Sometimes, the jokes write themselves. If you were a low-grade comedy writer with a chip on your shoulder and the same liberal opinions as everyone else you know, you might fantasize about a president who came down a golden escalator getting stuck going up an escalator at the United Nations building and then, as a diplomatic crisis escalates in the Middle East, finding that the speakers in the hall are off and that the teleprompter has died. And then you’d dismiss the idea. Too crude, too literal. And too close to the truth.

All of this happened when President Donald Trump went to the United Nations General Assembly on Sept. 23. Was it, as our shy and retiring president suggested afterward, “triple sabotage”? Since November 2024, the Trump administration has cut U.S. contributions to the U.N. by $1 billion and severed ties to UNESCO, the World Health Organization, and the U.N. Human Rights Council. It wants to recover another billion from congressional appropriations, and its fiscal 2026 budget request would cut another $2.2 billion. On Sept. 21, the Times quoted U.N. employees joking that they might “turn off the escalators and elevators” and tell Trump that they “ran out of money, so he has to walk up the stairs.”