UNITED NATIONS (CN) — Met with shock by world leaders at his first visit and derision in the second, President Donald Trump emerged largely gaffe-free Tuesday at his third appearance before the United Nations General Assembly.
Instead, the latest Trump address will be remembered for its relentless attack on the institutions and values that his host institution holds dear.
“The future does not belong to globalists,” Trump said, reading prepared remarks. “The future belongs to patriots."
By tradition, Brazil kicks off the annual general assembly debate, meaning Jair Bolsonaro delivered the first of today’s speeches. A Trump supporter who expressed open nostalgia for his country’s fallen military regime, Bolsonaro took aim this morning at “media lies and hate” while attacking the media’s portrayal of his policies regarding the Amazon rainforest, where a record number of fires raged in August.
“The Amazon is not being destroyed nor consumed by fire, as the media is falsely portraying,” Bolsonaro said, playing down the 77,000 manmade fires that have been raging through the 2.7 million square-mile rainforest all year.
With the backing of the Brazilian government, loggers and ranchers have been responsible for burning about 90% of the 4.6 million acres of forest lost since January, according to reports.
The United Nations' recent climate action summit depicted global heating as a planet-threatening emergency. But Trump, who endorsed Bolsonaro’s election and celebrated his inauguration this past New Year’s Day, did not mention the climate crisis at all.
For Trump, the global emergency is not the scientific consensus about how global heating can render the Earth uninhabitable.
“One of our biggest challenges is illegal immigration,” Trump said. “Mass illegal migration is unfair, unsafe and unsustainable for everyone involved: the sending countries and the depleted countries.”
The United States and Hungary are the only U.N. member states to have spurned a global contract in migration, and Trump today used the word evil to describe the nongovernmental groups working on that vision.
Even that rhetoric dialed back the tone from previous years when Trump threatened a member state with annihilation on the world stage. Today world leaders assembled in the room maintained relative silence during Trump’s speech and respectfully applauded when he finished.
On foreign policy, Trump took his usual swipes at Cuba, Venezuela and Nicaragua, adopting Red Scare-imagery warning of a supposedly rising threat.
“One of the most serious challenges our country faces is the specter of socialism,” Trump said, in phrasing that perhaps unintentionally invoked Karl Marx.
Having pulled out of the nuclear deal, Trump threatened to ratchet up his new sanctions against Iran but, bemoaning “endless wars,” he declined to escalate militarily after Saudi Arabia blamed the Islamic Republic for its damaged oil tankers.