Trump blitzes social media ahead of UN general assembly address

UN appearance is Trump’s first since Iran war began

President Donald Trump is set to address the UN General Assembly in New York on Tuesday after days of posts across his social media accounts on subjects ranging from a planned Washington DC arch to artificial intelligence, according to The Guardian.

The annual gathering has historically served as a platform for US presidents to present a serious, positive vision to a global audience, The Guardian noted, pointing to leaders from Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower to John F. Kennedy and Barack Obama over eight decades. Trump’s prior addresses to the assembly have departed from that tradition.

Last year, in his first appearance before the body since returning to the White House the previous January, Trump told assembled leaders their countries were “going to hell” while assailing the UN and the concept of open borders. In 2018, he drew laughter from fellow leaders by opening his speech: “In less than two years, my administration has accomplished almost more than any other administration in the history of our country.” A year earlier he attacked longstanding allies, singling out Germany over its energy policy and declaring the US “can no longer be taken advantage of, or enter into a one-sided deal where the United States gets nothing in return.”

Tuesday’s appearance will be Trump’s first since the US, in tandem with Israel, launched a war against Iran in February. Despite Trump’s predictions that the conflict would last a few days and result in the collapse of Tehran’s Islamic regime, the war shows no sign of ending and the regime still stands, The Guardian reported.

Iran’s closure of the Strait of Hormuz — a waterway that carried one-fifth of the world’s oil exports before hostilities began — has sent global energy prices soaring and stoked inflation in the US, challenging the prospects of Trump’s Republican Party in November’s midterm elections. Polls show a majority of Americans oppose the war, further deflating his approval ratings, according to The Guardian.

In the days before the address, Trump’s social media output spanned several topics. In an early Sunday post he declared he intended to turn his planned arch in Washington DC into a military storage facility, claiming without providing evidence that the move was requested by the US military.

A post headlined “His Hemisphere” depicted Trump gazing at a map of the globe, less than nine months after US forces seized former Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro in his compound in Caracas and carried him and his wife to New York, The Guardian reported. The Trump administration has since described a deal giving it control over a significant segment of Venezuelan oil reserves.

Trump also positioned himself as a defender of artificial intelligence, rejecting fears that its rapid development could presage the destruction of the human race. He characterized AI as the latest target of “many hoaxes, all generated by the radical left dumocrats, for purposes of destroying our country” and announced plans for an “AI force,” headed by an “AI Czar,” modeled on the space force established during his first presidency. “AI is the next Industrial Revolution, or Internet, but will be even larger and more impactful, possibly as much as 25% of our country’s GDP,” he wrote. “We are leading China, and the rest of the world, and I intend to keep it that way.”

On Friday, echoing his 2018 address, Trump posted a list of his “Top 25 Trump Achievements” since returning to office.

Iran’s president, Masoud Pezeshkian, is expected at the UN gathering, adding to the political stakes, The Guardian reported. Trump has signaled a willingness to meet his Iranian counterpart, but Pezeshkian — described by The Guardian as a relative pragmatist under pressure from regime hardliners to stand firm and avoid compromise with an enemy Tehran still brands “the great Satan” — is thought unlikely to agree to such an encounter.

US presidential speeches to the UN traditionally undergo a long drafting process and reviews by the State Department, the Pentagon and the intelligence community, along with fevered last-minute rehearsals. The Guardian reported that while that process may still hold for this address, a no-holds-barred speech rehashing the themes of Trump’s recent social media output also remains possible.