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 said Tuesday that if anyone at the United Nations “intentionally” stopped an escalator before President Donald Trump and First Lady Melania Trump stepped on it, “they need to be fired and investigated immediately.”
Her threat came hours after an escalator at the UN abruptly halted just as the Trumps got on it ahead of his General Assembly speech.
Leavitt in her post highlighted a report from the British newspaper, The Times, which said that UN staff members had reportedly joked about turning off the escalators and elevators during Trump’s visit to the organization’s headquarters.
A UN official, however, said earlier on Tuesday that a person traveling with Trump inadvertently hit the stop lever on the escalator, causing it to come to an abrupt halt, according to the Associated Press.
Trump pointed to the escalator mishap, in addition to a faulty teleprompter, to fuel his mockery of the United Nations’ headquarters, a building he once sought to renovate.
“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 during wide-ranging remarks that questioned the purpose of the UN.
“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.”
Trump began his speech reading from paper notes because the teleprompter was not working.
“These are the two things I got from the United Nations: a bad escalator and a bad teleprompter,” Trump cracked.
The UN official also noted that the president’s team was responsible for operating the teleprompter, the AP reported.
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.