U.S. President Donald Trump said Wednesday that he was the victim of “three very sinister events” during his time at the United Nations General Assembly on Tuesday.
The Secret Service will be looking into the issues, which included an escalator that suddenly stopped and a defective teleprompter, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social.
“First, the escalator going up to the Main Speaking Floor came 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,” Trump wrote.
“It was only that we were each holding the handrail tightly or, it would have been a disaster. This was absolutely sabotage, as noted by a day’s earlier ‘post’ in The London Times that said UN workers ‘joked about turning off an escalator.’ The people that did it should be arrested.”
But it turns out the escalator coming to a halt with Trump and his entourage on it was due to his own team, said a UN representative.
UN spokesperson Stephane Dujarric said in a statement that a videographer from the U.S. delegation who ran ahead of Trump triggered the stop mechanism at the top of the escalator.
“The safety mechanism is designed to prevent people or objects accidentally being caught and stuck in or pulled into the gearing,” Dujarric said in a statement. “The videographer may have inadvertently triggered the safety function.”
President Donald Trump, centre, and his wife, Melania Trump, upper right, walk up the escalator after it stalled as he rode up to the General Assembly Hall, Tuesday, Sept. 23, 2025, at UN headquarters.
AP Photo/Stefan Jeremiah
Later in his post on Truth Social, Trump noted that the teleprompter wasn’t working when he began his speech at the UN headquarters.
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“Then, as I stood before a Television crowd of millions of people all over the World, and important Leaders in the Hall, my teleprompter didn’t work,” Trump wrote. “It was stone cold dark. I immediately thought to myself, ‘Wow, first the escalator event, and now a bad teleprompter. What kind of a place is this?’”
He said he proceeded to make his speech without a teleprompter until it “kicked in about 15 minutes later.”
“The good news is the Speech has gotten fantastic reviews. Maybe they appreciated the fact that very few people could have done what I did,” Trump said.
A UN official, speaking on condition of anonymity to The Associated Press because of the sensitivity of the issue, attributed the teleprompter issue to Trump’s side as well, saying the White House was operating the teleprompter for the president.
Trump also claimed that the sound was off in the auditorium as he spoke and that people could only hear his remarks if they had interpreters speaking into earpieces.
“The first person I saw at the conclusion of the Speech was Melania, who was sitting right up front. I said, ‘How did I do?’ And she said, ‘I couldn’t hear a word you said.’ This wasn’t a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN,” Trump wrote.
He said the UN “ought to be ashamed of themselves” and he plans to send a copy of his Truth Social post to the secretary-general, demanding “an immediate investigation.”
“No wonder the United Nations hasn’t been able to do the job that they were put in existence to do. All security tapes at the escalator should be saved, especially the emergency stop button. The Secret Service is involved. Thank you for your attention to this matter,” his post concluded.
Trump’s press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, took to X to address the escalator incident at the UN involving Trump.
“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,” she wrote.
While on Fox News, Leavitt suggested that UN staffers may have “purposely” tried to trip Trump by halting the escalator.
“When you put all of this together, it doesn’t look like a coincidence to me,” she said to host Jesse Watters.
“I know that we have people, including the United States Secret Service, who are looking into this to try to get to the bottom of it,” Leavitt said. “And if we find that these were UN staffers who were purposely trying to trip up — literally trip up — the president and the first lady of the United States, well, there better be accountability for those people, and I will personally see to it.”
— With files from The Associated Press
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