At Turtle Bay, Trump Sinks Under His Own Weight

By Kevin D. Williamson

Wednesday, September 23, 2026

 

Donald Trump, the retired game-show host who serves, incredibly enough, as president of these United States, addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations on Tuesday, and, of course, he gave a second-rate rally speech that was daft and superficial and dishonest in all the ways Trump customarily is daft and superficial and dishonest. Dog bites man, if toothlessly.

 

The ladies and gentlemen of the United Nations, for their part, did what they do best, i.e., approximately nothing, although they did apparently undertake several separate inspections of the escalator Trump would use, hoping to avoid repeating last year’s fiasco in which a malfunction had the president fuming about being victimized by “sabotage” at the international body. This time around, the stalled equipment was Trump’s inferior (very) frontal gyrus, specifically the bit known as Broca’s area, which is the part of the brain responsible for accessing vocabulary and evidently experienced a glitch as the president raged against the “mutilization” of children under the influence of radical gender ideology.

 

Trump’s speech was intended for domestic rather than international consumption, and it contained no good news for Republicans—rather the opposite, in fact: Trump reiterated his insistence that he expects an Iranian peace deal and a rapid decline in gasoline and diesel prices after the midterms, which is Trump’s beef-witted way of saying that he expects no such developments before the midterms. Not unrelatedly, he made a point of reminding the room that he is not going to be on the ballot. Allow me to translate that into English from the original Low Chimpanzee: You Republicans are hosed, nothing is going to be done about the one big issue that most irritates the greater part of your voters, and my main concern here is that this could make me look bad, so I’m just going to pretend that it doesn’t have anything to do with me. Trump is getting ready to tell defeated Republicans “I never knew you,” words he himself might expect to hear in the near future in another context.

 

Indeed, much of the speech was given over to Trump’s rehearsing the emotional self-defense litany he will be chanting to himself (and to anyone who will listen) after Republicans get their asses handed to them at the polls and he gets to spend a lot more time answering questions about why it is that a family of supposed billionaires needs a Russian oligarch to pay for Uday’s ghastly wedding: greatest economy ever, strongest country ever, strongest military ever, etc.—an all-American bed of roses until those ungrateful MAGA rube voters Democrats came along and wrecked everything.

 

President Ronald Reagan gave seven addresses to the General Assembly in the closing days of the Cold War, which was in its closing days in no small part because of the efforts Reagan described in his U.N. speeches, which were themselves moral weapons wielded in that war to considerable effect. The first, second, and last of them together form a sort of essay on Reagan’s view of international relations in his time. Many Americans, particularly miseducated young people, will find those speeches enlightening, even shocking: Reagan, caricatured in our time as a warmonger and bigot, is remarkably conciliatory toward the Soviets, denounces South African apartheid and comparable moral blights on the second half of the 20^th century, presses for reduction in both conventional forces and nuclear weapons, quotes Mohandas Gandhi, etc. At the United Nations, Reagan the peacenik is on full display: You know—the man who wanted the United States to share anti-missile technology with the Soviets as a way to make nuclear missiles less strategically valuable.

 

In much the same way that civil rights leaders such as Frederick Douglass and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. were at their best and most influential when they indicted the United States for failing to live up to its national creed, Reagan put the United Nations on the spot by celebrating its ideals and idealism and pressing the body and its member states to live up to its own words. In his series of speeches, Reagan reiterates his belief that the two great mandates of the United Nations—the pursuit of international peace and the defense of fundamental human rights—are, in fact, the same mission:

 

If we would have peace, we must acknowledge the elementary rights of our fellow human beings. In our own land and in other lands, if we would have peace, the trampling of the human spirit must cease. Human rights is not for some, some of the time. Human rights, as the universal declaration of this Assembly adopted in 1948 proclaims, is “for all people and all nations,'” and for all time.

 

This regard for human rights as the foundation of peace is at the heart of the U.N. Those who starve in Ethiopia, those who die among the Kurds, those who face racial injustice in South Africa, those who still cannot write or speak freely in the Soviet Union, those who cannot worship in the Ukraine, those who struggle for life and freedom on boats in the South China Sea, those who cannot publish or assemble in Managua—all of this is more than just an agenda item on your calendar. It must be a first concern, an issue above others.

 

Trump, on the other hand ... well:

 

I have a big decision to make.

 

Will a deal be made with Iran that lets them rebuild and create a far greater country than it ever was before?

 

Maybe one of the greatest in the Middle East, or even the world.

 

Or do I annihilate the Islamic Republic and do it quickly, never giving them a chance to kill and destroy people and countries again?

 

Do I drive them into hell with no chance of survival and no hope of future greatness or generations?

 

But I believe we’ll make a deal right after the election, because it doesn’t make sense for them not to.

 

They’re waiting to see how I do in the midterm election.

 

What they don’t realize is that I’m not running.

 

I did that already and won in a landslide.

 

We won in a giant landslide.

 

Trump also reiterated his favorite political slogan: “To the victor belong the spoils,” a slogan introduced into U.S. politics in the early 19^th century as a defense of the patronage and corruption of the “spoils system.” Its antonym is “Drain the swamp,” if anybody remembers that much-abused phrase.

 

Of course, it is embarrassing for Americans to be represented by such a man as Trump: ignorant, rage-addled, smeared in make-up applied with an artistry that falls somewhere between clown and hooker along with an evolving assortment of hair dyes, doddering, bloated. It is tempting to treat a pathetic figure such as Trump the way Trump would treat such a figure. But what afflicts Trump more than whatever causes his ankle swelling is a curse that might be best understood as a form of moral obesity, a suffocating excess of self that has the ironic effect of disfiguring the self—here I mean the moral self and the mind—rather than aggrandizing it and fortifying it. One can overdo the metaphor, but Trump is a man who seems to have suffered the spiritual equivalent of an ischemic stroke when he was about 27 and never to have recovered the full use of his faculties. It is not for nothing that he insists on traveling with the emotional equivalent of a nurse.

 

Perhaps Natalie Harp could be dispatched to represent U.S. interests at Turtle Bay. The United Nations is not what it used to be, and it is a very long way down to Ambassador Mike Waltz from George H. W. Bush, Jeane Kirkpatrick, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, George Ball, or Henry Cabot Lodge Jr. It remains a very high platform from which to speak and might prove useful for a man with something to say. But the American president is not that kind of man: He has nothing at all to say, beyond even if he does go on and on and on about it.