Trump expresses frustration over the "bad escalator" at the UN, and the White House promises to look into the issue. Get the ful...
Trump expresses frustration over the "bad escalator" at the UN, and the White House promises to look into the issue. Get the full details on the unusual complaint. The press secretary thinks the escalator stopped on purpose to humiliate the president, while the UN claims the safety function may have been "inadvertently triggered."
Donald Trump seemed to laugh it off on Tuesday when an escalator and a teleprompter both broke down while he was at the United Nations, but US officials were not laughing.
The White House stated they were looking into whether the moving stairs were stopped on purpose to embarrass the president. Later, he criticized the UN in a speech to the general assembly in New York.
“If we find that these were UN staff members who were trying to trip up the president and first lady of the United States, then those people need to be held accountable. "And I will make sure of it," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt stated on Fox News on Tuesday night.
Leavitt also wrote on X after the event, "If someone at the U.N. purposely stopped the escalator, they need to be fired and looked into right away."
A UN spokesperson said that the accident happened because someone in front of Trump mistakenly triggered a safety feature on the escalator, which caused it to stop working.
Earlier in the day, Leavitt pointed to a report in the Times of London newspaper on Sunday that said UN staff members had joked that they would switch off the escalators and "tell him they ran out of money" because the US was cutting financing by a lot.
Several other people at the White House and conservative commentators also thought there might be a plan to get rid of Trump.
The video shows the 79-year-old president and First Lady Melania Trump climbing on the escalator at UN headquarters. After a short distance, the escalator stopped with a jolt.