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Standing on the United Nations General Assembly dais yesterday, President Donald Trump had a message for the global leaders and representatives in attendance: “Your countries are going to hell.”
What for? The “failed experiment of open borders,” according to the president. Never mind the fact that some countries represented in the room—such as, say, the Solomon Islands—don’t receive very many immigrants at all, and that leaders have profoundly diverging views about the long-term effects of mass immigration. The irony was lost on Trump; his address demonstrated what happens when an “America First” president engages with the rest of the world.
Trump spoke for almost an hour (well past his 15-minute limit) in a speech that oscillated between bombast and blithe nihilism. He grumbled about the building’s terrazzo floors, complained that the teleprompter had broken down before his speech, and repeatedly mentioned that an escalator he’d been on had stopped short. (“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter.”) He also falsely claimed sole credit for ending seven wars, and at one point suggested that radical environmentalists “want to kill all the cows.” Rather than laughing at him, as the assembly did back in 2018, his audience was polite this time, chuckling at some of the ad libs and sitting through the digs.
The address featured many such unrelated and fabricated elements, including the supposed “con job” of climate change (it’s real) and the claim that London and its mayor want to institute Sharia law (they don’t). The through line was the contrast between America’s current “golden age” and the “death” and destruction that Trump argues other nations are facing—support for his general thesis that he’s handling the world’s most intractable crises better than anyone else is.
So, is the “America First” mentality about investment at home, or is it just about the abandonment of long-held foreign-policy goals? The answer depends on Trump’s disposition at any given moment. Take his unpredictable stances on the Ukraine war: When Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky petitioned the White House in February for support in the country’s ongoing war against Russia, Trump publicly scolded him, saying that Zelensky didn’t “have the cards” to be asking for any more money. But in yesterday’s speech, Trump placed the blame for the drawn-out war squarely on Russia. In a follow-up post on Truth Social, he wrote that Ukraine can “WIN” back the territory illegally occupied by Russia since the start of the war, and even said during a post-address press conference that NATO member countries should shoot down Russian planes that enter their airspace.
This apparent 180 is more an abdication than a switching of sides—“one of his tantrums,” as my colleague Tom Nichols put it last night. Trump once appeared content to let Russian President Vladimir Putin steamroll Ukraine. “Now,” Tom writes, “the president seems to be implying that he’ll walk away and let Europe do whatever the hell” it wants.
Trump’s disregard for diplomatic norms extended to the UN itself. “What is the purpose of the United Nations?” he asked during his speech, not as an inspiring prelude but as a swipe. The vision of the world the president espoused was one of profound dysfunction, a globe-enveloping chaos that is eating away at the very fabric of society—except, of course, in America, per his telling. Faced with a world on the brink, Trump seems to be throwing up his hands; countries can either follow his cue or fend for themselves.
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Today’s News
- One ICE detainee was killed and two were seriously injured in a shooting at an ICE facility in Dallas, according to Department of Homeland Security officials; Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said that the shooter died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Officials are investigating the incident and found ammunition engraved with the message ANTI-ICE, according to FBI Director Kash Patel.
- Russia dismissed President Donald Trump’s statement at the United Nations that, with NATO’s help, Ukraine could retake all of its territory occupied by Russia. The Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov said on a radio interview that Ukraine refusing to negotiate would only worsen its position.
- The Securities and Exchange Commission recently dropped a civil-enforcement case against Devon Archer, a former client of current SEC Chairman Paul Atkins, who had testified on Archer’s behalf before joining the commission. An SEC spokesperson told The New York Times that Atkins had recused himself from the decision to drop the case.
Evening Read
The Black Hole That Could Rewrite Cosmology
By Ross Andersen
To study the origins of our universe is to struggle with profound chicken-or-egg questions. We know the Big Bang happened. Cosmologists can see its afterglow in the sky. But no one knows whether the laws of physics or even time itself existed before that moment. Nor can we say exactly what happened next. The order in which certain celestial objects formed during the very early universe is hotly contested.
For a long time after the Big Bang, not much of anything could form. All of space was permeated by a roiling plasma. It was too hot and chaotic for any structure to cohere. Hundreds of thousands of years passed before a tiny hydrogen atom could even hold itself together. Another 100 million years or so after that, great clouds of hydrogen condensed and stars flared into being. Most cosmologists believe that these stars were the first large, free-floating structures to illuminate our universe, and that black holes appeared later. But some have proposed that it went the other way around.
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Culture Break
Read. Addie E. Citchens’s novel, Dominion, creates a vibrant Mississippi town and a dire morality tale about the suppression of desire, Omari Weekes writes.
Explore. In the world of sorority rush, expensive fashion trends merge with old southern ideals. Caitlin Flanagan asks, “What kind of future (or past) are these young women preparing themselves to enter?”
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Rafaela Jinich contributed to this newsletter.
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