Address lacked idealism themes past presidents used at UN
Former White House speechwriter Ted Widmer wrote in the Guardian on Tuesday that President Donald Trump’s address to the United Nations General Assembly was “hollow” and “long on snarling belligerence and short on ideas or policy proposals,” describing the speech as a “spectacle of raw power” from a president whose persuasive standing abroad sits at historically low levels. Widmer edits the anthology American Speeches and recently published The Living Declaration: A Biography of America’s Founding Text, both published by the Library of America.
“Expectations were low for Donald Trump’s address to the UN on Tuesday, and yet somehow it was even worse than expected,” Widmer wrote. Trump, he added, “does not perform well in formal settings, like chambers of government, preferring a blingier room, like Mar-a-Lago, or an outdoor rally.”
The Trump administration’s posture toward the United Nations, Widmer wrote, has in recent years “deepened into something more like a full-on assault.” He cited “frequent attacks on the International Criminal Court (perhaps out of fear that he will someday be indicted),” on the UN’s climate agenda, and on UNESCO, from which the United States decided to withdraw in July 2025.
In January, Trump launched what Widmer called his “flamboyant” Board of Peace, which at times the president “wondered if his new creation might simply replace” the UN itself, Widmer wrote. Five months later, the Board “has achieved little in the way of tangible results, except to demand huge sums of money from its small number of member nations, most of which are petrostates,” Widmer reported. None of those states, he wrote, “can say that the Middle East is in better shape since the board came into existence, with a crisis that is deepening daily and may engulf Saudi Arabia soon.” The Board came shortly before what Widmer described as Trump’s “war of choice” on Iran, now nearly seven months along.
On the speech’s delivery, Widmer wrote that Trump “read robotically from a teleprompter for long stretches,” reverting when he remembered to “the many complaints about the world that he has memorized from his rallies.” Trump’s grievances, Widmer wrote, “go back to his rise as a xenophobic developer in the 1980s.” Widmer compared the address to “Festivus,” the fictional “holiday for the sharing of grievances” introduced in a famous episode of the television series Seinfeld, and characterized Trump’s worldview as a “Hobbesian vision of the world, with touches of Rodney Dangerfield added in.” Trump, Widmer noted, “complains endlessly that he gets no respect.”
Widmer wrote that Trump “insulted nearly everyone in the room, from the Middle Eastern countries who are wondering about the validity of US security guarantees, to the European allies he habitually belittles, to Ukraine.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was present in the General Assembly hall, “undoubtedly wondering why Trump is now asking him to pause his effective strikes on the Russian invader,” Widmer wrote. In one stretch of the address, the rhetoric included overt lobbying for a Nobel Peace Prize while Trump “boasted of all the conflicts he has solved,” Widmer reported, and “audience members yawned and checked their phones.” Trump described two ongoing wars with the word “unendable,” Widmer noted. The Ukraine-Russia war “is still going strong despite his frequent promises (including today) to to stop it,” he wrote.
On Iran, Widmer reported, Trump renewed his threat to “annihilate the Islamic Republic,” paired with what Widmer called “car-salesman promises to help Iran achieve greatness if they will just agree do work with him.” Iran continues “to defy US threats and even to solidify their position (which has improved markedly with Houthi gains in the last two weeks),” he wrote. On arms supplies, Trump “insisted that stocks of American weapons are increasing,” Widmer wrote, “when all news reports are they are rapidly being depleted.” The price of oil, he added, “has been rising steadily.”
Widmer described the climate portion of the address as a “lengthy assault on climate change, claiming (falsely) that the earth’s climate is cooling, and that the science is a hoax.” The claims came, he wrote, “when August tied a record for the hottest month ever recorded, and several important science reports in the last week confirmed how dire the situation is.” Widmer cited the on-field temperature at a Tennessee football game between the Titans and a Philadelphia NFL team as having reached 157 degrees Fahrenheit and connected that figure to a line from Trump’s 2025 UN speech in which the president called the United States the “hottest” country in the world.
Trump also introduced the term “super-intelligence,” or “SI,” as a replacement for “AI,” an effort Widmer compared to Trump’s previous attempts to rename Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico. “On the eve of an important summit and state dinner with Xi Jinping, this might have been an important moment to stake out ways the US and China might cooperate on AI, to mitigate risks and increase the potential for beneficial research into disease and other problems,” Widmer wrote. “That opportunity was not seized.”
On Greenland, Trump claimed the United States would enjoy basing rights — which it already enjoys, Widmer noted — and that foreign adversaries would not be permitted bases on the island. That claim, Widmer wrote, “is hardly news – they have never been allowed bases on Greenland.”
The address passed over the “rapidly deteriorating relationship with Canada, once the US’s greatest ally, and now enraged by Trump’s constant insults,” Widmer wrote. Canada, he reported, is “achieving the opposite effect” of bending to Trump’s will, with the country’s posture captured by the phrase “Elbows Up.” Repairing the relationship, Widmer added, “will take years to repair the damage to a vital strategic relationship to the North.”
In a section on sovereignty that included his claims to Venezuelan oil, Trump quoted William M. “Boss” Tweed, the leader of New York’s Tammany Hall, to say “to the victor belong the spoils.” Widmer noted that Tweed “was later convicted of stealing tens of millions of dollars from the public, and died in jail,” calling the citation “a sordid page of US history.”
The wider absence in the address, Widmer wrote, was its “utter lack of US idealism – the very force that led to the UN’s creation.” “In the 250th year of the United States, there were plenty of themes that might have won over a skeptical audience,” Widmer observed, but the speech contained “no inspiring words about fighting poverty, or reducing nuclear tests or keeping weapons out of space (as John F Kennedy promised in 1963).” Widmer catalogued other themes past presidents had used the UN platform to advance: Jimmy Carter in 1977 on human rights; Ronald Reagan in 1988 on reducing tensions with Russia; George H.W. Bush in 1990 on the end of the Cold War; and Bill Clinton in 1998 on fighting terrorism while avoiding Islamophobia. Tuesday’s speech, he wrote, contained “no inspiring words” on those subjects either. It amounted, he concluded, to “just raw power; and a power that is likely to diminish in the years ahead.”
“The power of persuasion has always been critical to presidents coming into the United Nations,” Widmer wrote. The Pew Global Attitudes project, he reported, places confidence in Trump’s leadership at 23 percent across the 36 nations it surveys. “The number,” he concluded, “is unlikely to go up after today’s performance.”