attack on global efforts to tackle climate change, which he dismissed as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”.
He complained that policies on climate change were “made by stupid people”, 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 burning coal and gas at home.
Yet evidence produced by Trump’s own government agencies shows that global warming has resulted in rising temperatures, extreme weather, wildfires and shifting oceans.
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, he dismissed the world body’s “empty words”. He then falsely claimed to have resolved seven wars, several of which, such as the three-decade conflict in the Great Lakes, continue unabated.
Trump’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 SA’s Navi Pillay — has described as Israel’s genocide in Gaza. Rather than playing an “honest broker” in this dispute, the US president instead denied Palestinian Authority president Mahmoud Abbas a visa to address the UN.
He castigated 10 Western allies for joining 147 UN members to recognise a Palestinian state and continued to repeat Israeli talking points: that recognising a Palestinian state was tantamount to rewarding Hamas terrorists.
A scaremongering Trump then launched a prejudiced attack on migration, telling European allies: “It’s time to end the failed experiment of open borders ... 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 subsequently warned that Europeans were being “invaded by a force of illegal aliens”, language deliberately designed to dehumanise migrants as extraterrestrial monsters. The US president then falsely claimed that millions of global citizens “from prisons, from mental institutions” had crossed the US’s southern border. His assertion that “zero” migrants had entered the US between June and September this year was also inaccurate: 8,200 asylum seekers and migrants entered America in July alone.
Reinforcing his white Christian supremacist Islamophobic ideology, Trump falsely accused Pakistani-British London mayor Sadiq Khan of seeking to impose sharia law on the English capital.
His bigoted speech 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.
• Adebajo is professor and senior research fellow at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Advancement of Scholarship.
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