Updated September 25, 2025 at 1:16 PM EDT
President Trump is alleging "triple sabotage" of his speech at the U.N. General Assembly, demanding an investigation into back-to-back mishaps with an escalator, a teleprompter and a sound system — for which the U.N. is at least partially blaming the White House.
"A REAL DISGRACE took place at the United Nations yesterday — Not one, not two, but three very sinister events!" Trump wrote in a Wednesday Truth Social post. "This wasn't a coincidence, this was triple sabotage at the UN. They ought to be ashamed of themselves … No wonder the United Nations hasn't been able to do the job that they were put in existence to do."
Trump visited the U.N.'s headquarters in New York City on Tuesday to speak to a room of world leaders. The trouble began pretty much the moment he stepped on the escalator, just behind first lady Melania Trump.
The escalator stopped abruptly mere seconds into their ride, leaving the couple briefly stranded. Video of the incident, which some are calling "Escalatorgate," shows them walking up the rest of the stairs while holding onto the handrails.
A short while later, as Trump took the podium to begin his remarks, he observed that his teleprompter wasn't working. He said he didn't mind, adding that "I can only say that whoever's operating this teleprompter is in big trouble," which drew laughs from the crowd.
Trump took a moment to recount — and seemingly laugh off — the technical difficulties of the day.
"All I got from the United Nations was an escalator that on the way up stopped right in the middle," he said, adding that if the first lady weren't in such good shape, she would have fallen. "And then a teleprompter that didn't work."
Then, with the device back on track, Trump proceeded to deliver a nearly hour-long speech in which he called global warming a hoax, criticized Europe for its "unmitigated immigration disaster" and accused the U.N. of "funding an assault on Western countries and their borders."
Trump has long been critical of the organization, withdrawing the U.S. from UNESCO and the U.N. Human Rights Council in both of his terms. But he said during a meeting later Tuesday with U.N. Secretary-General António Guterres that the U.S. is "behind the United Nations 100%."
Afterward, Trump wrote on Truth Social that he believed his speech was "very well received," and that the teleprompter and escalator malfunctions "probably made the speech more interesting than it would have been otherwise."
But his tone quickly changed. By Wednesday, Trump was calling the escalator incident "absolutely sabotage" and calling for the arrest of those responsible.
"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."
Trump said the Secret Service was investigating, and demanded that the U.N. open its own probe. On Wednesday night, Guterres spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric announced that the secretary-general had ordered a thorough investigation.
"He conveyed that the UN is ready to cooperate in full transparency with relevant US authorities on this matter to determine what caused the incidents referred to by the United States," he wrote.
The U.N. says a U.S. videographer likely accidentally froze the escalator
On Tuesday afternoon, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt suggested in a tweet that U.N. staff may have intentionally stopped the escalator as the president and first lady stepped onto it.
She shared a screenshot from a Sunday story in the British newspaper The Times: "To mark Trump's arrival, UN staff members 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 U.N. is in a deepening financial struggle, due in large part to the decisions of what was once its largest funder, the U.S.; the Trump administration has stopped paying its portion of the U.N.'s budget and halted funding to specific U.N. programs.
The Associated Press reported that U.N. offices in New York and Geneva have intermittently shut off their escalators and elevators as part of cost-saving measures.
In a rare move, Dujarric, the U.N. secretary-general spokesperson, sent a note to reporters on Tuesday to clarify what had happened. He said the most likely explanation is that a videographer from the U.S. delegation accidentally brought the escalator to a halt.
The videographer had been many steps ahead of the first couple on the escalator, standing backward to film their arrival. Apparently, when the videographer reached the top, he inadvertently triggered a safety feature designed to keep people or objects from getting caught in the gearing, Dujarric said.
"A subsequent investigation, including a readout of the machine's central processing unit, indicated that the escalator had stopped after a built-in safety mechanism on the comb step was triggered at the top of the escalator," he wrote.
The U.N. says the U.S. delegation is responsible for operating the president's teleprompter and referred questions to the White House.
In a statement to NPR, the White House said its staffers were "prevented by UN staff" from setting up the teleprompter prior to Trump's speech as promised, so were left "trying to set the teleprompter up as the President was speaking."
Mike Waltz, the freshly-confirmed U.S. ambassador to the U.N., tweeted Wednesday that the U.S. has asked the U.N. secretary-general to share a "detailed explanation of the teleprompter failure's root cause, along with immediate plans to implement robust preventative measures."
He also demanded the complete results of the U.N.'s internal investigation into the escalator malfunction, "including who or what caused it to halt and whether it was intentional sabotage."
But the White House alleges the mishaps were no coincidence
Trump administration officials have continued to paint the overlapping malfunctions as part of a broader conspiracy.
In a Tuesday night appearance on Fox News, Leavitt said the problem wasn't limited to just the escalator and the teleprompter, but that a reporter from a conservative outlet had also noticed that "the audio inside of the room was much lower, and different, for the president of the United States than the previous speaker."
"When you put all of this together, it doesn't look like a coincidence to me," Leavitt continued. "And 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."
Echoing the administration's calls of sabotage, Fox News host Jesse Watters said on his show that "what we need to do is either leave the U.N. or we need to bomb it," comments he walked back after disagreement from his co-hosts. Such rhetoric has prompted concern among U.N. staffers, especially on the heels of the Secret Service's announcement that it had uncovered a large network of devices capable of disrupting cell phones near the U.N. General Assembly meeting.
NPR has reached out to the Secret Service for comment about its investigation into Tuesday's events, but had not heard back by publication time.
In his Wednesday post, Trump said that on top of the escalator and teleprompter issues, he was told after his speech that world leaders, "unless they used the interpreters' earpieces, couldn't hear a thing."
"The first person I saw at the conclusion of the Speech was Melania, who was sitting right up front," Trump wrote. "I said, 'How did I do?' And she said, 'I couldn't hear a word you said.'"
But the U.N. says there's a logistical — and linguistic — reason Trump's speech may have sounded quiet to those in the room.
The sound system was designed to allow people at their seats to hear speeches being translated into six different languages through earpieces, a U.N. official said, speaking on condition of anonymity to discuss internal processes.
Waltz, the U.N. ambassador, called the series of incidents "unacceptable and symptomatic of a broken institution that pose serious safety and security risks."
"The United States will not tolerate threats to our security or dignity at international forums," Waltz wrote in his Wednesday tweet. "We expect swift cooperation and decisive action."
NPR's Michele Kelemen contributed reporting.
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