The escalator escalation keeps escalating.
President Donald Trump has demanded an investigation into what he called a “triple sabotage” at the United Nations General Assembly, including his allegation that an escalator was deliberately halted while he and first lady Melania Trump were riding it.
The U.N. says the escalator was likely stopped when a White House videographer accidentally triggered a safety mechanism. Nonetheless, Secretary-General António Guterres' office said late Wednesday that it had ordered a "thorough investigation" into the three incidents mentioned by Trump, and was "ready to cooperate in full transparency" to find out what caused them.
That came after Trump posted a 358-word complaint on Truth Social detailing “three very sinister events.”
Aside from the escalator issue, he saw malice in faults with his teleprompter and audio during his speech to the assembly, in which he had initially made light of the issues and told Western nations “your countries are going to hell” over immigration.
“This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN,” Trump wrote. “They ought to be ashamed of themselves. I’m sending a copy of this letter to the Secretary General, and I demand an immediate investigation.”
In what has become a fraught back-and-forth between the White House and the General Assembly, U.N. spokesman Stéphane Dujarric detailed the sequence of events that caused the escalator to halt.
"A readout of the machine's central processing unit indicated that the escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism" was "triggered at the top of the escalator," likely by the White House videographer who had boarded before the president and first lady, Dujarric said. That safety mechanism "is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing," he said.
That did not appear to satisfy Trump, who described the escalator as coming to a “screeching halt.”
“It stopped on a dime. It’s amazing that Melania and I didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first,” he wrote. “It was only that we were each holding the handrail tightly or, it would have been a disaster.”
He referenced reporting in Britain’s Sunday Times newspaper that had said that U.N. staff had been overheard joking about turning off the building’s escalators and elevators to highlight a funding shortfall caused by White House cuts. This reporting has not been confirmed by NBC News.
“This was absolutely sabotage,” Trump said, adding that the Secret Service were now involved. “The people that did it should be arrested!”
The is just the latest show of hostility by Trump and his supporters toward the U.N. and other such global bodies.
During his speech Tuesday, he accused the U.N. of leading a “globalist migration agenda” and “funding an assault on Western countries and their borders,” adding that “the U.N. is supposed to stop invasions, not create them and finance them.”
