Sixteen years ago, Miley Cyrus reminded us that life isn’t about the destination—it’s the climb. Perhaps that should have been President Donald Trump’s takeaway when an escalator stopped working at the United Nations General Assembly gathering on Tuesday. As Trump and his wife, Melania, headed up to the speaking floor, the stairway before them came to a halt, forcing the confused pair to walk up with their very own feet.
Trump was visibly displeased with the faulty conveyance—but he didn’t express the full extent of his anger until the following day, when he called the incident “sabotage” in a post on Truth Social. “It’s amazing that Melania and I didn’t fall forward onto the sharp edges of these steel steps, face first. It was only that we were each holding the handrail tightly or, it would have been a disaster,” he wrote on Wednesday, adding, “The people that did it should be arrested!”
While at the UN, Trump also reportedly had issues with a teleprompter and audio quality during his speech. In his Truth Social post on Wednesday, he reproached the triple-mishap, deeming them “three very sinister events!”
Before Trump lashed out, U.N. Secretary General spokesperson Stéphane Dujarric explained the potential cause of #Escalatorgate in a statement on the United Nations’ website. (The memo’s subject line, in all seriousness, reads, “Note to correspondents: on UN escalators.”) Dujarric said a White House videographer who went up the escalator ahead of Trump appeared to have “inadvertently triggered” the built-in stop safety mechanism. As for the teleprompter, an anonymous U.N. official said someone from Trump’s team was operating it, AP News reported. But Trump still called for an investigation, which the U.N. says it will oblige with “full transparency.”
In the time since Trump’s Truth Social post, the situation has only escalated. On Thursday’s edition of Mornings with Maria, a Fox Business broadcast, news anchor Maria Bartiromo and Florida Representative Greg Steube both went along with Trump’s allegations of sabotage. “It seems to be intentional,” Steube said. Bartiromo, contended that the stalled escalator constituted a safety hazard, saying that “The president being frozen there in one place makes him vulnerable”—though she didn’t identify a specific threat.
The ongoing brouhaha brings to mind a similar incident: when Joe Biden’s brief stumble on some stairs in 2021 spawned widespread coverage (handwringing, punditry, debate over fitness), becoming a defining moment in certain media circuits. Or maybe Trump is smarting because he’s generally had positive experiences with escalators—particularly in 2015, when he kicked off his first presidential campaign by descending the mechanical stairs in Trump Tower. Back then, Trump famously turned a simple ride into a watershed moment. Melania recalled the triumph in her self-titled memoir: “He waved and gave two thumbs up before guiding me with his left hand to the escalator,” she wrote. “I stepped on in front of him, and down we went.”
