U.S. President Donald Trump and first lady Melania Trump arrive for the 80th session of the UN’s General Assembly (UNGA) on Sept. 23, 2025 in New York City.
Alexi J. Rosenfeld | Getty Images
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt fumed Tuesday that if anyone at the United Nations “intentionally” stopped an escalator right before President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump stepped onto it, “they need to be fired and investigated immediately.”
Leavitt’s demand on X came hours after an escalator at the UN abruptly halted just as the Trumps got on it shortly before he delivered a speech to the General Assembly in New York.
Leavitt’s tweet referenced a report in a British newspaper, The Times.
The paper on Sunday said that UN staff members, to mark Trump’s arrival, “have joked that they may turn off the escalators and elevators and simply tell him they ran out of money, so he has to walk up the stairs.”
The press secretary wrote, “If someone at the UN intentionally stopped the escalator as the President and First Lady were stepping on, they need to be fired and investigated immediately.”
But a UN official earlier Tuesday said that a person traveling with Trump inadvertently hit the stop lever on the escalator, causing its sudden halt, the Associated Press reported.
Trump mentioned the mishap and a faulty teleprompter to mock the quality of the UN headquarters as he complained that his prior effort to win a contract to renovate the buildings there had been rejected.
Trump began his speech reading from paper because the teleprompter was not working.
“Many years ago, a very successful real estate developer in New York, known as Donald J. Trump, I bid on the renovation and rebuilding of this very United Nations complex,” Trump told the GA in his speech.
“I said at the time that I would do it for $500 million, rebuilding and everything, it would be beautiful,” Trump said.
“I used to talk about, ‘I’m going to give you marble floors, they’re going to give you terrazzo,'” he recalled. “‘I’m going to give you the best of everything, you’re going to have mahogany walls. They’re going to give you plastic.'”
“I realized that they did not know what they were doing when it came to construction,” Trump said.
He said that the UN ultimately decided to go in “another direction,” which was “much more expensive at the time” and “produced a far inferior product.
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” Trump cracked.
The UN official who spoke to the AP noted that the president’s team was responsible for operating the teleprompte
In 2005, Trump asked a U.S. Senate committee to allow him to manage renovations of the UN, a request that was ultimately denied.
In his speech to world leaders on Tuesday, Trump criticized their global organization, accusing the UN of operating with “empty words, and empty words don’t solve wars.”
“The UN has such tremendous potential, I’ve always said it,” Trump said.
“It has such tremendous, tremendous potential, but it’s not even coming close to living up to that potential,” he said in his address, which lasted nearly an hour.
“All they seem to do is write a really strongly worded letter, and then never follow that letter up; it’s empty words,” he continued.
Trump’s speech came as he has withdrawn the United States from a number of different UN bodies and slashed funding for the organization.
Trump, who has long been critical of the UN, said its member countries “are being ruined” by immigration.
He also called climate change “a con job.”
Trump urged the UN to trust his vision for policy, saying that he’s “really good at predicting things.”
“During the campaign, they had a hat. The best-selling hat, ‘Trump Was Right About Everything,'” he recalled.
“And I don’t say that in a braggadocious way, but it’s true,” Trump said.